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My personal opinion is that surface level philosophy is very useful for challenging god and the typical creationist arguments. However, I have found that truly critical philosophy has made me somewhat more cynical towards the conception of reason as the 'ultimate arbitrator' and leaves me unable...

Sure, if they just want to dabble briefly or find the philosophical canon too difficult. Do note that untouchablecuz made a request for metaphysics, ethics and logic (which leads me towards something more than Asimov, not to say that literature is not a valuable access to philosophical ideas)...

Also, check out the Cambridge University philosophy reading list for prospective students: Reading for New(ish) Philosophers!. A near identical, but smaller, subset of these texts are recommended by Oxford. Do note the analytic bias in the list. There is some degree of overlap with my list above.

I don't think it matters if you don't catch it all on first read. I like the Republic because it opens up so many questions and starts to pick apart the associated problems with continue to run through the entirety of Western philosophy. Philosophy is largely about questions and the Republic is...

I apologise if the layout of the following is somewhat garbled. Next to the text recommendations I have added some retrospective 'stars' (*) to those which I think would be particularly good tects to start with (in many cases on account of their length - except for the Republic and Godel...

I call myself a nihilist insofar as I don't think that it makes sense to term moral propositions true or false. In this sense I align moral propositions with those of an aesthetic vein. However, I mainly use this label (e.g. in the context of BoS) due to its contrast with moral realism, which I...

Aye, very much so Persian. An affirmation of relativism is no excuse for passive acceptance (<3 Arendt). I also intended something of Socrates' general urge to reflection, that "the unexamined life is not worth living" (Plato's Apology). I also find metaethics to be quite a valuable exercise...

I suspect that the best you can do is consider the extent to which certain systems of morality make us more likely to achieve certain relatively uncontroversial ends - for example, social stability and peace (which might be help us to justify something like a liberal principle of toleration...

Meh, two more trolls just added to the ignore list. Time is too valuable to waste on this kind of tripe.

Ad infinitum, you clearly missed the point, and intentionally so. You can take your rubbish attempt at trolling elsewhere.

Neat graph (and a cool site in general) - it shows the rise of the welfare state very clearly. In the breakdown the growth is largely accounted for by an increase in expenditure on education, health and welfare. The latter two may be straight forwardly explained in the USA through consideration...

The same goes for any consequentialist theory - consequentialists place a value on certain ends without dictating how they are to be achieved, except to say that the means used cannot contravene the desired ends. This only amounts to relativity if you are a staunch believer that moral worth has...

@ Volition I didn't mean to say that the argument was fallacious because it was a slippery slope argument - just the the points needed for the argument to hold (i.e. to slide towards full socialism) seemed incorrect to me. I am aware that privitisation and general '(neo)liberalisation' within...

On occasion mainstream biology does do this. In fact, it is a common occurence in most sciences which have a strong link with issues of moral significance. As a student of medicine I can vouch that in a number of situations moral decisions are approached in an overly technical vein (after all...

Cheers for the link volition. However, I disagree with the main line of the argument that you present. "Either the market (via consumer preferences) determines how much of what is produced and how, and for what purpose, or the government does." You use a slippery-slope style argument to...

But rationality is about how information is used, not just how much information is possessed. I don't quite understand how you can boil this down to the amount of information possessed? Especially when the manner of possession is so wildly different in each case (i.e. largely implicitly in the...

I personally don't think that we have to fall into the dichotomy of the free-market versus an entirely planned economy. Why not make the most of both approaches? As someone in favour of limited forms of intervention I would allow the market to reign in certain areas whilst advocating...

Suppose that we grant you the claim that markets 'possess' more information than governments - why does it then follow that government intervention cannot lead to more rational outcomes?

Something of a case in point I would think.

You have left out a key element in the debate over rationality and the operation of the market - this issue of knowledge / epistemic status (which ought to be separated out from rationality, per se). In particular, free/efficient market economics makes fairly strong assumptions about the...