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Personally I prefer the Greek concept of eudaimonia to happiness. Eudaimonia may be viewed as 'human flourishing' in a broad sense which takes into account experiences of joy, moral virtue, health, art/beauty and so forth. Hedonism has its merits, and it is certainly a very seductive philosophy...

He arrived on the 5.15 train.

No (=strawman), because your restriction on positing does not serve a socially useful purpose (amongst other things). Surely you can be fairer in your exposition than that. I did not say that threats of violence legitimate further violence as long as people are aware of these threats. I assume...

My intuition is that our intellectual failings seem to suggest that government intervention of some form will be required to overcome these failings. What form this government should take is less clear. Also, what is the monkey sphere? Google seems to make clear that it is a meme of some sort...

P.S. My criticisms are not simply driven by a social democratic leaning. In moral discourse I tend to endorse a form of moral nihilism in so far as I think objective, normative moral (/political) truths are a load of bunk. It is primarily for this reason that I find libertarian dogmatism to be...

A government is a group of people organised in a particular social relation. That something is a government, in the broad use of the term, does not ensure legitimacy, but I am inclined to think that legitimate taxation is possible. In part I think the answer lies in debunking the myth of free...

You are ignoring the fact that an individual's income and property are also largely a function of their physical and social attributes which are distributed unevenly in society. The former are essentially given (ignoring biotechnology and the like) while the latter are little more than...

If they allow for the death penalty then clearly they don't simply believe that 'it is never ok to take a human life', but rather they attach a proviso along the lines of 'unless some condition X is fulfilled'. It is not a contradiction to hold a conditional view on the value of human life.

Hijab --> Lack of sun exposure --> Reduced vitamin D3 --> Osteomalacia (soft bones)

Re: Should mental abuse be policed as aggressively, if not moreso, than physical abus (1) Emotional abuse can engender a degree of dependence - e.g. debasing someone to the point that they feel worthless causing them to remain in a relationship which, although pathological, nonetheless exists...

Aye, point taken. Though for rhetorical purposes "we are god" has a better Nietzschean ring to it. Continental philosophy is slowly winning me over. Expect my coherence to approach the limit 'Iron' as time goes on.

Instantly.

Perhaps the approach in DSM-IV is wrongheaded then? I agree that the rubric is awkward and faces big problems when trying to standardise qualitative indicators of illness which, by their nature, are embeded in a person's life (culture, language, meaning, etc). Do note, though, that something...

For those after more info check out the CDC (Centre for Disease Control and prevention) website: CDC H1N1 Flu | H1N1 Flu and You

Aye, but note that if you wield the kind of argument I described above (where god/religion is explained away through appeal to psychology/sociology) then god is not an entity, but is rather an explanatory fiction, potentially admitting of odd descriptions like 'the origin of meaning and...

It depends on what it means to be God. If the concept is tied up with the origins of meaning and mythology then perhaps we are on Tatecress' account.

It depends on the way in which you want to uniquely identify something - in particular, whether you are identifying them from amongst all possible objects (in which case you would need to be rigorous) or from amongst all objects in the world (over its history, say). In the latter case you could...

Picky technicality: those are rules of deductive logic (in which the conclusion necessarily follows from the premise[s]). Inductive logic involves things like probabilistic reasoning, generalisation (noting that universal/existential generalisation are deductive rules in predicate logic), and...

What is the difference between a description of the concept 'cat' and a definition of the concept 'cat'? P.S. The way I have BoS set up (15 posts/page) we are now at 1000 pages. Massive.

There was a similar thread a while back that you might like to read: http://community.boredofstudies.org/201/reading-room/112685/why-do-you-read.html The reply I posted there holds equally true now: I used to read (fiction) mainly for the pleasure and escapism. In recent years my...