Category — Logic

This house believes that if someone were to claim to be a prophet nowadays, they would be roundly mocked by most of the very people who follow prophets of their own, and followed only by desperate or crazy people. Perhaps this says something about the first followers of the great world religions?

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What makes something the same as something else?

It is obvious that two identical twins are not truly identical, because they do not, and cannot, inhabit the same space at the same time. But is “inhabiting the same space at the same time” a necessary or sufficient condition for identicalness? [Read more →]

I wrote in a previous post (Does Truth Exist?) that we assume that truth exists in all our speech and thoughts, and that it would be impossible to truly speak or think otherwise: if I think, “truth does not exist,” I really mean, “truly, truth does not exist”—a logical contradiction. No functioning human—or sentient being for that matter—can reasonably live on the opposite assumption. [Read more →]

As far as I am able to see, there are only two positions one can adopt in answer to this. They are: “truth exists” and “truth does not exist”. One cannot say “truth sometimes exists”, because that means that it does. Nor can one say “truth is subjective”, because there are otherwise no true standards by which we can measure its validity. Saying “maybe truth exists” is neither here nor there. [Read more →]