Philosophy Department

If opinion is open to discussion, that is, to being supported, then art is a matter of opinion. If opinion is a matter of taste, it is not open to discussion, to being supported, and hence art is not a matter of opinion. What supports my love of music? Are you wrong in not caring for it? But might you be wrong if you held that Mozart’s music was not great art, even if it does not suit your taste? (RH)

Free will looks puzzling against the assumptions that (1) everything is physical and (2) physical things are entirely characterized by causal powers that are mechanistically explained by deterministic or indeterministic laws. Where compatibilists maintain that free will is possible despite the truth of (1) and (2), libertarians try to make room for the ability to do otherwise by denying (1). But maybe there is another way: deny (2) but affirm (1). Organisms aren’t machines. See https://bit.ly/3Hcrdcc (JR)

I think most of us would agree that legal rules are not the same thing as moral rules. If we thought (as Aquinas did) that law = morality, then we wouldn’t be able say things like “this law is immoral”, because if we accept a definition of the law in terms of the moral, then we would be effectively saying that “morality (= law) is immoral”! Contradiction! Assume this is right and we can’t define law in terms of morality. How would we go about determining what distinguishes legal rules from moral rules or the rules of etiquette? Legal positivists have an important and interesting answer to that question: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-positivism/ (JR)

Did we kill god? Nietzsche thought we murdered God. But I wonder if he was unambiguously happy about this. I think he is unsettled about this. In the wake this murder, he is wondering: how shall we (human beings) be comforted? (RH)

Thanks for the question Taylor! Given open theism, yes; given that God knows us more intimately than any person can, no. What is open theism? https://iep.utm.edu/o-theism/ (RH)