In many discussions, we appear to treat the terms 'state', 'country' and 'nation' as being interchangeable. But on reading around the subject, there seems to be a large degree of agreement about the precise meanings. The terms 'state' and 'country'
Much of the campaigning undertaken by equalities groups is, either explicitly or implicitly, directed at achieving a fair society - or, at least, a fair society for the members of our equalities group. The initial goals tend to be straightforward, c
There has been a lot of talk recently about various aspects of artificial life - artificial intelligence, sentient machines, computers gaining self-awareness, and so on. It seems self-evident that we can easily distinguish between living and non-liv
A materialist solution to Cartesian Dualism does not work because the body, the living organism, is not only material; the other side of the coin is that the problem of Cartesian Dualism itself, how a non-material mind interacts with a material body,
People constantly talk about God, whether they believe in God or not, and they clearly have something in mind when they do so. But, when you move beyond the beliefs of a specific group, there is almost no agreement about what a 'God' (or 'god') is.
All the usual principles of good practice on this site apply to discussion of religion too. Please be clear about the purpose of any contribution, and please aim to keep any response to a contribution relevant to what was posted.
There is a common assumption in many Western countries that if you are religious, then you 'believe in God', and that your choice of religion is all about believing in the 'right' God. However, while you will find a God or multiple gods in many reli
This is an attempt to identify the key aspects of war. Almost everyone agrees that war is bad, something to be avoided if possible, but we are not very clear what the ‘if possible’ might consist of: whoever you talk to, the responsibility for avoidi
Neither science nor reason can guide anything, from individual choice a national strategy. Science can tell us the fastest way to get from A to B, but it cannot tell us whether we should go there. It can tell us the likely consequences of an action,
In Western thought, there are two traditional ways of understanding what it means to be human, associated with the two major philosophical traditions found in the Greek and Hebrew cultures: in the Greek tradition, a human is a soul trapped in a body,
This article is written in response to a recent JustHuman meeting (February 2023), I attended but didn’t really contribute much to the conversation at the time - apart from my opening statement (something that
I believe that human beings are essentially good and rational, but we are pulled in two different directions because we are both social and selfish. Everything else, pretty much, comes from this basic starting point.
One of the basic problems we face in talking about sex, is that we may be trying to talk about vastly different things. At the very least, we can distinguish between these three kinds: physical mechanism (the process of reproduction); social roles a
Everyone seems to be familiar with the quote, "Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic," but I sometimes talk with people who appear to think that our inability to distinguish between the two implies that there is no real differ
Sabine Hossenfelder filmed a talk at the Royal Institution on 19 August 2022 with the title, "Existential physics: answering life's biggest questions". Sabine argues that science, philosophy and religion are not entirely distinct activities, but the
In the messy details of human relationships, questions of consent are rarely clear-cut. We have pressures, preferences and obligations, we make assumptions about other people, their actions, beliefs and motives. We don't even understand what we do
