Some Plato to Liberal Natural Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
Keep your philosophies here and remember that god hates suck ups.
Sorry, but whatâs with the numbers after the title?
Science 12345678⌠Philosophy 12345 ⌠I donât get it. 
There needs to be more digits in the title is all.
Oh look a place for philosophy!!!
Soul retching, care of dead burning guy: Your leaving out the âBad Seedâ born âwith out a soulâ and forgetting the religions that say women have no souls and what is the definition of âsoulâ and how many accept your definition?
Your philosophy requires a lot to be ignored or go too far the other way and include everything.
Philosophy is a delightful endeavor of the mind. However, it has little significance when an attempt is made to incorporate philosophical conclusions within reality.
I sense a storm brewing⌠
(such topics are best avoided btw)
Are you between 18 and 25 years old?
Have you been diagnosed with schizophrenia?
My philosophy: Ignore people who piss you off.
Or maybe not that philosophyâŚ
I wanted to, how ever some people had the need to yammer on the science thread. I am hoping philosophy will find a home here.
Ok I deleted it.
PS finally, philosophy on the philosophy page!!! 
Somehow Iâm feeling this is directed at a certain green zombie. With a suit. 
Agreed, Iâll stop âyammeringâ the other post and get my philosophic thoughts here. However this will not stop from hammering facts on the science post, biatches
Well, Socrates considered the discussion as the main tool for reasonning and get the first definition of a concept (in the western civlization that is). I guess that as long as people are open-minded, able to listen (or rather read) otherâs arguments and not fall into some sarcastic comments, I guess we should be OK
As for practical uses of philosophy in our real world, well ⌠letâs talk about Epicurus
His thoughts was that happiness can be achieved (some philosophies thought it could not be). His second thoughts are that the only real things are the sensations : pain and pleasure. Therfore, to achieve happiness, we need to get as little pain as possible.
However, its philosophy was rather deviated into âgetting as much pleasure as possibleâ (modern âepicurian lifeâ definition), which is not exactly the same, as he rather advocated enjoying things of everyday, be it food, friends or simply a nice weather.
I think most of us have a life defined by this original philosophy, some others by the modern âpleasure-guidededâ epicurian way of life (consumerist fall in this category).
Was it Buddhism that said happiness was lousing/forgetting ones self in helping/serving others? Cooking cleaning having a job⌠something like that. I did that and it left me feeling like a machine.
Current Psy. says it is overcoming difficult (not too hard and goodness not too easy) goals.
Modern psychology is pretty intertwined with understandings in neurology and psychiatry. I would say we are fairly lucky in that it seems to be the case most of the time when we are really helping other people, that itâs enjoyable work, particularly if we are appreciated either by others, or when we appreciate ourselves. It would suck if helping other people was physically painful for example.
Happiness is happiness⌠itâs an emotion. If happiness is your goal, then helping others is one way to achieve it. There are different kinds of happiness, usually a strong short burst of endorphins/dopamine, or a less intense longer release of neuropeptides. This in conjunction with brain morphology and physiology creates the perception of happiness.
Maybe an important question is, is happiness enough? Another question, is happiness even necessary? For example, I am sitting here, typing this out. I am quite sure that I am not particularly happy right now. Nor am I sad in any way. I am fairly neutral. I feel like this is they way we are most of the time, but we donât really notice it. Emotionally, I seem to be just existing. And I am great with that. The contrast is not existing. Equally emotionally neutral. Although in many other ways, a disadvantage.
Tough questions- ie is happiness a good goal or is it not a good goal? A much easier question is how to be happy. If you ask that, I have many solutions that I could give you.
I would rather live for a year than exist for an eternity.
I donât think when people just want happiness itâs entirely what they mean, to be content, possibly?
Happiness to me seems like a high, something fleeting as opposed to a sturdy state of mind, as long as Iâm content with myself and the world then I guess Iâll be fairly happy some of the time.
I donât really care much for the helping other people thing, as mentioned. I believe as long as you are not degrading someoneâs life than that is fine, people should have the right to get on with their own lives and fix their own problems. I guess thatâs where helping people comes into play, helping people who canât help themselves due to society, nature, the world, whatever, is more than a noble cause. Maybe thatâs something we should do more, I should do more, maybeâŚ
Enough rambling, having read what I have just wrote I realise none of it seems to make any sense.
[quote=âsausmanb, post:12, topic:423â]
I donât really care much for the helping other people thing, as mentioned. I believe as long as you are not degrading someoneâs life than that is fine, people should have the right to get on with their own lives and fix their own problems. I guess thatâs where helping people comes into play, helping people who canât help themselves due to society, nature, the world, whatever, is more than a noble cause.[/quote]
I think the answer to these thoughts are based around whether we have free will or not. If we donât have free will, then itâs pretty clear that we need to help everyone as much as we possibly can. Thoughts of retribution, revenge, ect are completely unfounded. We should still take steps to stop people from doing things that harm others or society, but ultimately, we have nobody to blame but ourselves and chance for how these people ended up. People that end up being serial killers were just incredibly unlucky to be born as the baby that would later become a serial killer as well as the people born to be killed by him. Then we must acknowledge that peopleâs minds are mostly created by the environment and culture that shape them and so we must ensure the culture is conducive to creating good people.
If we do have free will, well then Libertarianism and the corresponding philosophies seem to be the way to go.
Free will, just what is that? The free will to follow the part of your brain thatâs hard wired? [quote=âSaturday, post:13, topic:423â]
Libertarianism and the corresponding philosophies seem to be the way to go.
[/quote]
Relay, politics? That party was corrupted by the Koch Brothers. Stay on philosophy and off brand names.
The subject is responsibility. In a universe absent free will, we are responsible not only for ourselves but everyone else, for the society created. In a universe with free will, people can afford to be responsible for themselves and much less other people.
I love philosophy.
If free will is an illusion that is indistinguishable from the lack of free will then does it really make a difference if we have it or not? Your actions may be pre-destined and your responsibility for those actions may also be pre-destined. You do not become absolved of responsibility for an action you make just because on a certain level you had no choice. It is simply that the state of being responsible was also inevitable.
As it happens the latest evidence from quantum mechanics suggests that truly random things do happen at the quantum level so that gives a wide opening for the existence of free will.
As long as there is no way to predict the future it makes no practical difference whether we have true free will or not.
Whether the future can be predicted given its current state is another interesting philosophical discussion. Any machine in the real world that could accurately simulate the state of the real world would also have to also simulate itself. That could possibly be done by slowing down time within the simulation, but then it becomes useless for prediction.
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âLibertarianism (Latin: liber, free) is a classification of political philosophiesâ, so it is relevant to philosophy and âthatâ party? *political parties donât exclusively exist in the USA.
If we donât have free will, we have no ability to help people âas much as we possibly canâ. We can only help as much as our puppet masters want us to. Similarly, we have no control over our thoughts, be they of retribution or sympathy. Not having free will means weâre not free to make those choices. Theyâre being made by someone or something else.
Only if we have free will are those meaningful choices at all.
My response would essentially be exactly what Crayfish posted lol. Sam Harris has a good book about this. Also some good youtube videos for those of us like myself that are too frugal/lazy to buy the book =)
That is the opposite of what the economic part of what Libertarianism means. Find out what that means before you post things about it.
You can have that debate with out using brand names. Also you do NOT know what they stand for and from who they get there money.