The most efficacious piece of Philosophy written this century was buried in a software licensing agreement, and the Philosophy faculties of every major university have missed it. While clicking 'I agree', to all those licences, everyone will have come across this piece at some point.

Preamble The GNU General Public …

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I have a personal rule concerning arguments. I accept only two. I've made this a tight habit. If anyone protests (as they have) that they didn't put forward their strongest argument at the start, then I say this indicates a waste of time even more. Why put forward bad reasons, if you have good ones? This saves time, …

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A group of Victorian gentlemen called the 'Eaterateri' wandered various Scottish restaurants, trying all they could. The now well-known Adam Smith and David Hume regularly talked in the group about their ideas. I don't know if Hume felt bold enough to speak about Atheism, but Adam Smith may well have developed those …

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Fun fact: There's no such thing as a fish. This 'QI'-style factum results from the notion that fish do not all belong to the same genus (or 'family', or 'phylum', or some other Biological category). If we take one genetic branch of fish as the real fish, then we miss out a lot of animals which everyone calls 'fish'. …

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Robert Nozick created his 'utility monster' thought-experiment to show a fatal flaw in Utilitarianism. Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose...the theory seems to require that we all be …

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Causation is a matter of Ethics, not science. A man drinks some vodka, and soon after starts a fight in the pub, concerning a political point. So what's the cause? The man claims the vodka was the cause, and he should stop drinking vodka. The barman claims the man was the cause of the fight. The man's friends note that …

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My friends had a spirited debate after too many drinks. I suggested bringing back the Greek-style symposium, and it lead to a far more interesting debate. First, we agreed on time - two minutes. Then someone kept the time, and motioned to indicate when only thirty second remained. Everyone felt heard, nobody …

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For the last ten years, I've tried to expunge the words 'simple' and 'complex' from my vocabulary and thinking. Good and Bad Words Different cultures use different words. I can't say how much it affects their thinking - people have levied many criticisms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Still, I suspect bad words inflict …

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The knowledge argument wants to show us that the world contains more than physical facts. Mary is a colour scientist, and has studied every possible fact about colour, from how light-waves work, to how it's processed on the human brain. However, Mary has been raised in a black and white room, and has never seen colour. …

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