Questions tagged [relativism]
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Does humanism's rejection of God necesitate relativism?
I had the following discussion on Programmers.SE:
@Peter Turner, Which is a good example of how religion warps morality, leading people to imagine their concerns are moral when they are profoundly immoral. – TRiG
@TRiG, Which is a good example of…
Peter Turner
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Does an education that teaches relativism alone result in students who can not make ethical decisions?
This is a followup to a previous question that suggests that skepticism leads inevitably to moral relativism. In this question, I'd like to look further down the slippery slope and think of the children! This argument is probably false, but I'd…
Jon 'links in bio' Ericson
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Does skepticism inevitably lead to ethical relativism?
In this question, I will make a slippery slope argument. It's probably fallacious, but your task is the identify the point where one step does not inevitablly lead to the next step and explain why not. Here are the steps to the…
Jon 'links in bio' Ericson
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Why do people who subscribe to self-refuting skeptical philosophies still argue with others?
The belief that everything is relative is obviously self-refuting, because it holds to an absolute.
However, in my experience, people who believe this (or some form of it) such as some Buddhists and atheistic materialists, or people who have an even…
ErikE
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Are there any philosophical works consisting entirely in conditional propositions?
Related, I suppose, to this question.
In mathematics most theorems are of the form:
If we have a [type of object] with [property 1] then it also has [property 2]
That is, they are conditional statements on classes of objects. Traditionally…
Tom Boardman
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Is Feyerabend confusing discovery and justification when he criticizes the scientific method?
I am reading Feyerabend's "Against Method", where he uses Copernicus's (and Galileo's confirmation) discovery of the fact that the Earth orbits around the Sun and other examples to show that irrational approaches can lead to legitimate scientific…
Alexander S King
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Does Nietzsche's rejection of Socrates mean that he is a relativist about ethics?
In Twilight of Idols (passage 10 in Problem of Socrates section) Nietzsche asserts that Socrates's equating Reason, Virtue and Happiness is a sign of decadence.
Does it follow from this that Nietzsche is a relativist about ethics? How would he…
Frank Booth
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Has/can moral relativism be refuted and what are its implications for a true and useful ethical calculus?
It seems that the existence of moral relativism undermines the entire enterprise of ethics, as it devolves into a bunch of, albeit very smart, people abstractly formulating what is ultimately just a particular neurological sentiment.
While I hope…
user4634
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Was Rorty a Relativist?
Richard Rorty spent much of his career defending his work against accusations of Relativism, and yet his name is often mentioned in such discussions. Are these accusations of Relativism directed at Rorty fair, or is he unjustifiably…
Bonzai
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Are there any philosophers who advance a non-foundationalist absolutism?
I'm sure my terminology is poor here (background in math more than philosophy), but are there any philosophers who have advanced a distinctly non-relativist epistemology without ultimately coming out foundationalist? I'm not talking about…
eMansipater
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Why is ontological relativism so hard to digest for many people (philosophers)?
The nature of reality is something many people like to know. A regious person believes in god(s), a physicist be in particles and fields, or an Aboriginal believes in Dreamtime.
So different cultures believe different things to exist.
What makes it…
user53342
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Is postmodernism the historical source of epistemic relativism? And does epistemic relativism logically derive from postmodernism?
It seems that epistemic relativism denies the possibility of science per se; because if there are no objective facts then there can be no scientific evidence neither as inductive basis (to be used as generalizations) nor as deductive basis (to be…
Luna
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How do Burkean conservatives respond to the accusation of cultural relativism?
I sincerely hope that this is the right StackExchange to ask this question. Politics deals with pragmatics and History seldom deals with more abstract questions.
As far as I can gather, Burkean conservatives argue for the maintenance of traditions…
James Cook
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How to understand objective/subjective and relative/absolute in the context of morality?
I was reading this SEP article and in this article a model with orthogonal axes for objective/subjective and relative/absolute is given.
An example analogy of a relative yet objective notion is also made: Tallness is a relative notion—John is a…
sloppydisk
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Is it possible to have faith in science while espousing anti-realism?
Realism is the theory that there is a mind-independent reality which we can know and interact with. Anti-realism holds, in general, either that there is no such mind-independent reality or that if there is the mind cannot possibly come to know about…
Bombadil
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