Just looking for those nasty questions which go back to antiquity (or maybe more recent times), and continue to perplex mankind even today.
There aren't actually a lot of philosophical problems which haven't seen progress.
Zeno's paradox has had some rudimentary answers, and could possible be solved by physics, at least most of its variants.
I guess the paradox of tragedy and the ship of Theseues are pretty big ones still.
There has been a lot of attempts to answer these two but there seems to be no general consensus, as far as I know.
It is also important to note that even if we see progress the answers may drastically change from period to period. Even if we revert our belief to the same answer we believed 1000 years ago, it might be because we have new philosophical knowledge and insight, and thus have made progress.
the dark knight was a bad movie people only like it because heat ledger died
>>912400
Nigga we haven't even worked out how to formulate the question of the meaning of being yet.
>>912431
Doesn't math disprove Zeno?
The problem of induction is actually ancient and goes back to the very beginning of knowledge. It still hasn't been resolved and probably never will be.
>>912444
It is not a settled matter.
There is still much debate going on in the free will debate so I will sketch out how it has gone about.
The general idea, which has been existent with the Greeks as well, is that there is a logical framework or "iron laws" of nature which determine everything.
A lot of people confuse free will to be incompatible with determinism but it is much more intricate than that. Free will is incompatible with deterministic iron laws.
The second variation of this, is that free will seems incompatible with indeterministic iron laws as well. As some Greeks pointed out, even if we had some sort of randomly generated event in our head, we would still be determined by it.
Therefore the Scholastics philosophers have analysed free will as a causal matter, and have analysed it with potency/act.
Hume was sceptical about this potency/act analysis and tried to analyse in a purely analytic/formal manner and basically tried to reduce causality to a logical operator (which has largely failed but there is a lot of great work on this as well).
With Newton's laws of physics, more and more people started to accept these "iron laws" of nature, and thus the idea of potency and act was slowly removed from the debate.
Kant and Hegel answered with some compatibility of determinism and free will be basically saying that we impose iron laws onto nature somehow (greatly simplified); the laws are socially constructed and the illusion of free will is merely an illusion.
Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum claims that if we have indeterministic laws we could go back to some rudimentary form of act/potency analysis which they call dispositions. Something has a disposition to do X, but it is not an iron law in the same way as we have perceived before, and thus there is still room for free will to exist.
All of this is a great simplification.
>>912501
The idea that we are free to choose implies we could have done otherwise, which implies that reality could have been different. It couldn't, we can't, and we aren't.
>>912498
No it doesn't.
Maths make no claim about some limits but rather just redefines them. Look at limits which calculates 0/0 which can be analysed with l'Hopital's rule, and later can be defined to be continuous, but it doesn't "disprove" anything.
Also, divergent series build up on Aristotle's proposed solution (look up Nicole Oresme).
Two other conclusions from Zeno's paradoxes are:
Nothing must exist, but nothing is not a thing and cannot therefore exist (possibly solved by quantum fluctuations and general relativity).
The last entity in an infinite procedure of splitting an object must either be atomic or forever continuous (possibly also solved by physics, in conjunction with previous solution).
First of all, it is important to remember that a logical analysis of an object can actually ignore the metaphysical implications it has. Sometimes when people claim that "maths solves X", it is just bullshit since maths is so abstract it cannot be applied to general metaphysics (an example would be to metaphysically explain i as anything else except a pragmatic number).
t. Maths/theoretical philosophy major
>>912524
You should really write a paper and send it to a philosophical journal!
>>912528
im not a philosopher, but that sort of thought seems to be the "natural" way for people to look at the problem - i remember other kids in middle school even positing that free will cant exist for reasons like "the same thing will happen every time if the situation is exactly the same"
what are some typical issues that philosophers run in to with that type of reasoning? has that perspective been entirely dismissed?
>>912609
It totally depends on what you mean by free will.
First of all, free will has an element of causality, "X happened because I willed it."
The analysis of causality is therefore pivotal. The comment
>The idea that we are free to choose implies we could have done otherwise, which implies that reality could have been different. It couldn't, we can't, and we aren't.
implies that freedom is not dependent on causing something, but rather of having options.
The question shouldn't be "Do I have options?" but rather "Is my will a causal factor?"
If it is only analysed in a manner of possibility, then if indeterminism is true, then we could have free will, but this seems absurd by the thought experiment of having a perfect dice in your head which you follow.
>which implies that reality could have been different. It couldn't
Why couldn't it be different?
There are a lot of ways to create universes, both logically, metaphysically and physically.
One of the problems multi-verse theories try to deal with is that there are too many possibilities and tries to reduce them to only one (by saying all possible universes are equally existent).
So yes, that is just totally bullshit and shouldn't be given any credit whatsoever. It is devoid of any actual analysis, a weird definition and it relies on a heavy assumption (that things couldn't have been different).
>>912400
rationalists are not meant to solve problems, but to create problems. why ? because ''solving a problem'' is subjective the rationalism that you choose to subscribe to.
in one word, nobody agrees on what ''solving a problem'' means.
>>912501
A* star post
hey I think the confusion comes from schematic identification of logicism with realism, intuitionism with conceptualism, and formalism with nominalism, referencing positions in the old debate on the nature of universals. This is mostly right, but not quite: Hilbert is a nominalist about mathematical objects, but he is a conceptualist (Kantian) about mathematical symbols and their manipulation. "The subject matter of mathematics is... the concrete symbols themselves, whose structure is immediately clear and recognizable". The difference with intuitionists like Brouwer is that they were conceptualists about mathematical objects, not just symbols.
In fact, this was Hilbert's original innovation. He considered (idealized) mathematical symbols as objects of a priori perception in a way similar to Kant's view of arithmetic as a priori synthesis in time (hence their agreement against Frege, to whom arithmetic was analytic), and geometry as a priori synthesis in space. But Hilbert extends this to formulas of algebra, formal logic, etc., by merging both space and time into a joint medium of syntheses. These are the "logical concrete objects that are intuitively present as immediate experience prior to all thought", "a condition for the use of logical inferences and the performance of logical operations". A condition of the possibility of certain knowledge, also very Kantian. But Hilbert's extension of Kant gives much more: we can have synthetic a priori knowledge of logical consequences of all our axiomatic theories. Indeed, their proofs are analogous to Euclidean constructions in geometry, they are a priori syntheses of imagination, but based on symbols rather than figures.
>>912841
This Kantian in spirit view of symbolic manipulation explains the key goal of Hilbert's programme: establishing completeness and consistency of mathematics by finitary means. While there is no restriction on the nature of objects that we choose our symbols to represent there is a restriction on what we can do with those symbols. Only constructions of finite length, although potentially unbounded, are accessible to our Kantian faculties. However, should we reduce all our proofs to such constructions we will get the holy Grail -- a synthetic a priori certitude for all of mathematics. Alas, this optimistic hope was proved unattainable by Gödel.
I think Peirce is underrated and underappreciated.
>>912841
Who are you answering to? And what are you talking about?
>>912526
Could you please be more specific?
>>912400
Most philosophical problems are still perplexing people because people don't read philosophy or understand little of it. For example, the problems of truth, illusion, the "ethical right", a priori knowledge, will, causality, subjective vs. objective dichotomy, etc. These issues were resolved, or at most settled for now, but there are still plenty of people in the dark about them.
