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🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/theology 🔗 Military history/European military history

Gödel's ontological proof is a formal argument by the mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) for the existence of God. The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm's ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: "God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist." A more elaborate version was given by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716); this is the version that Gödel studied and attempted to clarify with his ontological argument.

Gödel left a fourteen-point outline of his philosophical beliefs in his papers. Points relevant to the ontological proof include

4. There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.

5. The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.

13. There is a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology, which deals with concepts of the highest abstractness; and this is also most highly fruitful for science.

14. Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

In political discourse, if-by-whiskey is a relativist fallacy in which the speaker's position is contingent on the listener's opinion. An if-by-whiskey argument implemented through doublespeak appears to affirm both sides of an issue, and agrees with whichever side the listener supports, in effect taking a position without taking a position. The statement typically uses words with strongly positive or negative connotations (e.g., terrorist as negative and freedom fighter as positive).

🔗 Africa 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Anarchism 🔗 Somalia

Xeer (pronounced [ħeːr]) is the traditional legal system of Somalia, and one of the three systems from which formal Somali law draws its inspiration, the others being civil law and Islamic law. It is believed to pre-date Islam, although it was influenced by Islam and retains many of the faith's conservative elements. Under this system, elders, known as the xeer begti serve as mediator judges and help settle court cases, taking precedent and custom into account. Xeer is polycentric in that different groups within Somali society have different interpretations of xeer.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Science

Some of the major unsolved problems in physics are theoretical, meaning that existing theories seem incapable of explaining a certain observed phenomenon or experimental result. The others are experimental, meaning that there is a difficulty in creating an experiment to test a proposed theory or investigate a phenomenon in greater detail.

There are still some deficiencies in the Standard Model of physics, such as the origin of mass, the strong CP problem, neutrino mass, matter–antimatter asymmetry, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Another problem lies within the mathematical framework of the Standard Model itself—the Standard Model is inconsistent with that of general relativity, to the point that one or both theories break down under certain conditions (for example within known spacetime singularities like the Big Bang and the centers of black holes beyond the event horizon).

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

In philosophy and psychology, an alief is an automatic or habitual belief-like attitude, particularly one that is in tension with a person's explicit beliefs.

For example, a person standing on a transparent balcony may believe that they are safe, but alieve that they are in danger. A person watching a sad movie may believe that the characters are completely fictional, but their aliefs may lead them to cry nonetheless. A person who is hesitant to eat fudge that has been formed into the shape of feces, or who exhibits reluctance in drinking from a sterilized bedpan may believe that the substances are safe to eat and drink, but may alieve that they are not.

The term alief was introduced by Tamar Gendler, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University, in a pair of influential articles published in 2008. Since the publication of these original articles, the notion of alief has been utilized by Gendler and others — including Paul Bloom and Daniel Dennett — to explain a range of psychological phenomena in addition to those listed above, including the pleasure of stories, the persistence of positive illusions, certain religious beliefs, and certain psychiatric disturbances, such as phobias and obsessive–compulsive disorder.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality. That is, logic and mathematics are not considered analytic activities wherein deep properties of objective reality are revealed and applied, but are instead considered the application of internally consistent methods used to realize more complex mental constructs, regardless of their possible independent existence in an objective reality.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Cooperatives 🔗 Catholicism

Distributism is an economic theory asserting that the world's productive assets should be widely owned rather than concentrated.

Developed in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, distributism was based upon the principles of Catholic social teaching, especially the teachings of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno (1931). It views both capitalism and socialism as equally flawed and exploitative, and it favors economic mechanisms such as cooperatives and member-owned mutual organizations as well as small businesses, and large-scale antitrust regulations.

Some Christian democratic political parties have advocated distributism in their economic policies.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 United States/U.S. history

Gödel's Loophole is a "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-German-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel claimed to have discovered in 1947. The flaw would have allowed the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Gödel told his friend Oskar Morgenstern about the existence of the flaw and Morgenstern told Albert Einstein about it at the time, but Morgenstern, in his recollection of the incident in 1971, never mentioned the exact problem as Gödel saw it. This has led to speculation about the precise nature of what has come to be called "Gödel's Loophole". It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law."

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Artificial Intelligence

In machine learning, "stochastic parrot" is a term coined by Emily M. Bender in the 2021 artificial intelligence research paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" by Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. The term refers to "large language models that are impressive in their ability to generate realistic-sounding language but ultimately do not truly understand the meaning of the language they are processing."

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

The nirvana fallacy is the informal fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives. It can also refer to the tendency to assume there is a perfect solution to a particular problem. A closely related concept is the "perfect solution fallacy."

By creating a false dichotomy that presents one option which is obviously advantageous—while at the same time being completely implausible—a person using the nirvana fallacy can attack any opposing idea because it is imperfect. Under this fallacy, the choice is not between real world solutions; it is, rather, a choice between one realistic achievable possibility and another unrealistic solution that could in some way be "better".