Category Archives: philosophical lectures

The /Kalam/ cosmological argument

Posted by Chris Hallquist on June 18, 2008 1 comment

Last lecture, I briefly explained what’s wrong with a couple of simple, common arguments for the existence of God, including a form of the cosmological argument. It asks “why is there something rather than nothing?” or “where did the universe come from?” and runs into trouble on the question of why God exists and where [...]

Office chair arguments for God

Posted by Chris Hallquist on June 11, 2008 4 comments

Today, I’m going to begin our discussion of God, which philosophers commonly define as an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good being. (In philosophy-jargon, this is “omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.”) In this lecture, I’m going to be talking about what philosophers call “/a priori/ arguments” for the existence of God. To say an argument is “/a priori/” [...]

Logic and fallacies

Posted by Chris Hallquist on June 4, 2008 1 comment

In this lecture, I’m going to talk about how to reason logically and about fallacies in arguments. Why? On the one hand, probably the best way to learn to argue and assess arguments is just to spend a lot of time doing those things. We’re going to spend a lot of time doing that in [...]

Introducing Philosophical Lectures: What is philosophy?

Posted by Chris Hallquist on May 28, 2008 9 comments

>>>As part of the re-launch of my blog, I’ve decided to create a couple of regular post series. The first of these is “philosophical lectures.” The idea is this: I imagine I’ve been given a philosophy 101 class to teach and have to come up with material. I hope to be able to write 35+ [...]