Serdar

“Machiavelli stresses that it's better as a leader to be feared than to be loved. Ideally you would be both loved and feared, but that's hard to achieve. If you rely on your people loving you, then you risk them abandoning you when times get tough. If they fear you, they will be too scared to betray you. This is part of his cynicism, his low view of human nature. He thought that human beings were unreliable, greedy and dishonest. If you are to be a successful ruler, then you need to know this. It's dangerous to trust anyone to keep their promises unless they are terrified of the consequences of not keeping them. If”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.” The”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“One way of approaching the question about what makes a human being the same person over time would be to point out that we are living things. You are the same individual animal that you were as a baby. Locke used the word ‘man’ (meaning by that ‘man or woman’) to refer to the ‘human animal’. He thought it was true to say that over a life each of us remains the same ‘man’ in that sense. There is a continuity of the living human being that develops in the course of its life. But for Locke being the same ‘man’ was very different from being the same person. According to Locke, I could be the same ‘man’, but not the same person I was previously. How could that be? What makes us the same person over time, Locke claimed, is our consciousness, our awareness of our own selves. What you can't remember isn't part of you as a person. To illustrate this he imagined a prince waking up with a cobbler's memories; and a cobbler with a prince's memories. The prince wakes up as usual in his palace, and to outside appearances is the same person he was when he went to sleep. But because he has the cobbler's memories instead of his own, he feels that he is the cobbler. Locke's point was that the prince is right to feel that he is the cobbler. Bodily continuity doesn't decide the issue. What matters in questions about personal identity is psychological continuity. If you have the prince's memories, then you are the prince. If you have the cobbler's memories, you are the cobbler, even if you have the body of a prince. If the cobbler had committed a crime, it would be the one with the prince's body that we should hold responsible for it. Of”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“If Abraham had gone ahead and killed his son he would have done something morally wrong. A father has a basic duty to look after his son, and certainly shouldn't tie him to an altar and cut his throat in a religious ritual. What God asked Abraham to do was to ignore morality and make a leap of faith. In the Bible Abraham is presented as admirable for ignoring this normal sense of right and wrong and being ready to sacrifice Isaac. But couldn't he have made a terrible mistake? What if the message wasn't really from God? Perhaps it was a hallucination; perhaps Abraham was insane and hearing voices. How could he know for sure? If he had known in advance that God wouldn't follow through on his command, it would have been easy for Abraham. But as he raised that knife ready to shed his son's blood, he really believed that he was going to kill him. That, as the Bible describes the scene, is the point. His faith is so impressive because he put his trust in God rather than in conventional ethical considerations. It wouldn't have been faith otherwise. Faith involves risk. But it is also irrational: not based on reason. Kierkegaard”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy