The Philosophers’ Carnival is Here

Welcome to the Carnival! This is a biweekly summary of interesting Philosophy blog posts submitted from around the net. Each installment is hosted on a different blog, and this time around it's my turn. So here goes!

At the Experimental Philosophy blog, Hagop Sarkissian outlines a case that people generally are not moral objectivists. Specifically, when thinking about clashes between different cultures' norms, people tend to skew (apparently) relativist. I'm not sure they're actually being relativist—they may just be more inclined to consider it possible there are mitigating factors when people from other cultures do apparently horrendous things—but go read the post and see what you think.

MandM make an argument that religious considerations shouldn't be excluded from political thought just because they may be infallible. Sounds obvious? They attribute the opposing view to Audi, so who knows…

Thom Brooks provides a must-read essay about publishing as a grad student. I really need to get on that.

Kenny Pearce suggests that loose speech is "an attempt to express truth by uttering falsehood." If it's the uttering of a falsehood, is it dishonest? Kenny thinks not. I think it depends on how firm a grasp on the truth you're trying to express you really have. If you can't give a non-loose account of that truth, can you really attempt to express it at all? How would you know?

At the Florida Student Philosophy Blog, Andrew Brenner argues that in On Miracles, Hume failed to distinguish between the claim that miracles couldn't possibly be identified, and the claim that in fact no miracles have had strong evidentiary support, though one could have such support in principle. Quotations support both readings, so he could be onto something.

The Uncredible Hallq offers a definition of physicalism, and has something to say about whether physicalism implies that all facts can be deduced from the laws of physics and the present state of the universe. Hallq thinks not. Questions about what counts as what are not settled by physicalism, and neither are philosophical questions about thinks like explanation, causality and identity.

Diana Hsieh casts podly about objections to design arguments for the existence of God. With apologies to Diana, I confess I have not listened to the podcast, having had no access to headphones today. But hey, it's a discussion about objections to design arguments. What's not to like? Go listen!

Finally, as usual, we have Chaospet, this time giving a nice exposition of a paradox concerning causation—the one where two people take actions sufficient to bring about some wrong, yet because both did so, arguably neither actually caused the wrong. Huh? Go read it, it makes sense, it's funny, and it will asplode your head in the Philosophically virtuous sense.

That is all we have for this installment of the Philosphers' Carnival. Read all and comment!