This is the front page of The Daily Sun, probably South Africa's largest tabloid. Despite all the debate about releasing the photos of bin Laden's death, I don't think anything short of capture or display of his dead body would have forestalled this kind of speculation here. South Africa's a fertile ground for these sorts of things.
This post is dedicated to Mark Bedau , my philosophy professor at Reed, a great guy and a wonderful teacher, by far the least pretentious philosopher I've ever met. He is responsible for this post only insofar as he sparked my interest in the subject; its many shortcomings are mine alone. Who's ready for some unqualified philosophical rambling? I'm not going to do much more than summarize, as this is probably one of the five biggest problems in philosophy and the material quickly gets out of hand. Anyway—let's start with some terms, appropriately hefty philosophical ones. (I'm going to steal shamelessly from Wikipedia, as the free will article is very good.) Free will is "purported ability of agents to make choices free from constraints." Some call it the "ability to have done otherwise," but that definition runs into problems which I'll describe later. Determinism is the view that all events are caused by previous events, while indet...

Somebody i know doesn't believe he's dead. And a lot of somebody's he knows, as well.
ReplyDeletePictures wouldn't change the situation and this belief that he is still alive is prevalent everywhere. Think of Elvis, 2pac, Hitler. Some people are going to question it now matter what evidence is given.
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