Free will is interesting only in that it informs our thinking about moral agency. It is metaphysics, and therefore not to be taken seriously. It’s a useful assumption, but it is not a primary consideration in social justice.
Social justice is mostly concerned with preserving various equilibria.
Determinism is a political idea.
A claim is true or false. Claims are the only things that are true or false. You could throw in “indeterminate” as a type of claim, or you could avoid this.
“I have a pet named Max” is the same as “it is true that I have a pet named Max”. The tricky part is, believe it or not, to remember the redundancy.
If “reality” doesn’t mean “the empirical world” to you, you’re probably a philosopher. If it does, you can relax. You’re gonna be okay.
We don’t really have to know how we know, or even if we know. Epistemology is all about God. Or some god, anyway. It used to be that you couldn’t, as a professional philosopher, put forth a moral theory without an epistemological one.
There are no “necessary truths.” “Necessary” has, for some, taken the place of “objective.”
Progress.
“All unmarried men are bachelors,” is, lest we forget, the most trivial claim we can make. Philosophy should deal with the ordinary, but not the trivial.
Philosophy is a peculiar srudy of language. That’s all it is, yet it can seem so difficult.
What in god’s name does “universal truth” even mean?