The weirdest and most non-intuitive belief I have is probably that “(metaphysical) freedom” in the/a positive sense denotes a kind of ignorance, and a sort of restriction in the/a negative sense.

Free will nihilism.

Negative acts are acts…

Put more absurdly: not doing things is doing things.

There is only one substance (and it’s not matter or mind).

The good man cannot be harmed.

plenty of philosophers subscribe to at least one of these odd beliefs:

• There are no composite material objects (objects with parts); all there are are lots of particles arranged into relatively stable patterns (e.g., there are no dogs; there just are particles arranged “dog-wise”).
• Although there are composites, there are no artifacts that are composites: no human-made objects that have parts.
• No ordinary physical objects are colored; color is just in our experiences.
• No one has any beliefs; although we have many cognitive operations and states of various kinds, the notion of belief is a relatively primitive one that will be replaced upon future research.
• There is no substantive knowledge of the external world.
• There are no mathematical truths; mathematical theorems are practically useful but false.
• Pain is located only in the head, not in the rest of the body.
• There are no substantive moral truths, only moral opinions and feelings.
• The entire universe is just one particle plus a physical “pilot wave”; everything else is illusion (this is an ontological version of Bohmian quantum mechanics).
• No claims made with vague words are true even though many are useful in virtually all contexts.
• There are no truths; truth is an inconsistent concept, as shown by the semantic paradoxes.

Plants ought to have legal rights.

I honestly have no idea whether or not I’m dreaming, or if I’m a brain in a vat, or what.

privation theory (i think)

1) That there is no such thing as ‘communication’ and that noone can ‘change their mind’ on the basis of dialogue (we are only going to have the ideas we are necessarily going to have by virtue of our intellectual disposition).
2) That you have to force the philosopher to teach (although it seems to be to the contrary!)

Theories of truth should not be able to explain the rational faultlessness of affirming hysteretical (“flip-floppy”) mental representations in terms of changing opinions about the truth of propositions.

That sounds totally strange and pompous, but the motivation is noble. It really just feeds off of the introspectively obvious fact that we don’t have a series of miniature mental breakdowns when we see the duck rabbit illusion and say “It is a duck” one minute and “it’s not a duck” the next.

The world is God’s love affair with herself.

We are how being thinks itself.

The Hegelian Dialectic is the best thing that ever happened to me.

If “I” has been adopted by a different family than the one who (as a matter of fact) adopted me, I would not exist.

Most non-human animals can’t feel pain, but do have aversive experiences.

Observing more and more black ravens can disconfirm the claim that all ravens are black.

The pleasure that Osama Bin Laden experienced on 9/11 had as much value as any other pleasurable experience of the same intensity, duration, and quality.

I believe in cultural evolution.

What doesn’t happen is logically impossible and whatever is logically possible is actual.

1) With respect to objects referred to in science and mathematics, I am an empiricist/nominalist/anti-realist, but I still think metaphysics is a useful philosophical practice that gets us real knowledge about the world (perhaps better knowledge than science).

2) I believe that God exists even though I think there’s no good reason to believe that God exists. I think one can know God substantively even though it’s not possible to utter a substantive sentence about God.

3) I’m not sure that language ever describes the world correctly (to include logic, math, science, etc.), yet I study logic, math, and science and even write papers about which logics model language better than others and which ways of thinking about scientific models and the like make the most sense.

Not only is classical logic almost entirely bunk, but practically everyone already knows this (for some significant sense of “know”).

There is no such thing as Logic as traditionally conceived.
Also, two things can be parts of one another.

Freedom and determinism are compatible.

Some contradictions are true

Free will does not require the ability to do otherwise, and we are morally responsible for (some) things beyond our control.

We do not have privileged access to our own minds, and how we know ourselves is essentially the same as how we know others. (The only way in which we do have any sort of “privileged access” is much more like how I have privileged access to my closet or pants pocket than what is normally thought.) Failure to see this is one of the biggest sources of self-deception among people.

One token of an emotion type can be cognitive and another token of the same type can be non-cognitive.

In principle (for sure) and even in a variety of actual circumstances, there is nothing morally wrong with cannibalism.

1. Analytic philosophy is worthless in its attempt to mirror science; there is no such thing as progress in philosophy, just new concerns
2. Graduate programs are exploiting the labor of grad students; there is no purpose to them since mentoring would involve more than just supervising a dissertation. It would involve the responsibility of making sure some level of prosperity was possible.
3. Continental philosophy has its purists, and they exclude just as much as analytics. Evidence of this can be gleaned from a Heidegger research group on Facebook that laments that Epoche and Heidegger Studies are not rigorous enough; on the contrary, there are some fine articles in those journals.
4. God’s existence is revealed through our realization of love; panentheism is true.
5. There are nonnatural kinds.
6. Philosophy that does not mesh with experience is worthless; analytic philosophy that maintains a distinction between the folk and philosophers is equally worthless.
7. Gatekeepers of the profession have benefited from the prestige bias of the Leiter Report, and the power of that structure is replicated in many social interactions in philosophy to the point that people will immediately take issue with this proposition. They will hide behind doing the best philosophy when really it is a manifestation of the power this structure imposes on the whole of the profession. The desire to keep the report is implicitly connected to the prestige, benefit, and perpetuation of its effect. Overcoming the Divide should be connected to destabilizing the configuration of this structure.
8. Philosophy of culture is a real thing.
9. Ethics can only be regulative, not prescriptive.
10. Ethics can discern moral truths only about the forms of life and the conditions/capacities of persons to realize moral truth; these moral truths, however, are objective for the participants in the lifeworld.
11. All religions are an arrangement of aesthetic beliefs; they give us an aesthetic of suffering to address the same existential questions of suffering in the human condition. In this way, theologians are just art historians, bad philosophers, and therefore any speculation about God must come from philosophy. There can really be no verification of any speculative metaphysics, so any speculation can only be true pragmatically. A speculation becomes pragmatically internalized and is re-presented as a new interpretive possibility for religion. Think Thomism for Catholics, Calvinism for Protestants.
12. Given 11, most philosophy of religion defies the Jamesian constraint of metaphysics. Most philosophers of religion are working on pseudo problems.
13. William James’s critique of metaphysics is true; the only metaphysics possible is a metaphysics of experience; radical empiricism and neutral monism are true.
14. Phenomenology is a form of nonnaturalism; it is committed to a form of intuitionism and nonreductive realism, not idealism. We can also be realists about the structures it describes, a form of realism I like to call participatory realism.
15. Ethics cannot get off the ground without a philosophical anthropology, which includes a philosophy of community. This is why analytics look to construct one by trying to do moral psychology, analyzing agency, and trying to provide a picture about how agency works..what is practical reason etc. Continentals also proffer ethics without a philosophical anthropology, especially Levinasian otherists. These otherists use the religious appeal of Levinas to do the same thing. Also, the Nietzschean critique of ethics is false.

There “are”nonexistent objects
Minds are the only particular things that exist.

To show other philosophers “respect” by constructively criticizing without being an asshole is pretty weird.

I think you mean “property”

(1) Your self-regarding attitudes toward your death should not track how good or bad it is for you. So, your death might be good for you, but you should lament it for self-regarding reasons anyway.

(2) Sometimes it is morally permissible to indulge in a trivial good (e.g. going to the theatre) at the cost of letting a child drown. Or, sometimes there is nothing wrong with letting a child drown.

http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/content/75/2/204.short?rss=1&ssource=mfr

That there is not a significant moral difference between inflicting pain or suffering on a human and inflicting pain or suffering on a sentient non-human. And sometimes if you have to decide between harming a non-sentient, non-human, living thing and harming a human living thing, you ought morally to choose the latter.

P.S. I should note that my above message was directed at Felix who offered comment #17.

The Lion King does not depict lions. Why? The beings depicted in the movie talk and we understand them. But if a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand it. (This is just one way that philosophy can help you make your children/grandchildren/colleagues cry.)

I think that average happiness utilitarianism is true and can be defended from most/all of the criticisms that have been directed toward it.

I think that if a utility monster actually did exist, we actually would be morally obligated to feed ourselves to it/ it actually would be morally obligated to eat us. I think it can be shown that our intuition is wrong in this case. I think we can show that people are utility monsters. I think we can show that small children, the elderly, cute little fluffy animals etc. are all utility monsters.

I think that once people really accept the substrate-independence theory of mind, that they would no longer be averse to plugging into an experience machine, given the right conditions.

I think more than likely, we are already living in a computer simulation. I don’t think the fact that there might be moral reasons against creating an ancestor simulation are sufficient to prevent such a simulation from being created anyway in the vast span of time.