For most of us, sleep is nothing but a compulsory action that we have to do at least once a day, but for scientists who study it, the mysteries of sleep contribute to a plague of questions with hard to decipher, often inaccessible, answers. Questions such as what function does sleep serve and is there an internal mechanism controlling our sleep are among various possible questions that researchers in the field continue to scrutinize but in this particular paper we will examine the stages of sleep, their physiological differences and a number of the theories behind Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep.
July 4, 2009
Emotivism & Moral Nihilism
One tends to wonder whether an emotivist view of ethics will ultimately result in a case of moral nihilism. Firstly, lets examine what exactly is emotivism and then have a look at a few problems faced by it. Emotivism is a form of non-cognitivism and was first put forward for consideration by A. J. Ayer in his book Language, Truth and Logic. Although more sophisticated versions of non-cognitivism were later penned by people such as Charles Stevenson, Simon Blackburn, Allan Gibbard and Richard Hare, Ayer’s version is the most unadorned yet still highly confrontational of these developed theories.