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Articles

Everything is a Goat

Bill Capra rebutts a cosmological argument against goatism.

Philosophers can be perverse. Sometimes intuitive, common-sense ideas are challenged by clever and apparently compelling arguments that lead to extraordinarily counterintuitive conclusions. Consider the common-sense principle that everything is a goat, otherwise known as goatism. This is a simple, intuitive claim about the world, part of our unreflective outlook – something we take for granted but don’t ordinarily examine. Yet surprisingly, some philosophers have thought an argument can be mounted against this common-sense idea.