119,

Has anyone actually bothered to reply to any of your posts like this on here, or do people pretty much just ignore them and keep on as if they didn't exist? Haha.

We've looked over vBulletin's documents, and it should be fine as long as we actually enforce our rules.

I have to ask, though: Do we really need some of these rules? I understand that, as a classical theism forum, we have to safeguard the freedom to speak of controversial topics dear to classical theists part of traditional religions (most classical theists). But do we really need the line about it being okay to talk about certain racial characteristics? I mean, that's not exactly philosophically substantive stuff. . .

Calhoun wrote:

I don't know if PSR is getting more and more or less or less popular , there doesn't seem to be any data on this but I have seen it getting defense from secular philosophers and in non theistic context in recent times.
 

"What are your sources John?" 
I'm basing my comment on what's in major philosophers from Leibniz onwards' works. (I think that more recently, in ontology at least, the vast majority of philosophers take it for granted that the PSR can be shucked aside. I'm guessing that the situation in philosophy of science, ethics, and so on, is worse. I'm not sure about philosophy of religion, where atheist philosophers are probably more likely to have the principle forced on them by theists running cosmological arguments.)

RomanJoe wrote:

honestly couldn't give a solid reason which is why I prefaced it as something I would "like" to happen.

Ah, okay.  I thought you meant “I like to think” in more of a “I like to think people would have the good sense to listen to reason and. .  .” kind of way. 

Why do you think PSR has taken such a beating in the past two centuries?

Superficially, a lot of people admit brute facts because they're naturalists.* Armstrong and David Lewis, for example, are both totally explicit about this when starting their systems. Less superficially, I think you might be able to explain some of this in terms of Hume and early analytic philosophers' influence (see Daniel's discussion of analytic philosophers and modal notions here).

I've seen some scholastic authors suggest that people have moved away from the PSR as a result of their moving away from an intellectualist God, but even voluntarists might be able to affirm the PSR if they're willing to go as far as some contemporary authors and, for example, embrace the idea that free choices (in the libertarian sense) are explanations. I don't know much about the history of the PSR, though.

*N. B. I consider naturalism, the thesis that only spacetime and its contents exist, and atheism, the thesis that God doesn't exist, distinct. I also consider naturalism and physicalism, the thesis that everything obeys the laws of physics, distinct.

It depends on what you mean by "cast into the metaphysical waste bin". The history of philosophy, if it shows us anything, shows us that disputes over philosophical issues tend to not get decided, though everyone living may take one or another attitude towards those issues for long stretches of time.