Haha, thanks ArguingWAristotleTiff!

"as an evolutionist I reject existence of artificial processes" - I think that's a really interesting thought @Hrvoje. I 100% agree with you that from a scientific perspective, everything should be considered natural, but I can't help but feel the word 'natural' vs 'unnatural' still has some kind of meaning.

Take for instance when Heidegger writes about technology distancing people from nature, or the ordinary language claim that a food contains 'only natural ingredients'. Would you take these statements to mean something else, or to be using the phrase natural incorrectly?

So it might just be that I need to go back and read more Russell, but I think he would view a sentence like 'unicorns have wings' as true because unicorn is an empty set rather than because of qualities about the unicorns. It might not be a great example for meto use since I know Russell ran into a lot of problems around so called 'fictional truths'.

The real point I was trying to get atwas that logically a sentence of the form 'all Ps are Qs' is always true if there are no Ps (so in effect 'Q' here cloukd be anything without affecting the truth value of the sentence). This doesn't hold for 'a P is Q' since it requires a P to exist.

Ah, I really loved it! (Although I was the kind of kid who was really into CYOA too)

I think I ended up with the ending where he goes back in time and gets on the train with his mum, although I cycled through quite a few different endings on my way there.

I found it a little bit disturbing just how much I enjoyed making intentionally bad decisions just to see what would play out- it's probably a good thing that we can't 'replay' life, otherwise who knows what insane decisions we'd all make. . .

I always found this a bit confusing as well- the key thing for Russell's point of view (as opposed to Aristotle) is that statements like "All winged horses have wings" can be trivially true, i.e. true by default because the term doesn't refer to anything that exists.

It might help to also consider that Russell would also interpet "All winged horses are wingless" to be true. Since nothing is in the set "winged horses". It's a bit similar to how "a->b" is always true when "a" is false.

However, a statement like "there exists a winged horse that has wings" can't be trivially true in the same way. It's saying that "for the set of winged horses, there is at least one member, and that member is also a member of the set of things that have wings".