Tag: philosophy

Game Over

Yesterday was very strange. Last Friday I finished up my metaphysics and promptly went on a short vacation to see some friends. I got home Tuesday night. Then came yesterday. It was the first whole day in which I had to really spend time worrying about what to do now that I have written everything I ever wanted to. The proper term for what happened was I flipped out.

A note on ethics: Mutual Enrichment

Our ethical responsibility is to do our best to enrich the lives of others and to give others the opportunity to enrich us. Everyone understands what it is to have an enriched life: everyone has had a friend, learned something of worth, or made the world a better place at some point (even by accident).  Moreover, once you understand how your life has been enriched, then you understand how you could act in a similar […]

K*nt F*cker

I was at a bar on Friday.  One of my friends says, “Hey Noah, there’s another philosopher here, come talk.”  So I go and chat. She wrote a MA thesis on Levinas.  But somehow we got to ethics.  I started making fun of virtue ethics, which she believed in.  Something about me saying she had tomatoes being cultivated in her head got her riled up.  Since I had said I was unimpressed with Singer earlier, […]

One way

I took a sculpture class as an undergrad (somehow I fit it in between the 18 philosophy courses, not counting the 3 I sat in on and never missed a day). My professor said that one of his contemporaries had bragged that he had found five ways to represent drapery.  This is no mean task, and my professor said he hadn’t a clue about how to go about representing drapery, let alone know five ways.  […]

What are Quantifiers?

What are quantifiers?  Quantifiers have been thought of things that ‘range over’ a set of objects.  For example, if I say There are people with blue eyes this statement can be represented as (with the domain restricted to people): ∃x(Bx). This statement says that there is at least one person with property B, blue eyes. So the ‘Ex’ is doing the work of looking at the people in the domain (all people) and picking out […]

Consciousness Dilemma, take 2

Back in January I wrote up a post on what I believe to be a major problem in the study of consciousness. Now, with the introduction of Consciousness Online (started by the estimable R. Brown), I feel my dilemma should get some renewed attention. Here’s the argument: Assume someone knows what consciousness/mind is. If someone knows something, then it is part of his or her consciousness. If someone knows what consciousness is, then his or […]

Where Does Probability Come From? (and randomness to boot)

I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. It is a wonderful, beautiful place. I zip-lined in a rain forest canopy, hiked above a glacier, kayaked coastal Canada and was pulled by sled-dogs. Anywho, as on many cruises, there was a casino, which is an excellent excuse for me to discuss probability. What is probability and where does it come from? Definitions are easy enough to find. Google returns: a measure of how likely it […]

Relativity as Informational Interdependence

Ever have the experience of sitting in traffic and believe that you are moving in reverse, only to realize a second later that you were fooled by the vehicle next to you moving forward? You were sitting still, but because you saw something moving away, you mistakenly thought you started to move in the opposite direction. Two different senses may be at work here: your sight and your balance. Lets assume that your balance did […]

Getting Around Gettier

The Gettier argument (and its descendants) run thusly… Someone thinks they know x. However, due to factor y, they do not know x. These sorts of thought experiments are used regularly to undermine different accounts of knowledge. Generally I think they are effective but there is one gray area that is under-appreciated. When the thought experiment is introduced, it is generally assumed to be unproblematic: whoever is setting up the thought experiment is defining the […]