This is an issue I see a lot in apologetics and in arguments about theism vs. atheism. Certain theists (who I will just refer to as “theists,” even though I’m not referring to all theists) want to be able to put forward the existence of god as a hypothesis that can be argued for or…
Category: Philosophy
Stop viewing animals as good or bad
I recently learned that opossums can carry a parasite that can cause serious injury to horses. When looking into it, I also discovered opossums might not eat nearly as many ticks as previously thought. My heart sank reading all this. I previously viewed opossums as a kind of superhero animal, cleaning up the bad stuff…
The present’s relationship to the future
Stop being so serious. It’s destroying my mental health. Evil Neuro The glass is already broken “You see this goblet?” asks [Ajahn Chah], the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns….
Disagreement and subjectivity
Why do people disagree? In many cases, it’s due to differences in preferences and values, things that are entirely subjective. However, people also frequently disagree about facts, which should be objective. How does this happen and how can it be resolved? First, we don’t have direct access to physical facts, we only have access to…
Nihilism: the philosophy that doesn’t matter
What is nihilism? This is a question with many different correct answers. People have used the term to refer to different things. For me, it represents what I would call more specifically “philosophical” nihilism, a combination of philosophical positions that could loosely be said to form a worldview. These positions are as follows: With ontological…
Equality, equity, equivalence, identity, indistinguishability, isomorphism, resemblance, congruence, and similarity
While the title of this post might as well be a thesaurus entry, my purpose here is to investigate the differences between these concepts and how they operate in different contexts. Mathematical equality The reader is almost certainly very familiar with the equals sign or = used in math. Many of us first encounter it…
Being nothing
I am what I am not. I am not what I am. Jean-Paul Sartre The concept horse is not a concept. Gottlob Frege What is the self? This is my interpretation. It is unique among things in the world in that it is a subject, while everything else consists of objects. The self is not…
I like nonsense the best
I have often said that my favorite way to sort objects is alphabetically by color name. For example, if your objects are colored red, yellow, green, blue, and purple, then you would put the blue one first, followed by green, then purple, red, and finally yellow. But why? Partly for humor. I think it’s funny…
“Humility and a willingness to be corrected”
This phrase comes from a video by Erica “Gutsick Gibbon” on YouTube. In the video, she describes how important it is for scholars especially to put what they think the know out there for criticism because it’s the only way to learn and get better. On my About the Author page, I have the following…
Structural realism in the philosophy of science
One of the core issues in the philosophy of science is realism vs. antirealism. This concerns two things, the ontological status of entities referred to in scientific laws and what the aim of science is (or should be). Realism is the view that entities referred to in scientific laws genuinely exist to the extent that…
thoughts on mind 