Beliefs of Fiction It may be a total absurdity to abuse the notion of ‘fiction’ as the foundation of an entire philosophy. Even other radical empiricisms attempt not to undermine themselves right off the bat in such a way, being rather more ambiguous in their first formal principles. Where could Hume have been going with this idea? In an initial attack on innate rationalism, Hume declares that, “All ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: the mind has but a slender hold of them: they are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas....

The world we find ourselves immersed in is both composed of and populated by apparently many individually separated things, i.e. people, tools, buildings, other animals, planets, atoms, and so on. We seem to have the common intuition that each and every thing there is coincides with nothing or, in other words, that each thing is itself and not some other thing. To put it yet another way, any two given things can neither be present in the same space nor share the same place at the same time....

We often would like to determine whether we are justified in believing some proposition P. Take this P to be the statement, “It is sunny outside today.” If we find ourselves inside of a room, how would one of us go about justifying this claim? You might declare the following proposition P’, “Because I looked through the window, I am justified in believing that it is sunny outside today,” from which the first proposition P should follow....

After many thousands of years of rather slow advancement in musical technology and thought it is surprising to think how quickly our views changed in the 20th century in a period as short as twenty years. In his The Art of Noises, Russolo remarks on the future of music and details his plans for a futurist orchestra, including “rumbles, murmurs, gurgles, and scrapes,” among other noises he considered to be fundamental to nature....

Kant claims that geometric knowledge is of a synthetic a priori nature. Geometric knowledge can be encapsulated by the propositions it postulates, which are the set of all statements it declares to be true. This includes such things as the Pythagorean Theorem, which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of its other two sides. Under Kant’s theory of knowledge, propositions can fall under either one of two categories: analytic or synthetic....