How is it possible that there are statements which appear to deal with contingent identity? It does at first seem to be the case that we use this type of identity statement commonly in our everyday language. However, Kripke disputes the idea that it is possible for these kinds of identity relationships to exist. Instead, he contends that such statements are actually matters that deal with necessary identity. Whenever we say of two things, let’s call them x and y, something in the form of “x=y”, we are making a claim about their shared identity....

Many philosophers have concerned themselves with the philosophy of the mind, which largely attempts to describe the relationship between the mind and the body, if there is one at all. The word ‘mind’ in this case refers to all of our hopes, dreams, beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and similar abstractions. The ‘body’ is more loosely defined – often referring to the brain, nervous system, and/or various sensory inputs located around the body: the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, possibly even including the entire epidermis for touch....

According to Hume, there are problems present in moral philosophy that stand to bring it to an intellectual level below that of the mathematical sciences. Largely analytical works such as those based on mathematics are founded on the relations between our ideas, and are generally extremely precise in their statements and proofs. These are intuitively true in a sense that do not require any external information, as their legitimacy is not dependant on anything found in nature, and in fact their falsehood is generally thought to be logically inconceivable....

L-states are a necessary component of the causal theory of perception, which generally states that a subject’s perception is of an object only if some notion of causation by the object can be satisfied. Accordingly, the L-state is the effect an object must have on the subject which perceives it, which is that of a visual state that may be described with a sentence in the form of, “It looks to the subject that…” This is to say that the subject sees an object only if it looks to the subject as though it is looking at the object....

It seems very common for a person, especially around before Kant’s time, to presume that their own principles of morality also happen to apply to all other people. This is based on the idea that moral principles are come upon through the use of reason, which all rational beings are intrinsically capable of, and therefore transcend all differences of culture or individuality. In his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant attempts to develop a matured view of morality that accounts for the obvious differences in moral belief that we observe in one another every day....