Philosophy

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....

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....

A certain moral dilemma is presented as such: Should a person, John, take a job as the overseer of a concentration camp intended for people of the ancestry his country is at war with in order to minimize the harm done there, or pass the job on which then may be taken by his cruel second-in-command whom John knows holds a hatred for the people to be imprisoned in the camp....