Philosophy

Stroud, a contemporary philosopher, argues that part of Descartes’ work in the 17th century largely initiated a still ongoing philosophical problem of skepticism: how are people able to say that they know anything about the world around themselves? This is a very particular type of philosophical skepticism, in that it addresses only one’s knowledge in regard to the external world itself, and not the far more broad possibility for knowledge about anything whatsoever....

During our study on the nature of time it has come to my attention that the four-dimensional ‘block’ view of space-time seems to be a very plausible model we have available to us to describe the world we find ourselves in. This is firmly grounded in its great compatibility with the findings of modern physics, but also seems to contradict many of the psychological intuitions of time I find both myself, and far more experienced academics, often mistakenly maintain....

Predictions made by quantum mechanics appear to conflict with the classical understanding of causation. In this view of causation it is generally accepted that separate events can only affect one another sequentially in forward motion through time. Quantum mechanics rather necessitates either a nonstandard view of causal relationships, or instead several clear violations of the principle of locality, which states that an object may only be influenced by its relatively constrained environment....

Smart contends that sensory statements which seem to correspond with brain states such as, “I am in pain,” or, “There appears to me the visual sensation of a yellowish orange after-image,” can not be reduced to reports as those which refer to a uniquely mental substance. Instead, they seem to be composed simply of physical processes, subject to all the same natural laws as those which describe the body. He argues by Occam’s Razor that the fields of science offer increasingly sufficient explanations for the natural world composed solely of physical constituents, and that these too should be applied to the human mind, rather than reserving it as some special class of entity entirely distinct from the rest of the world made up of extended body....

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....