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That Man With the Champagne in His Glass is Happy

2024-05-12

The concept of "possible worlds" can be sensationalised into some kind of pseudo-scientific parallel universe nonsense. Instead, a more preferable term would be counterfactual scenarios. One such work of great interest which covers counterfactual scenarios is Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity. Like all good

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The Death of Scientism

2024-03-05

Zoé Ziani was working on her PhD thesis in the field of behavioural psychology. She was looking at a particular paper "CGK 2014" (an abbreviation for The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty). This paper is about how individuals can feel "pysically d

#science #philosophy

Is Empiricism All We Have as the Basis of Knowledge?

2024-01-13

This essay is in some ways a follow up to a previous blog post about economics. In other ways, it is stand alone. Allow me to explain. You don't have to read that post to understand this one, and this post won't be about economics. A lot of the same ideas are going to crop up and we'll be putting them into a larger epi

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Introduction to Economics

2023-10-01

This article aims to provide a general introduction to Austrian economics. We will focus the majority of our attention on the epistemological foundations of the science. We will also look at some specific key ideas that will allow you actually start performing real world analysis.Unfortunately, I simply can not cover e

#economics #philosophy

Are Videogames Art?

2023-08-05

Philo has gone to Brad's house to play the latest video game – "Postmodern Warfare"Brad: Haha – take that Philo. I'm the best Postmodern Warfare player there is. You stand no chance of winning!Philo: You have beat me again Brad! You're just too quick and nimble with that controller.Brad: Quite. I love thi

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Human Rights and its Malcontents

2023-07-29

I am not a lawyer. I have not been to law school. This blog is not legal adviceThe Rule of Law by Tom Bingham is a wonderful exploration of what the rule of law is, and why it is necessary. In this post I want to dig into some of the theoretical aspects of what human rights are, and how they apply to the rule of law.Fi

#law #philosophy

Preamble to the Pre-Socratics

2022-04-17

The pre-Socratics are a collection of philosophers that came quite literally before Socrates. This is a period of history from around 635BC to around 440BC, although quite a number of the later pre-Socratics were actually contemporaries of Socrates himself. After Socrates' death, and with the rising of Plato and Aristo

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The Pre-Socratics Part 7: The Sophists

2022-04-10

The population density of Manhattan is 74,800 per square mile. We don't know exactly what the population density of Athens was, but we estimate maybe 120,000 people in a 0.68 square mile area – 176,500 people per square mile. I think it's no surprise that communication was essential in Athens of this time. Enter, the

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The Pre-Socratics Part 6: The Atomist Pluralists

2022-04-05

There are two members of the Atomist Pluralist school: Leucippus and Democritus, and we shall deal with them together as one. This is because they are very similar in thought, and apparently some of the works have been misattribute to each other (possibly explaining why they are so similar).Leucippus seems to be the ol

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The Pre-Socratics Part 5: Loose Ends

2022-03-20

This article deals with three pre-Socratic philosophers who are not generally considered to be part of any of the main schools of thought. This includes Heraclitus, who is ostensibly one of the most important of the pre-Socratics. We will also look at Diogenes Apolloniates who was a late pre-Socratic influenced by Anax

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The Pre-Socratics Part 4: The Pluralists

2022-03-14

Building off of the Eleatic school last week, the Pluralist school can be considered a kind of post-Parmenides reaction. While working inside Parmenides framework that all is one and that "becoming" and "ending" are not possible, they aimed to reconcile Parmenides' other views with an acceptance tha

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The Pre-Socratics Part 3: The Eleatic School

2022-02-27

This school, as Diogenes Laertius tell us in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is an Italian school influenced by Pythagoras. The common theme across this school is that motion is an illusion, everything is one, and the senses are unreliable. The Eleatics are rationalists, and would be the foundation of much of rat

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The Trails and Death of Socrates

2022-02-20

Socrates is perhaps one of the most important philosophers of all time. Indeed, we group the philosophers before him into the Pre-Socratics. Despite being of such importance to us, Socrates was put on trail and executed by the state of Athens. Perhaps they could not see the important contribution to philosophy he was m

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What are the Bourgeois Virtues?

2022-01-30

I recently read The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre McCloskey. This is the first work of her Bourgeois series, that I hope to read and write about over the coming year. The scope of her work is vast and I certainly can not do the work full justice here. I will say that it was an excellent read and I strongly suggest it. T

#politics #philosophy #economics

A Very Short Introduction to Logic

2022-01-23

Some people in the modern world will boldly declare that we do not need logic. Logic is, after all, to them, nothing more than a convenient side effect of biology that helps us survive in a jungle or a conspiratorial system created to make sure mathematics and sciences remain inaccessible to certain groups of people. N

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Towards a Definition of Art

2021-09-04

In the last post we discussed some of the things we might be able to know. In this post we will begin to work towards a definition of art, which is something I have been personally struggling with for some time. This work is still in its early stages, so I hope you will forgive me if there are mistakes in my thought.I

#philosophy #art

What can we Know?

2021-08-28

This might not seem like a very hard question at all – I mean, you know that you are reading this post, you know where you are, and so on. And yet, the field of epistemology is huge, and no consensus has been reached yet. So, today we will try and begin to make an answer to the question, what exactly can we know?This

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The Pre-Socratics Part 2: The Pythagorean School

2021-02-28

The Pythagorean school begins our break from the Ionaian school and the first foray into the Italian school. This is known as the Italian school because it really began in the Italian colonies. This school began with Pythagoras, but we will begin with Pythagoras' influence: Pherecydes. Diogenes Laertius lays down much

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Beyond Left and Right

2021-02-21

The political landscape is little understood in the modern world. More conservative politicians (viz. Donald Trump) refer to political opponents as socialists when they don't wish to seize the means of production. More "liberal" politicians (what does "liberal" even mean?) call Trump a fascist, when

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The Pre-Socratic Philosophers Part 1: The Milesian School

2021-02-11

Pre-Socratic philosophy essentially refers to a group of philosophers that came before Socrates (or were his contemporaries). These philosophers are grouped by two qualities, I think. The first is that they unfortunately have very little in the way of sources left (indeed, most of what we know about them is from what o

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