Review of John Skalko's "The Incoherence of Gender as a Social Construct"
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Aristotle on the Origin of Causes
The following is an essay I turned in for my Aristotle class. Explain Aristotle’s argument in Physics Book VIII, Chapter 4. Your explanation should make clear not just what problem Aristotle addresses but why it is a pressing problem for him. The problem that Aristotle wants to address is the origin of causes (256a). To flesh this out, he makes a few distinctions. The first distinction is between accidental and essential motion (254b10). Accidental motion would be things like a woman healing a patient. The woman heals a patient not because she is a woman, but because she has healing medical knowledge. That she is a woman is only an accident of the cause. Essential motion on the other hand is motion with appropriate links to causes, such as being healed by a doctor. It is essentially the doctor who heals me as a doctor, not for any other feature in addition to their doctor status. A second distinction he makes is between things which are moved by either something within itself or f...
Aristotle on the Motion of the Earth
The following is an essay I turned in for class. In On The Heavens Book II, Chapter 13 Aristotle states, “In general our quarrel with those who speak of the movements in this way cannot be confined to the parts, it concerns the whole universe.” (294b31 – 32) Explain what he means and how his criticism of his predecessors as well as his development of his own view illustrate what he means. (You will have to be selective in what you discuss here.) The context in which Aristotle says this in his discussion about the underlying cause for the rest of the earth, that is to say, why the earth itself is not moving. This begins with his discussion of his predecessor's arguments that the earth is still because of its shape. Anaxagoras and Democritus reasoned that the earth is still because it is flat (294b15). The flat side which presents to the air is so wide that it doesn’t allow air to move around it, like a lid (294b15). And since movement through air is possible because one cuts throug...
David Hume on Induction
The following is an essay I turned in for my British Empiricism class. It is on Hume's Problem of Induction. Deductive and inductive reasoning are types of argument structures. In a deductive argument, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. For example, if 1) All cats are mammals 2) Felix is a cat, then it would follow inescapably that 3) Felix is a mammal. If 1 and 2 are true, there is no possible or conceivable world in which 3 is not true. Inductive arguments do not provide this guarantee. A good inductive argument only makes the conclusion more probable or likely than not. For example, if 1) 90% of people can swim, and 2) Michael is a person, then 3) Michael can swim, though not guaranteed, is likely. It does not follow with logical necessity because Michael may just happen to be part of that 10% of the population that does not swim. David Hume’s problem of induction states that inductive justifications that rely on past experiences wi...
