The Christian Vanguard

When I was a Protestant, our college ministry would have these really early morning prayers where all the guys would go on top of Signal Hill and pray. We would gather in a circle and go around and do a little prayer. And by itself a 2 or three minute prayer isn't bad, but, when you have a couple of guys who are just trying to flex, a 3 minute prayers in a circle of about 15 guys can mean just standing in a circle for a solid 45 minutes, and I wasn't having it. So when it was my turn to pray, all I said was, "Dear God, please bless me with millions and millions of dollars. Amen." I was kinda making a point, and I was being a butthead about it. Afterwards, my friend Max came up to me, and he told me, "Dude, I looked up and Steve just gave you the maddest look. It was hilarious." Indeed, it was.  So, what exactly is wrong here? Maybe the execution of the prayer, in that context, but I want to look at the content. The content of the prayer did, at the time, see...

The following is a draft of a final paper I had to turn in for my Analytic Philosophy paper. Enjoy.  Russell’s Structural Collapse In this paper, I critically examine Bertrand Russell’s theory on the relationship between our sense-data and physics. Russell aims to show that we construct about the world from our sense-data, we do not infer the world from our sense-data. He does this by arguing from analogy. Since we do away with hypothetical entities in math, then we should do it in physics. The relative property between math and physics in Russell’s view is that physics really is just reducible to math. However, I show that there are problems with the mathematical content of the analogy itself and Russell’s understanding between the relationship of math and physics which absurdly tells little to nothing than what we commonly understand physics tells us, thus making his argument by analogy a weak one.  Russell is out to set out a theory concerning the relationship between sense...

The following is an essay I had to turn in for my analytic philosophy class.  Analytic philosophy begins with Immanuel Kant and his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are those which express nothing in the predicate which is not already in the concept, whereas synthetic propositions are those which do predicate something to the subject, and thus amplifies our knowledge (“Prolegomena” p.10).1Because the predicate is already thought up in the concept, all analytic propositions have the property of being a priori in nature, whereas synthetic propositions can be either a priori or a posteriori (Ibid. p.10).2There is some contention about whether there really is synthetic a priori knowledge, however, since synthetic judgments are often thought to come from experience, which doesn’t seem to be part of what it means to be a priori.3Kant argues that mathematical judgements are synthetic a priori, since they do not directly rely on the principle o...

These last few weeks, my car has been making a really bad screeching noise. I kind of hoped it would go away, but it only got louder and louder as time went on. So I finally decided to drop it off at a mechanic. They told me they could find no noise. I went back, drove around with one of the mechanics in the passenger seat, and sure enough, my car made no noise. I'm sure this has happened to many of us before.  I'm going to force a metaphorical reading on this event, so I have something to write about. When we have issues, we tend to lash out. Sometimes it is a cry for help. And after a while, the screeching in our souls becomes so loud, we go see someone to help fix us, but really, we just need to vent and have someone hear us. We just need to release some things, just talk to someone, and then we're all good and dandy once again.  Some time ago, I wrote about feeling a need to cry, but being unable to do so. That it was building up pressure, and I didn't know when it ...

 Sir Roger Scruton presents an argument in his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction against the transcendental nature of beauty. To be clear, he is only presenting it, not endorsing it. He writes, "Why believe p ? Because it it is true. Why want x ? Because it is good. Why look at y ? Because it is beautiful. In some way, philosophers have argued, those answers are on a par...Someone who asked 'why believe what is true' or 'why want what is good' has failed to understand the nature of reasoning...Does the same go for beauty?...To say as much is to overlook the subversive nature of beauty. Someone charmed by a myth may be tempted to believe it: and in this case beauty is the enemy of truth...A man attracted to a woman may be tempted to condone her vices: and in this case beauty is the enemy of goodness...Goodness and truth never compete...The pursuit of beauty, however, is far more questionable." The argument states that since transcendentals have this qualit...

In rationality and decision theory, we have the Maximin principle, which states that we look at the worst possible outcomes of every act, and choose the act which produces the least worst outcome. So, if I have to choose between two investments, say Apple and Google, and if the worst case scenario for my Apple investment is I lose $100 and the worst case scenario for my Google investment is that I lose $200, then under the Maximin principle, I should choose to invest in Apple over Google. That is, if course, if I want to minimize my losses.  There is something pessimistic about the Maximin principle. If for example, the best case scenario for my Google investment is that I profit 1 million dollars and the best case scenario for my Apple investment is I profit 5 thousand dollars, then we may be rational to choose Google over Apple. But I want to focus on the pessimism because I get the sense that many people are pessimistic about politics and the election these days. So, can the pes...

I had to give a 5 min presentation on Gottlob Frege for my Analytic Philosophy class. I had a powerpoint, but I wrote out the entirety of what I said. Here it is. Frege had several important ideas, and one of the more important ones was his championing of this view called “Logicism”. So what is Logicism? So Logicism is the view that math can be reduced to logical statements, thus making math a branch of logic. Just as there are branches in philosophy, like Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, and those branches have sub branches, like in Ethics you can branch off into ethical theory, and applied ethics, so Frege wants to say that math is a branch of Logic. Which was a real trip at the time because it was something of a common opinion that math was a generalization of our experiences. And this view was held by philosophers like John Stuart Mill. So for example, when I have two dollars, and then I have another two dollars, I then learn that I have four dollars, and so I draw from my own personal ...