The Christian Vanguard

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...

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...

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...

My philosophy of religion professor posed this challenge to me. Professor says the arguments for God's existence don't prove uniqueness (that is, these arguments do not prove one single God is responsible), including Aquinas. I said, appealing to Aquinas First Way, that there can't be more than one thing that is Pure Act because if there were, there would be some potential to distinguish between them. Professor replied that assumes the indiscernibility of identicals, which is by no means obvious. Consider a sphere with equidistant points on the surface. They have no distinguishing features to differentiate between one and the other, yet they are not all the same.  The tempting answer is to appeal to space and relation, but it seems every space point has the same relation. My friend Christopher shared with me his thoughts and I thought they were worth sharing here so that I can reference it in the future.  You don't have to argue from the identity of indiscernib...

Legal positivism is the view that whatever is posited as law is truly law. To help understand this, consider first the Nuremberg Trials, in which Nazi war criminals were prosecuted. The common defense for the Nazis was that they were obeying the law, and laws are supposed to be obeyed. So they obeyed them, and you can't blame them for doing what they were supposed to do. As Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us in his Letter From A Birmingham Jail, what they did was legal. That doesn't seem to be contested. So, if we wish to prosecute Nazis, on what grounds should we do it? Do we want to say that laws do not need to be obeyed? That seems like too much to say. I like it when everyone obeys the law and drives on the right side of the road. It keeps me, and everyone else, safe. So laws do need to be obeyed. Does Nazi law count as real law then? According to legal positivism, yes it does. Legal positivists will disagree on what is the mechanism for positing a law, whether it is the c...

In my Metaphysics textbook, there is an article by David Parfit describing split brain experiments and its implications for the philosophy of mind. So, the experiments go something like this. You take a brain and you split it into the two hemispheres. Each part of the brain controls a different part of the body. Next, the patient is shown a card that is half blue and half red. Now, say the right eye is focused on the red, and the left eye is focused on the blue. Then ask the patient which color he sees, and his right arm will write red, and his left arm will write blue, but the patient cannot comprehend both at the same time. He thinks he only sees blue and he also thinks he only sees red. He cannot conjoin the two beliefs.  What Parfit says this proves is that our conscious is not a unified thing. Consciousness is supposed to  unify all beliefs, and this unified consciousness is what we call the self. But since we know that a single patient can have two streams of consci...

The following is a paper I wrote for class. To avoid plagiarism, I won't be putting up the prompt, just my findings. Euthyphro In trying to defend his scandalous actions to Socrates, Euthyphro argues that his actions are pious, which implies some knowledge of what the nature of piety is. At first, Euthyphro gives a rough definition as being that which the gods love, but soon refines it to be that which all the gods love. Socrates then asks, “Is the pious being loved by all the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?” Socrates goes on to flesh out what the thrust of his argument is, giving analogous examples such as being carried and being seen. What those examples are supposed to show is that when we try to define the nature of a thing, we have to be able to explain it in such a way that it wouldn’t be dependent on anything else. Some of the examples he gives are being led and being carried. The point of these examples is that one gives r...

At the recommendation of my professor, I purchased a Great Courses audio course titled, "Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills." Here is my review.

I love watching movies, but there is a lot of garbage out there. I think it is important to watch movies, if one wishes to be a Christian engaged in culture. More people watch movies than read a novel these days I think, so watching a movie is part of being culturally literate. Sure, there are movies that are meant to just entertain you, like Transformers , and I am not interested in those. What I am interested in are movies that might interest the philosophically inclined, or may encourage the layman to think about philosophical issues. I'll list some of my favorites down below, but as time rolls on, I'll add some more.

About a week ago, the topic of discussion for Philosophy club was animal rights. One member, whose name I cannot recall, gave a brief presentation on why animals have rights, and I got up, gave a brief explanation as to why they do not, and we all had a good discussion from there. This is just an outline of my talk, I deviated and gave some examples, and I took questions as I spoke. But this was requested by a friend, so, here it is. 

This argument is put forth by Frank Jackson.  Mary is a scientist confined to a room where everything is black and white. She learns every fact about the physical world, or just about everything there is to know about the physical world and how it works. If physicalism, the view that all that there is entirely physical, is true, then Mary knows everything there is to know, and so she knows everything. There isn't something she doesn't know.  Yet, this does not seem true. If Mary were let out to the world and experience something Red, it would be said that Mary has actually learned something, which is, redness. She knows what it is like to experience redness. So, physicalism is false. This is the knowledge argument against physicalism.  This doesn't seem convincing to me. First, it seems to assume that if physicalism is true, then everything must be expressed as a proposition. Even if physicalism was true, that wouldn't follow. Say Mary didn't know what stra...

Much has already been said about whether or not Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Why another drop in the ocean? Because I haven't seen anyone make this point, or at least explicitly make this point, and so that justifies me adding to the noise. That point is that the distinction between de re and de dicto is relevant here.  Take the following syllogism: 1. Mary Jane believes Spider-Man is a hero 2. Spider-Man is Peter Parker  The temptation is to conclude that  3. Mary Jane believes that Peter Parker is a hero But this would not be true if Mary Jane does not know that Spider-Man is Peter Parker. So how do we account for this? We do so by making the semantic distinction between de re and de dicto. De re means "of the thing" and de dicto  means "of what is said." (3) follows from (1) and (2) on the de re  interpretation, but not on the de dicto .  For example, take the proposition, "Adrian believes that someone is a fr...

Those that would have me leave the Roman Catholic Church have linked me several articles from James White, of Alpha and Omega Ministries. I am concerned for him. He seems to be very anti-philosophy. Or rather, he doesn't like it when Theology takes a backseat to Philosophy. Why this is so, I'm not sure. He might say because it's not Biblical, but there are problems.

I risk being called a racist for this. My better judgment is telling me not to make this thought public, but my gigantic ego is telling me to not be a fairy and put it up like man. I’m thinking we ought to abolish hate-crime. What is hate-crime? Basically, what happens is, if I, a “Mexican-American” (I prefer just “American”, thank you very much) beat up a gay man, and while doing so, call him derogatory names in reference to his homosexuality, like “queer” or “faggot”, my punishment will be more severe. My targeting of his demographic for a crime makes my punishment more severe. There are difficulties with this.