The Christian Vanguard

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...

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 ...

The following is an essay I wrote for my British Empiricism class.  In order to understand Berkeley’s argument that sensible objects cannot exist unperceived, we first need to understand his ontology and how he understands “existence”. The objects of our knowledge, begins Berkeley, are either impressed upon the senses, or by perception of the passions or mind, or by memory and imagination. All these objects, no matter which mode they come by, will only be known to us by some kind of property, such as it is red, soft, and heavy. That is all that is known to us, and what is not known to us is the thing in themselves. When I describe my heavy red blanket, all I am really describing are my bundled perceptions of the thing, but there is a gap between my perceptions of the thing and the thing itself. So all I really have access to are perceptions. However, if there are no perceptions of a thing, then it cannot be said to exist. For Berkeley, to speak of something unperceived as exis...

This is a draft of my final essay for my Modern Philosophy class. In it, I look at Cartesian dualism and Cartesian skepticism from a Thomist view. Feedback welcome.