The Christian Vanguard

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 ...

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...