What is emergentism? My answer is that it is a big word for a not-so-big concept. Emergentism is simply the idea that the sum is greater than the parts. The common example goes: But who cares about water. This idea can be applied to so many things, like the table you are leaning on or Read more

I present in this article three conflicting views about how the world is made. Each view is plausible; however, some are more so than others. While Leibniz and Spinoza were 17th-century rationalists, the anthropic principle is relatively newer. As you can probably imagine, the older theories rely more on God/theology, while the anthropic principle is Read more

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” According to 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley, it most certainly does not. At first glance, idealism—or the concept that reality is made up of mind or consciousness—seems straight out of a fantasy book. In Read more

Like so many great thinkers, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was largely unknown and unpopular. His greatest work, The World as Will and Representation, was developed as both a continuation and critique of the works of his predecessor, Immanuel Kant. If you haven’t already read my article on Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, it might be helpful Read more

Tool is an alternative metal band that I’ve loved since 8th grade. One of my favorite tracks by them (after “Jambi” and “Sober”) is “Pneuma”, an 11 minute and 53 second behemoth of a song. For some backstory, “Pneuma” is the second track off Tool’s fifth studio album Fear Inoculum—their first album since 2006.  A Read more

Exploration is our duty. Inside each of us is the astronomer staring up at the sky, pondering if celestial beings lay above. Inside each of us is the man on the frontier, slogging his wagon on its rusty axle across swamp and mountain, through sleet and desert. In the common day, these men are relics Read more

This is the second part of a two-part series focused on personal-identity—what it is and how we can define it. In the first article, we recapped that identity cannot be tied to something merely physical, and therefore there must be some mental component that engages in the construction of the personal identity. We also covered, Read more

In this article, I’d like to talk about an interesting topic in contemporary philosophy. Let’s dive right in. Who are we? Some answers someone may throw out are: While descriptive, none of these answers prove sufficient for the question. I asked what we are, not how we relate to other people. We are only brothers Read more

As I covered yesterday, scientists and philosophers alike struggle broadly to define a conception of the relationships between consciousness and the world. Materialism, or the theory that mental processes arise from purely physical elements, has been widely critiqued. Likewise, mind-body dualism, similar to what Descartes radically proposed in the 17th century, deals with its own Read more

We all know the feeling. You have homework due the next day, but you’ve been binging Stranger Things on Netflix. You know that you have to complete your homework, and that there are tangible consequences if you don’t, yet you still decide to watch Stranger Things. Why? You seem to be acting irrationally, but you Read more

If you’re anything like me, the classic free will/determinism debate was the thing that drew you into philosophy. I wrote my first-ever philosophy paper about the debate, but I can’t read it now because it’s logically incoherent. However, I’m glad that I wrote that first paper. It provided a raw analysis of what my gut Read more

After proving with the Evil Demon thought experiment that his thoughts were the only things that he could be certain of, Descartes extrapolated the concept against the Monists. If Descartes could only be sure of the existence of his mind, how could his mind and body be one? It did not make sense, which led Read more

Physicalism is the somewhat outdated theory that everything we do or experience can be reduced down to physical components. The physicalist would believe that consciousness can be explained purely through physical matters. In other words, there is no mental component accompanying consciousness. An important term in the this discussion is what philosophers refer to as Read more

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—  I took the one less traveled by And that has made all the difference Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” Intro Life is essentially a long string of decisions. We do not choose where we are born, what we look like, or how we are raised. Despite Read more

The Prussian Immanuel Kant was a groundbreaking philosopher. Kant’s metaphysics was monumental in that it provided system of thought that bridged the gap between the combating views of his time. Metaphysics-wise, my best interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism is that it mixed the views of the empiricists, who thought that the only perception of the Read more