Adding philosophical depth to anything and everything
A colleague recently suggested to me that Immanuel Kant’s categories of understanding could be described as algorithms that organize sense data. An algorithm, the someone said, is defined as “a procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation” (2003 […]
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Beethoven and Philosophy Many people are not aware of the fact that Beethoven’s tremendous musical innovation was in part influenced by the incredible innovation occurring in German philosophy at that time. Beethoven knew several members of the German Idealist movement and corresponded with them. German Idealism was an early 19th […]
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Intelligence is not thinking you know everything without questioning, but questioning everything you think you know. This is not the same as skepticism. It is not questioning that knowledge is possible, it is question whether I have knowledge. As Descartes wrote in his Meditations, what we need to keep in […]
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During a lecture, the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that although a double negative in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. To which Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser responded in a dismissive tone,
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