The Based Life

Descartes objective in his Meditations on First Philosophy is an epistemological task to ground knowledge in what can be known as absolutely certain i.e. that which can not be doubted. Descartes rather than evaluating his beliefs one by one strikes at the core of that which is necessary in order to be able to come to judgements in the first place, he states “I will attack straightaway those principles which supported everything I once believed” (Descartes, 60). One of these preconditions being that of sensory experiences, if he finds sufficient reason to doubt the truth validity of his senses, he must therefore doubt every belief which has been predicated on the certainty of his sensory experiences. The task Descartes embarks upon in his first meditation therefore is to doubt whether we can trust our senses. This is done through an argument based upon our experiences of dreams. Descartes observes that there is not enough sufficient differences between our experiences in the real world...

Reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy I stumbled across a section which reminded me of the importance of Ernest Becker's later work regarding the role of heroic culture as a means to deny finite existence i.e. death. We can find the origins of the denial of death  in Greek society when king Midas asks the wise Silenus what was the best of all and most desirable of man. The demon laughing responded:  Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to say to you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is the best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die The Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence, in Becker's words the finitude of existence with all the pain and suffering involved, in order to be able to confront these terrors what the Greeks did was to come up with a mechanism in order to deny their meaningless existe...

Chapter 5: Property and Power section 5.13 The textbook gives an example with West Bengal in which the distribution of the crop used to be distributed 50% for the farmers who worked on the land of the landowners and the other 50% for the landowners, a system that had been in place since the 18th century (basically feudalism). The problem was that the peasants lived in miserable conditions, understandable, so what the government did was pass a law where the farmers got 75% of the crop and could not get evicted by the landowners,  Operation Barga , the textbook claims that this was the reason total output shot up 28% in the region which is something I am not going to dispute. The textbook claims this was a great achievement and increased the amount of  output  the farmers received as well as  income ,  even the World Bank endorsed this policy for economic development .  Now you may be asking, why are you mad? do you hate poor people? and the answer, to the la...

Determinism is the view that human action, derived from thought, is determined by the laws of nature. Libertarianism is the view that free will is incompatible with determinism but don't worry determinism is false so everything is cool. Now to me it seems as if the entire debate is really about answering the question:  are my thoughts,  assuming the cogito ergo sum is true, that I am my thoughts, and my thoughts are me,  determined by the laws of causality . If determinism holds true, if we take the Universe at the beginning of time when the Universe we live in was merely the size of a dot on a piece of paper, we could theoretically use the Laws of Nature (LoN) to work out, even though its very complicated, what I am going to decide tomorrow to eat for lunch.  If this turns out to be true then Inwagens proof that Determinism and Free Will are incompatible holds true. If determinism holds true the Universe at Time 0 and Place 0 entails, and can only entail, the result...

Meditations on Moral Theory For the past few days I have been reflecting on the nature of the foundations of different moral theories, for some reason I couldn't put my finger on the arbitrariness of each theory, it seemed as each one had sound arguments and could work within a given society. After some discussions and further reflection I believe I was able to finally grasp what my issue was with the foundations of all moral theory: the foundation of every moral theory requires  faith. Faith is required for either: to believe that the presupposition is true within itself, without further demonstration or if with further demonstration, that the method of arriving to the conclusion is  the correct way to arrive at the moral maxim warning: my knowledge regarding moral theory isn't very extensive so it is most likely I will commit some mistake.  This foundation I will call the presupposition of faith , from this presupposition every moral theorist can ...