PHI304 Blog -- Jacob Robinson

Truth is Faith In a sense I can agree that a belief in truth ties directly into faith; not religious faith, but rather the faith that what you believe is true is actually true. We cannot certify that anything is 100% certain, we can only increase the probability of it being certain by lowering the amount of assumptions we make about it. The remaining piece of this, however, has to be ascertained with the faith of believing that, based on probability (or perhaps something else, depending on the person), it is in fact certain. How much does being right matter? It depends, both on what you’re being right about as well as what actually matters. Since my background is in Finance, I’ll give a related example: say you’re buying a big bet on a stock going up. You’d want to be right on this simply based on the fact that, if you are right, you make a ton of money, and if you are wrong, you lose a ton of money. However, money and trading isn’t everything to everyone, and in this cas...

[Just realized I've been erroneously refering to these posts as days instead of weeks. Whoops.] Existential Slavery I feel personally as though this falls into the idea of determinism, or at least determinism in the sense in which I define it. Some background: I believe free will vs fate is more of a battle between what you can do versus what society and nature deem you ought to do. In some cases it makes more sense to follow in line with how things should be, and other times it is best to break out and go a new path. Existential Slavery I believe is defined as the chains in which society and your own mindset hold you to, and so I believe this is an apt comparison. Degrees of Slavery ·         Physical Slavery – actually shackled and forced to do physical work o    Examples: Transatlantic Slave Trade, USSR Gulag Laborers ·         Mental Slavery – trapped into a situation via various psy...

Types of Suicide   Depressive Self Sacrifice Euthanasia As of right now, I can’t particularly think of any other cases in which suicide would occur; it would seem to me that these three are our main categories when we discuss the act of suicide. I’ll try to keep all three of these in mind when we discuss our next few topics within this post. Reason and Ego One of the things I gained from this last session was the concept of their being a level of ego needed to ask for a reason to live. This is really fascinating to me; we as humans are the only real animals in the known universe to have the ability to think abstractly, which means we are the only animals who can think of things in an existential nature. Because of this, all other animals within our world go about their business without the need to beg for some higher power to give them a purpose. We, as humans, are the only ones with this dependence. That being said, you could then go on to make the argument th...