Zach's Strange Corner of Thought
You Made A Wrong Turn Awhile Back!
From aphorism 109 of the book The Gay Science by Friedrick Nietzsche.
Citations: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. “Let us be on our Guard!” The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1974, aphorism 109.
Help out the channel by purchasing this book through this Amazon link. Buy here.
The words of a madman:
God is dead!
God remains dead!
And WE have killed him!
Help out the channel by purchasing this book through this Amazon link. Buy here!
Citations:
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. “The Madman.” The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1974, aphorism 125.
How do we determine whether a theory is scientific or not? What gives science the credibility and authority that it commands? In philosophy of science, this is called the demarcation problem: how do we demarcate between science & pseudoscience. Some philosophers believed if you could find confirmations of your theory, then it must be true. But, philosopher Karl Popper proposed a different method. Instead of trying to find more confirmations of our theories, we should be doing everything we can to FALSIFY OUR THEORIES, BIIIITCH!!!
Help out the channel by purchasing these books through the Amazon links below.
Sources:
Popper, Karl Raimund. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge, 2002. Buy here.
Einstein, Albert. Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition by Albert Einstein. Translated by Robert W. Lawson, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1961. Buy here.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, Barnes & Noble, New York, NY, 2005. Buy here.
UPDATE: Because Nihilism means that nothing has meaning anymore, I’ve decided to say fuck calendars, it’s November Nihilism for as long as I want.
Announcing November Nihilism. This month I will be focusing on videos, essays, and journalism that analyzes nihilism, or a willing-towards-nothing.
I will heavily rely on the philosophy of Friedrick Nietzsche, which is always freakin awesome.
Here’s a sneak peak of what to expect:
Also, all TL;DR philosophy #shorts for this month will be profoundly EVIL!
Check out the Too Long; Don’t Read philosophy Playlist:
Help pay my billz yo:
PayPal
Cash App: $ZacharyGittrich
Become a monthly contributor. Support our work on Patreon.
Both philosophers Martin Heidegger and Rudolph Carnap wanted to see metaphysics destroyed, but they had very different ways of going about this. In 1929, Heidegger gave a speech entitled “What is Metaphysics?” Three years later, Carnap wrote an essay called “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language” attacking Heidegger’s speech as meaningless mumbo-jumbo. Heidegger never responded, but we can imagine what might of happened if they swung philosophical swords against each other.
Logic is a field which studies truth and the basic rules which govern thought. This is done by positing an argument made up of a number of reasons or premises that supports a conclusion. What is the difference between deductive & inductive reasoning? What are some of their flaws?
Deductive Examples:
P1: All humans are puny mortals.
P2: Philip Jose Farmer is a human.
C: Therefore, Philip Jose Farmer is a puny mortal.
Inductive Examples:
P1. The last time I bought from this dealer, I believe they gave me below quality product.
P2. This dealer has a high level of shadyness, over level 9000!
P3. My friend claims this dealer robbed him.
C: Therefore, I will not purchase illegal substance from my neighborhood drug dealer.
P1-P100: This swan is white. (1, 2, 3, 4… 100)
C: Therefore, All swans are white.
Last time, we looked at the sense & reference of unreal objects like the Present Emperor of China. Of course, there is no Present Emperor of China, so any statement using the denoting phrase the Present Emperor of China is necessarily false. But, this leads to the possibility that sense & reference might be the same thing, since definite descriptions of unreal objects seem to have no sense and can’t be used truthfully in a sentence. This led Philosopher Bertrand Russell to declare that sense is superfluous and only referents are meaningful.
So, is sense superfluous as Russell says? Or, can sense be rescued beyond the shackles of the nominatum? In this video, we look at a critique of Russell’s reductionism provided by P.F. Strawson.
Bertrand Russell voiced by Alexander Moneypenny.
Music sampled from Zoë Blade.
Works Cited:
Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting (1905).” The Philosophy of Language, edited by Aloysius Martinich, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 203–211.
Strawson, P.F. “On Referring (1950).” The Philosophy of Language, edited by Aloysius Martinich, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 219–234.
