Philosophy

Dan Herbatschek | Philosophy of Science Whenever we ask a big question, it quickly breaks down into smaller ones. What makes a science a science? is no exception. To answer it, we confront the problem...

Dan Herbatschek Søren Kierkegaard was a singular figure. Alongside Nietzsche, he stands as one of the two 19th-century roots of what would later grow into 20th-century existentialism. The two could not be more different—Kierkegaard...

Recognizing that it’s no easy task to pin down the essential features of science, let’s return to the story at hand. In Lecture Two we saw how a piece of Einstein’s general theory of...

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is probably the most controversial philosopher who has ever lived in the Western tradition. We will examine his ideas chronologically, from his early work on Greek tragedy to his excoriating criticisms...

What is a fact?  A fact is something made or done, which has a clear objective status. There are two basic types of facts: Things and Events. A thing is an existing entity e.g.TheWhiteHouse established by direct or indirect evidence. An event is...

A Historical Perspective We’ve completed our first pass through logical positivism, having paid special attention to the positivists’ doctrines of empirical meaning and of evidence. We’ve seen, in the positivists own attempts to explain and...

Probabilistic Statements The Bayesian approach considers probability statements as subjective, asserting that they represent one’s degrees of belief. It does not impose that one’s degrees of belief should align with frequencies. What Bayesianism requires is...

Incompleteness Mathematicians love simplicity. Back around 1900, their dream was to create a world of math that was cleanly split in two. True statements would all be provable from axioms. The false statements, none of them...