I’m a student who loves and pursues creativity. Creativity—the ability to synthesize the novel from the known in the magical process of convergent thinking—is my passion. Being able to contribute a unique mark to the world’s collective knowledge is no small feat! I guess I could call myself an artist, then, a term who I …
A Dilettante’s Take on Focus, Achievement, and Creativity Read More »
This paper illustrates a series of debates among realism, anti-realism and structural realism to decide whether one should believe that it is possible at all to discover any truth through science. First, it defines realism and anti-realism and shows pure realism can be “surely untenable” (149 Worrall). Second, it presents structural realism, a fusion of …
Duke is always beautiful. But at twilight, it becomes magical. Still groggy from my afternoon nap, I grabbed my dad’s old 35mm film camera and made a beeline for the gardens. It was a perfect time to capture the overwhelming beauty of the campus in the gloaming. It was also an opportune moment for mindfulness. …
To avoid defining thinking, which is a challenging task, Alan Turing proposes a new question—can machines do what humans (thinking entities) do?—to answer the original question. He believes humans decide whether others think by judging others’ behaviors. He ignores cognition and focuses only on behaviors to test whether machines can think. If machines demonstrate thinking …
Every Wednesday night, a few dozen faithful, free-food loving Duke students descend on a welcoming refuge from the stress of college life: Jazz @ The Mary Lou. This uber-casual, late-night jam session is run by professional jazz musicians here at the University, although guests are encouraged to BYO Saxophone and join in on the fun. …
According to Kant’s notion of categorical judgment, subject gives us the notion of a substance, which is the absolute subject of predication and not a property/predicate of anything else. Descartes argues that because one thinks, one is a thinking substance. His logic is that since “I” is the absolute subject of all judgments, the predicate …
In her First and Last Notebooks, French socialist philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil writes: “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She adds in the enduring classic Gravity and Grace that “ [a]bsolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little …
Descartes has argued that <God> contains <existence> as a property, so God must exist. If one claims that God does not exist, it is a logical contradiction because it is saying that God does not contain <existence> as a property. Because it is a logical contradiction to claim God doesn’t exist, God must exist. Kant …
What’s the Difference Between the Concept of a Thing and a Real Object? Read More »
I never wanted to be that guy – the one who can’t hold a conversation without bringing up the latest and greatest podcast that he’s listened to. But that’s exactly what I’m going to do. In case you were wondering, my blog’s namesake is a not-so-subtle nod at my favorite podcast, On Being. A fixture …
Hypothetical judgment is under the relation category according to Kant. The logical form of hypothetical judgment is independent of the content and consists of a proposition and a consequence. To form a hypothetical judgment, one starts out with two propositions (P and Q). After one applies the logical form of hypothetical judgment to them, they …
