Thoughts on philosophical issues by a grad student who likes Hume (and Chinese philosophy)
We all want personal safety for ourselves, and also the safety of the people we care about. So, many of us believe in a heaven, where we and our loved ones will be protected against all harm. But suppose that there is no heaven. Then it seems that absolute safety is not for us mere mortals.
Mystics tend to believe otherwise. They believe that they can be absolutely safe come what may, Read the rest of this entry »
In “My Philosophical Development”, Bertrand Russell writes:
…I have always been deeply persuaded that, from a cosmic point of view, life and experience are causally of little importance. The world of astronomy dominates my imagination and I am very conscious of the minuteness of our planet in comparison with the systems of galaxies. I found in Ramsey’s Foundations of Mathematics a passage expressing what I do not feel: Read the rest of this entry »
While thinking of what blog name I should have, I noticed two interesting themes in blog names: self-referring names like What Is It Like to Be a Blog, This is the Name of This Blog, etc., and self-effacing names like Unpolished Jade, Obscure and Confused Ideas, and so on.
Not clever enough to think up a self-referring name, I decided to go with a self-effacing name. Read the rest of this entry »
