Fighting the Gravity of Vice: An Essay on Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth Dwight Goodyear Introduction (Spoiler Alert) The cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) is one of my favorite films. It was directed… Read more ›
Directions for making an anamorphic projection from Jean-Francois Niceron’s La Perspective Curieuse (1652) Introduction I recently realized that some of the most powerful lessons I have encountered in philosophy share a dynamic which can be elucidated with the help of… Read more ›
A scientific theory must give rise to a testable hypothesis. If someone has, for example, a scientific theory about how COVID-19 can be eradicated then we would expect that theory to offer us ways we can test it and prove or disprove… Read more ›
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty nine seconds while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street. His death, and many other… Read more ›
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty nine seconds while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street. His death, and many other… Read more ›
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty nine seconds while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street. His death, and many other… Read more ›
The law of identity states that each thing is identical to itself and can be represented as A=A. Snow, for example, has a set of characteristics that make snow what it is. The law says that snow, by having these characteristics… Read more ›
I just came across an interesting and, as far as I know, original argument why matter is infinite from Edgar Allan Poe. The argument takes place in the course of a very philosophical and haunting dialogue he wrote called “The… Read more ›
Fake news can be defined as “a form of news consisting of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional news media (print and broadcast) or online social media” (Wikipedia). Many people are understandably expressing their concern, even panic, over not knowing how to… Read more ›
In January of 1972 BBC Two broadcasted a four episode television series called Ways of Seeing written and presented by John Berger (1926-2017). The series was subsequently adapted into the book Ways of Seeing which was published in 1973. Both… Read more ›
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 It is March 21, 2020 and the coronavirus is a pandemic threatening everyone on Earth. In my relative isolation of social distancing, I have had more time to read and I was drawn to a tale… Read more ›
In earlier posts I briefly presented both St. Augustine’s (see here) and Leibniz’s (see here) arguments for God from eternal truth. Since I find this underrepresented approach to demonstrating God’s existence both fascinating and promising, I decided to present my… Read more ›
Those of us who believe in the truth typically accept contingent truths or, to use possible worlds semantics, truths that are true in some worlds and false in others. For example, the sentence ‘Dwight Goodyear was born in 1970’ expresses a… Read more ›
Our experiences of beauty and duty appear to be very different. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in his book Critique of Judgment, argued that judgments of the beautiful must be “disinterested.” This means that we make these judgments (1) without concern for the truth; (2) without… Read more ›
Obviously one of the most important general and fundamental questions is: What is truth? This is a difficult question—if only because we tend to assume a certain conception of the truth as we look for the truth about the truth!… Read more ›