Raymond Smullyan's Knight and Knave Word Problem

• April 24, 2005
• James Skemp

According to David Gries (via his site), logician Raymond Smullyan stated the following word problem in one of his many books, which regards lying knaves and truthful knights.

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English language books by or on Arthur Schopenhauer

• February 2, 2005
• James Skemp

If you’re going to read more on Arthur Schopenhauer, I suggest you start with his main works, followed by other primary resources (id est, books written by him), followed by secondary resources.

For ease, I’ve compiled a list of books currently available to the English language reader. Obviously, if you can read German, it makes little sense to purchase any of the translations, since the language the work was written in is better suited for Schopenhauer’s original thoughts.

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Should Doctors Always Tell Patients the Truth?

• December 31, 2004
• James Skemp

Looking through an old philosophy anthology, Biomedical Ethics: Fifth Edition, I found and read On Lying to Patients, by Mack Lipkin. After reading this piece, I was again made to realize how much I dislike ethics. While Lipkin sets out to give us a theory, or method, he leaves us with more questions than answers. For this article, I would like to discuss whether doctors have an ethical obligation to tell the truth to their patients.

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On Humour at Another's Expense

• October 25, 2004
• James Skemp

Have you ever visited Cliff Yablonski Hates You on SomethingAwful.com? For those of you have not, maybe you'll want to take a look, maybe you won't. Google it if you'd like to see it for yourself (or just browse Something Awful), or read on. One of the easiest kinds of humour is the kind at the expense of another. Honestly, it's funny to see someone suffer some kind of hardship or accident.

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Jen

• October 21, 2004
• James Skemp

Jen: I have lived for six moments, each longer than the last.

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What are the futures of those illusions Freud?

• September 26, 2004
• James Skemp

Notes: While primarily based upon The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents may have crept into this discussion. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, seeing as how the latter is a sequel of the former, but if you have not read the latter, some of the ideas here may be new to you. Sigmund Freud tells us, near the end of the work, that “the sole purpose” of The Future of an Illusion is point out the necessity of man surmounting infantilism.

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On the Saying 'God is Odd'

• September 17, 2004
• James Skemp

Listen to On the Saying 'God is Odd' (MP3 format). An old and popular saying states that ‘God is odd’. But is there any validity to this claim? This article shows that there is indeed validity and truth to this claim. God consists, or is equal to the addition, of three characters; ‘G’, ‘o’, and ‘d’. If a number is not evenly divisible by two, that number is odd. Three divided by two is one-and-one-half, therefore three is not evenly divisible by two.

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Overview of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy

• September 3, 2004
• James Skemp

René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy consists of three parts; a preface to the reader, a synopsis, and the six mediations themselves.  Heralded as the first ‘modern’ thinker in philosophy, Descartes introduces the problem encompassed by ‘dualism’: how is it that mind and body can interact with each other?  Descartes also questions how it is that we can know reality.  While the quick answer is through our senses, depending upon our senses opens us up to questions of how we know that our senses are correct.

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On Mohandas and Arun Gandhi's Blunders of the World

• August 16, 2004
• James Skemp

Any indented text is my own regarding the particular blunder outlined above.  The rest of the text is Arun Gandhi’s. Mohandas K. Gandhi was convinced much of the violence in society and in our personal lives stems from the passive violence that we commit against each other. He described these acts of passive violence as the "Seven Blunders." Grandfather gave me the list in 1947 just before we left India to return to South Africa where my father, Manilal, Gandhi's second son, and my mother, Sushila, worked for nonviolent change.

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Heidegger's Principle of Reason Lectures

• June 17, 2004
• James Skemp

The reason I picked up Martin Heidegger's The Principle of Reason was quite simple - having read Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation and agreed with many of his points, I attempt to further my knowledge of his principles as much as possible. While Heidegger doesn't mention Schopenhauer a single time in his thirteen Lectures, nor in his Address, Schopenhauer certainly discusses the Principle of Reason, pulling off of Leibniz, and is therefore a blatant oversight of Heidegger's to not mention Schopenhauer at all. Whether this is unintentional one cannot know from simply the text, but for a German philosopher to not know another German philosopher who covered the same content is quite surprising, to say the very least.

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