Steve Gimbel

Distinguishing necessary and sufficient conditions can be challenging to undergraduate logic and critical thinking students. Explaining J. L. Mackie’s notion of INUS conditions—insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions—is an even more difficult concept to understand. It is helpful to have memorable examples that not only clarify the concept, but make it easy to remember. Law student turned stand-up comedian Demetri Martin uses necessary, sufficient, and INUS conditions to construct absurdist jokes. These jokes provide effective tools for making Mackie’s notion understandable and memorable.

The National Football League, the premier professional organization for American football, developed a policy concerning the protocol in cases where players contract COVID-19. This policy includes elements such as collective punishment that appear, at first glance, to be morally problematic. To the contrary, the policy is indeed morally acceptable as we should not think of organizations such as the NFL in the same way we think of governments in stable nations, but rather in the same way that we think of hybrid justice systems in countries where because of histories of colonialism, the identity of citizens is divided, with tribal identities being more important than national citizenship.

Hans Reichenbach is one of the central figures in the debate concerning the epistemology of geometry. Reichenbach's mature geometric conventionalism, the view that there is no fact of the matter concerning a geometry of physical space, as expressed in The Philosophy of Space and Time is generally considered to be the view's most important formulation. This thesis re-interprets Reichenbach's later view in light of its broader context in Reichenbach's writings. The re-interpreted view is then shown to be immune from the standard objections leveled against Reichenbach in the current literature. ;Reichenbach's epistemology of geometry in his first book, Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge is expressly non-conventional. Reichenbach's argument is explicitly empiricist. Yet in his second book, Axiomatization of the Theory of Relativity, he is unabashedly conventionalist in his geometric epistemology. A central question in Reichenbach scholarship is to explain the shift in his view from empiricism to conventionalism that occurs between his first two books. ;The received view of Reichenbach's later conventionalism is that it stands in line with the views of Moritz Schlick, Albert Einstein, and Henri Poincare. Advocates of the received view therefore propose explanations in which Reichenbach is influenced by one of these figures and thereby abandons his previously held results. ;The foundation of this view is wrong. Reichenbach's mature geometric conventionalism is not that of Schlick, Einstein, and Poincare which is theory-independent, but is a theory-specific doctrine which arises from the "method of scientific analysis" which is sketched, but unfulfilled in Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge. This mistake throws all of the standard explanations into error. ;When previously untranslated works from the period 1921--1922 are considered, the true birth of Reichenbach's theory-specific geometric conventionality comes into focus. Different sorts of conventional arguments present themselves for Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, a result inconsisent with the standard view. ;Since the standard objections to Reichenbach are formulated against the standard interpretation of Reichenbach, this new theory-specific conventionalist doctrine finds itself unharmed by these arguments. The objections of Hilary Putnam and Clark Glymour are examined in detail

The epistemic foundation of Hellenic-Christian thought is based on a correspondence between thought and a single reality, but the epistemic foundation of Jewish thought stresses the creative act of perspectival interpretation of an absolute text. This stress on wisdom from extracting a multiplicity of contextualized understandings of an absolute can be seen in the writings of the great rabbis, but also in the work of Jerry Seinfeld. Where Talmudic thought takes as its basis, passages of the Torah as its source of truth to interpret, Seinfeld’s stand-up is neo-Talmudic in using a different source – phenomenological commonalty (our shared experience) – as its basis. The move from the stage to the small screen changed the comedy of Seinfeld as his eponymous television program now lampoons the sort of neo-Talmudic thought of his stand-up material just as the classic rabbis of Chelm jokes mock Talmudic thought.