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A Solution to the Paradox of CausationPhilosophy in Science 8 (1): 81-182. 1997.It is shown (i) that causation exists, since we couldn't even ask whether causation existed unless it did; (ii) that any given case of causation is a case of persistence; and (iii) that spatiotemporal relations supervene on causal relations. (ii) is subject to the qualification that we tend not to become aware of instances of causation as such except when two different causal lines---i.e. two different cases of persistence---intersect, resulting in a breakdown of some other case of persistence, …Read more
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Skepticism in Relation to Disbelief in Personal FreedomFreud Institute. 2018.Granting that there is more substance to the idea that we lack freedom than there is to the idea we know nothing about the external world, neither idea has much substance; and the appeal of both ideas, especially of the latter—and doubly especially of the two taken in conjunction---is that they give bureaucrats an excuse to be bureaucrats—to be people who do not know anything and are therefore under no obligation to do anything.
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169Modern Philosophy as Rationalized BureaucratismFreud Institute. 2021.The modern philosophical establishment is a bureaucracy, and all of the philosophy it produces is an attempt to disguise (and legitimate) that fact.
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179Aggression is Frustrated Power-lustFreud Institute. 2020.A number of psychologists hold that aggression is a basic instinct, meaning that it is a primitive drive and therefore cannot be derived from, or decomposed into, other drives. The truth is that aggression is not a basic drive. Desire for power is a basic drive, and aggression is what results when that desire is frustrated.
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Who does psychoanalysis help?Freud Institute. 2018.It helps non-bureaucrats and doesn't help bureaucrats.
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4078Kant's Arguments for God's ExistenceFreud Institute. 2020.A clear and concise exposition and critique of Kant's arguments for God's existence
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Economics in an HourFreud Institute. 2020.The truly important parts of economics without the usual fluff. Each point is followed by a brief multiple-choice quiz, ensuring that knowledge is sealed in.
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162Religion and the Limits of Modern RationalismFreud Institute. 2021.Religion is shown to be distinct from both rationalism and spiritualism but to combine elements of both. It is further shown that modern rationalism, much like an unregulated economy, collapses into its own antithesis, it being one of the purposes of religion to prevent this collapse.
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Boringness as Camouflage for Pseudo-scholarsFreud Institute. 2018.Sometimes, when a given person and/or his scholarly work are boring, it is intentional: that person is deliberately being boring so that nobody bothers to scrutinize, or therefore discover, the emptiness of either him or his work.
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Natural Law as Divine Rationality : Kant’s Conception of GodPhilosophypedia. 2020.The essence of Kant’s conception of God is that God is constitutively, as opposed to causally, responsible for spatiotemporal existence: God is responsible for the world not by creating it but by grounding it. And, so Kant holds, God grounds it by virtue of being identical with it (or, more precisely, with its noumenal substrate: see below), with the qualification that, in being identical with it, he infuses it with his own rationality, this being manifested as natural law.
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269Religion and the Limits of Modern RationalismPhilosophypedia. 2020.Religion is shown to be distinct from both rationalism and spiritualism but to combine elements of both. It is further shown that modern rationaiism, much like an unregulated economy, collapses into its own antithesis, it being one of the purposes of religion to prevent this collapse.
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4Nietzsche on Slave Morality and Master Morality: Good Psychology, Bad SociologyPhilosophypedia. 2021.Nietzsche distinguishes between “slave morality” (the morality of the weak) and “master morality” (the morality of the strong), and he believes the structure of modern society to be rooted in slave morality. According to Nietzsche, slave morality is the morality of modern “bourgeois” (commerce-based) society, whereas “master morality” was the morality of ancient caste-based societies. In this paper, I argue for the legitimacy of the distinction between these two kinds of morality but argue again…Read more
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138Do I know that my chair won’t sprout wings and fly away? I know that it would be needlessly anomaly-generative to believe that it will. Setting aside limiting-cases, such as my knowledge that I am conscious, what we refer to as knowing that such-and-such is really knowledge that it would be needlessly anomaly-generative to believe otherwise. Consequently, what we typically refer to knowing that such-and-such is the case is really meta-knowledge to the effect that granting such-and-such eliminate…Read more
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242What is JusticePhilosophypedia. 2020.According to Rawls, a just society is one that one would choose to belong to if one knew nothing as to what one's position in that society would be and if one knew nothing as to one's gender, ethnicity, intelligence-level, or other such status-relevant parameters. Such a society would be a squalid bureaucratic wasteland, similar to the Soviet Union, and its entire structure would be a weapon for the mediocre to hold back the gifted, with the result that people as a whole, including the mediocre,…Read more
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1599The Myth of Borderline Personality DisorderFreud Institute. 2020.Borderline Personality Disorder is female privilege. It is to be understood primarily in political terms, and only secondarily in psychoanalytic terms.
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603Review of Reimer & Bezuidenhout (2004): Descriptions and Beyond (review)Pragmatics and Cognition 14 (1): 196-204. 2006.In order to understand a sentence, one must know the relevant semantic rules. Those rules are not learned in a vacuum; they are given to one through one's senses. As a result, knowledge of semantic rules sometimes comes bundled with semantically irrelevant, but cognitively non-innocuous, knowledge of the circumstances in which those rules were learned. Thus, one must work through non-semantic information in order to know what is literally meant by a given sentence-token. A consequence is that on…Read more
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879Education has to go digital, and this will involve a lot more than just on-lining brick-and-mortar classes. Also, the process of doing this will be real epistemology, as in, it will involve people doing epistemology, instead of just impotently and unoriginally talking about it.
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281¿Qué es el conocimiento? [What is Knowledge?]College Papers Plus. 2020.Una guía concisa de epistemología moderna.
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Jesus vs. Socrates: Religious vs. Secular PerspectivesFreud Institute. 2020.This short work puts forth two answers to the question: In what ways are Jesus and Socrates similar? One of these answers is put forth by a Christian and embodies a deeply Christian perspective, and the other is put forth by two non-Christians, working jointly, and embodies a decidedly secular perspective. The question was first raised by the Christian author.
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859Plato's Theory of Forms and Other PapersCollege Papers Plus. 2020.Easy to understand philosophy papers in all areas. Table of contents: Three Short Philosophy Papers on Human Freedom The Paradox of Religions Institutions Different Perspectives on Religious Belief: O’Reilly v. Dawkins. v. James v. Clifford Schopenhauer on Suicide Schopenhauer’s Fractal Conception of Reality Theodore Roszak’s Views on Bicameral Consciousness Philosophy Exam Questions and Answers Locke, Aristotle and Kant on Virtue Logic Lecture for Erika Kant’s Ethics Van Cleve on Episte…Read more
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886OCD and Philosophy: Short Papers on OCD, Psychopathy, and PsychopathologyJ.-M. Kuczynski. 2019.Short papers on OCD, philosophy, psychopathy, psychopathology generally, and their interrelations.
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184The Economics of Higher Education in the 21st CenturyFreud Institute. 2019.In the first part of this two-part work, the economics of higher education are explained. It is made clear how a university’s business model differs from that of a company that has to compete on the open market. On this basis, it is explained: (i)Why universities are in no way threatened by low retention-rates and graduation-rates; (ii)Why universities cannot significantly improve or otherwise alter the quality of their educational services without imperiling their very existences; (iii)Why u…Read more
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528Literal Meaning & Cognitive ContentFreud Institute. 2015.In this work, it is shown that given a correct understanding of the nature of reference and of linguistic meaning generally, it is possible to produce non-revisionist analyses of the nature of *Perceptual content, *Mental content generally, *Logical equivalence, *Logical dependence generally, *Counterfactual truth, *The causal efficacy of mental states, and *Our knowledge of ourselves and of the external world. In addition, set-theoretic interpretations of several semantic concepts are put f…Read more
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377Ninety Paradoxes of Philosophy and PsychologyFreud Institute. 2018.Solutions to ninety paradoxes, some old, some new.
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Zero-sum ContextsFreud Institute. 2017.A context that is not expanded by the intelligence within it---that is only internally articulated by that intelligence---is a zero-sum context and is therefore not worth being in.
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The Mind as Double-fractalFreud Institute. 2017.How a person is on the inside replicates how he is on the outside—so he is a fractal in that sense. And how he is in little matters replicates how he is in big ones—so he is a fractal in that sense as well. And so it is that a person’s identity has a doubly fractal structure.
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Institutional Psychopathy in Relation to the Fractal Character of InstitutionsFreud Institute. 2017.It is shown that institutions are fractals, meaning that are structurally the same as their parts, and that for this reason liberal institutions are quicker than conservative institutions to decay into a condition of abject psychopathy.
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An Illustration of the Fractal Character of InstitutionsFreud Institute. 2017.The behavior of individuals who compose an institution tends to mirror the behavior of that institution as a whole. This short work illustrates this principle.
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Counterentropic Systems Have a Fractal StructureFreud Institute. 2017.A system is counterentropic to the extent that it has a fractal structure and entropic to the extent that it doesn't.
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1Why Star Trek was Such a Good Show: A Freudian AnalysisFreud Institute. 2018.Freud divided people in three libidinal types: narcissist (doer), obsessional (thinker), and libidinal (lover). Kirk (narcissist), Spock (obsessional) and McCoy (libidinal) complemented each other, giving the show depth and balance.
University of California, Santa Barbara
PhD, 2006
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |