http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy What is philosophy anyway? Fri, 08 May 2009 18:54:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It was important to talk about my epistemology first because that sets the skeptical tone of my whole philosophy up to this point, but when I'm actually doing philosophy, everything comes back to metaphysics. It's the foundation off of which I build all my ideas. I think about reality in three ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/05/03/solidly-material/ We are finite, meaning we all have our unique hermeneutics position from which we view the world.  We can never hope to gain the view of the everyman. As such we must construct a subjective ethics.  This escapes relativism in that we are all united by our finitude.  Concerning morality, being ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/05/02/the-philosophy-of-james-keller-a-preview/ I enjoy the western approaches to philosophy both analytic and continental the most though they are also the ones most familiar to me.  Much like I do not enjoy the intuitionist's claim that classical mathematics doesn't really count as mathematics but is something else, I don't think the term philosophy ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/04/28/in-the-field/ It is my belief that as human knowledge progresses, questions in the area of philosophy will continue to get answered as the have been in the past thus ceasing to be in the area of philosophy. However I suppose you could say that I am an epistemological pessimist in that ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/04/28/where-philosophy-is-heading/ So I did not receive any financial aid for graduate school and subsequently will not be going next year.  This opens up numerous possibilities for the next few years.  I am certainly going to go to graduate school as there is much more I wish to study and the formal ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/04/28/onward-into-the-unknown/ He strolled over, hands in his pockets, and sat on the stairs near me while I tuned my guitar and we waited for rehearsal to begin. "So, Jillian," he said, all business but for the friendly upturned corner of his graying mustache, "what do you know?" Under normal circumstances I might have ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/04/26/hesitantly-skeptical/ I already gave an account of my intellectual journey in my post about why I became a philosophy major, but, conveniently, it mostly focused on the journey. Here I'll focus more on the intellectual part. Genesis In the beginning, I was Roman Catholic. Both of my parents come from Catholic families and ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/04/22/my-testament/ In ethical theory we read an excerpt from an essay of Bertrand Russell where he argues that the way to the good life is to not be self absorbed and to concern yourself with a wide array of interests.  This method apparently worked for him in is own life and ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/04/16/russells-ethic/ In the courses i have taken I feel that philosophy as conversation, the logical analysis of an argument, the explication of meaning, and conceptual analysis have been the most widely used methodologies. In Existentialism we took turns facilitating the class and part of this was to give a conceptual analysis of ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/04/14/methodologies/ I've now added categories for all of the assignments.  If you hover over the category name (on the main page), it gives a brief description of the assignment.  If you've written posts before a relevant category was created, please accept my apologies -- you can go back and add the ... http://blogs.stlawu.edu/metaphilosophy/2009/04/14/website-update/