December 2023

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646-1716) view that this world is the best of the possible worlds God could have created. The claim was advanced as the argument of Leibniz’s theodicy, his…

A psychological state usually characterized as a disposition to assent to a certain proposition (the intentional object of the belief) or otherwise act as though that proposition were true. In…

Plato’s realm of reality, contrasted with the realms of appearance and becoming, is being, the realm of eternal and immutable Forms. More generally, the term “being” is used by philosophers…

A theory of mind in which features of an individual’s mental states are inferred from what is publicly observable. https://youtube.com/shorts/I1cNTvIgLkM?feature=share

An informal fallacy, begging the question occurs when the arguer assumes the very claim they intend to prove. For instance: “God exists because the Bible, which comes from God, says…

In Plato, the world of appearance is the world of becoming—coming to be and passing away —that characterizes our daily experience. https://youtube.com/shorts/d12xAotPn9Y?feature=share

Named after Thomas Bayes (1701?-1761), Bayes’s Theorem describes how to update belief in the likelihood of an event, given the occurrence of evidence relevant to that event. While Bayes’s Theorem…

The refusal to accept responsibility for one’s freedom and, therefore, also for one’s choices. The term comes from the twentieth-century existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. https://youtube.com/shorts/U0965UIQpjU?feature=share