Steve Patterson

Author: Steve Patterson

  • Defending Zeno’s Paradox

    Paradoxes don’t exist. But they can teach us something about our ideas. Whenever we discover a contradiction in our beliefs, we’re forced to make revisions. Paradoxes can help us elicit nestled contradictions in our worldview that we wouldn’t see otherwise.

    Some of the most famous and oldest paradoxes in the world are Zeno’s paradoxes. He came up with several, but I just want to focus on the most famous one.

    And defend it.

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  • Philosophy Versus Practicality

  • All is One: The Logical Case for Mysticism

    Rationality and mysticism are often seen as opposites. Rationalists use logic and Reason to make sense of the world, while mystics claim to transcend Reason by directly experiencing the “oneness of the universe”. Then, when asked to defend their position, mystics will claim that language is too limited and cannot convey the truths that they understand. Rationalists are left scratching their heads, unsatisfied and unpersuaded.

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  • You Are Going to Die; Live Accordingly

  • Against “Doing the Right Thing”

    I’ve never liked Ethics. To me, most ethical questions contain unexamined presuppositions and frame philosophical problems in the wrong way. A central question in Ethics is: for any given situation, what’s the “right thing to do”? Growing up in a Christian evangelical household, I heard this question a million times. But it’s a misleading question which causes more confusion than clarity.

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  • The Sliding Scale of Certainty

    A central question in philosophy is “Can we know anything with perfect certainty?” Throughout history, philosophers have disagreed on the answer. One popular response is to say “We can’t ever be completely certain – there’s a sliding scale of certainty. Things aren’t black and white, but rather, different shades of gray.” The scale goes from not-so-sure to very-sure-but-not-completely.

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