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4___________Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody
Euwan Kim
6___________Is time as we think of it logical?
Dora Woodruff
8___________Lord of the Flies: What does it all mean? Emma Jones 10___________Emotivism and Morality
Becca Siegel
12___________The Wall: Album Analysis
Emma Jones
14___________Immanuel Kant: An Introduction 16___________A History of Toothpaste 17___________An Atheist’s God 19___________Hilary Putnam: A Tribute
Euwan Kim Neal Tolunsky
Teddy Rashkover Noah Phillips Table&of&Contents & 2& !
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A Brief Note from the Editor The second issue of the philosophical magazine 42 is, I think, as exciting and thought provoking as the last. I hope the reader (whoever that is) will enjoy it. Album and song analyses, religious musings, the unreality of time, Lord of the Flies, the nature of morality, great philosophers, toothpaste‌what more could one ask for? Neal Tolunsky Chief Editor-in-Chief Alex Chang Another Great Editor Enjoy this zebra I’m using to fill up the rest of the page:
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Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody by Euwan Kim Bohemian Rhapsody was written by Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the popular 70’s British rock band, Queen. The song was released on Halloween in 1975, in the band’s fourth album, A Night at the Opera. To this day, the song’s context still remains a mystery. When asked about the story behind the lyrics, Mercury revealed nothing except that they relate to relationships. The interpretation outlined in this article is only one of many that were shared by fans, band members, and those close to Mercury. Freddie Mercury was born on September 5, 1946 in Tanzania into a Zoroastrian family. In 1964, his family was forced out of Zanzibar due to government upheaval and moved to England. Around the time when the song was being written, Mercury was revealing his bisexuality and coming to terms with his shaky relationship with the love of his life, Mary Austin. The song may incorporate several of Mercury’s childhood traumas and hardships, especially his relationship with Mary Austin. The second stanza, in which Mercury recounts “killing a man”, may be referring to “killing” his past self. The stanza might be referring to his desertion of his identity and emergence as a new individual with a different sexuality. However, as can be seen in the song, this transition was a difficult point of soul-searching that would shape the rest of Mercury’s life. Mercury ends the stanza, “I don’t want to die. I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all”, shining light on his remorse for the sudden arduous turn his life took and his relationship with himself. It is well-known that there are several religious references within the song, especially to the Quran. Mercury wasn’t actively religious after his childhood, but during hard times, he may have called upon his religious
past to come to terms with his difficulties. In several instances during the song, other members of the band repeatedly shout “bismallah”, which directly translates to “in the name of Allah”. Every time they sing “bismallah”, the phrase “we will not let you go - let me go” follows. This can be interpreted as Mercury’s “pleas” to his god, asking why his destiny had been tied this way. Mercury also adds in the same stanza, “Beelzebub has put aside a devil for me”, adding another layer of desperation reflected in his life. This stanza in particular can reveal Mercury’s relationship with his religion.
There is one stanza in the song that can be directly connected to Mercury’s breaking relationship with Mary Austin. Austin was Mercury’s longtime friend and his beloved. Their relationship lasted for twenty years, and when Mercury died from AIDS in 1991, she inherited his multi-million dollar fortune. However, while Mercury was revealing his sexuality, their sturdy relationship had started to become shaky. There is no doubt that Austin would have been shocked by Mercury’s reveal, and that might have contributed to the end of their relationship. In the second to last stanza of the song, Mercury sings, “So you think you can love me and leave me to die...Oh baby can't do this to me baby. Just gotta get out…” These verses could Queen:&Bohemian&Rhapsody& 4&
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be hinting at the tensions between Mercury and Austin during those tremulous last years. Just as he had started in the first stanza, Mercury ends the song with the line “anyway the wind blows�. Perhaps this can be
understood that despite the tumultuous drama occurring in his life at that time, the band was still performing well, people were still buying their albums in bulk, and life outside was continuing to move forwards.
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Is time as we think of it logical? by Dora Woodruff We deal with concepts of time every day: C period starts at 10:20; you’ll need two hours to complete your homework; you’re meeting with your teacher in fifteen minutes; or your library book is a week overdue. Our entire social structure is formed around the concept of time. But does our concept of time even make sense? J. M. E. McTaggart, a philosopher who lived from 1866 to 1925, argued that it doesn’t, and that time as we know it is logically contradictory. His argument can be divided into sections. First, he defines two ways of measuring time, and calls them the A series and B series (which I will explain later). Next, he argues that time cannot only be described in terms of the B series, and requires the A series as well. Finally, he argues that the A series is contradictory, and since time can only be described in terms of the A and B series, not just the B series, there is something inherently illogical with the way we describe time.
Well, how do we define time? McTaggart says that time appears as a string of events taking place at different temporal positions. He then defines the A series and the B series as two ways of defining these temporal positions. The A series measures the temporal position of events in terms of the past, present and future, that is to say, an
event can be located in the future, in the present or in the past. An important observation to make is that events constantly move from the future, to the present, to the past - this notion of change is essential in McTaggart’s argument. He goes on to define the B series. Instead of events being described in terms of past, present and future, in the B series, the temporal positions of events are described in relation to each other, that is to say, an event could have taken at the same time as another event, before another event or after another event. The important observation to make here is that the temporal position of an event in the B series never changes. If I do my homework at nine before I go to sleep at midnight, then no matter how far you go into the future, I always will have gone to bed three hours later than I will have done my homework. 2011 will have always come after 2010, no matter whether it’s 2013 or 2429. Next, McTaggart argues that it is inadequate to describe events in time as only in the B series. He says that if we only allow events to pass through the B series, their temporal positions would never change (as we observed earlier,) and that the constant change of temporal positions of events is the essence of what time is. In other words, if we don’t let events move through time, then time can’t progress at all. Therefore, the B series cannot be mutually exclusive events in the B series must also go from the distant future to the present to the past. McTaggart then focuses on the A series, and argues that if an event is in the A series (which it must be,) then that event must take place in the past, present and future, which is a contradiction, because for an event to exist in one, it must not exist in McTaggart(on(Time( 6(
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the other two. It can’t be 11:56 on January the 3rd, 2017 now, and an hour in the future, and an hour in the past at the same time. His argument is that any logic trying to explain why an event can’t take place in the past, present and future is necessarily circular logic, and that it can’t be proved that events must take place in the past, present and future. He argues this by claiming that to define past, present or future, we can only do so by invoking a sense of one or another, not one and another, and this leads to an infinite regress: to say that an event can only be in one, we have to define them as separate from each other, which we can’t do unless an event can only happen in one. Since McTaggart has now explained that time can’t be described as either an Aseries or a B-series, he mentions, but does not expand upon the notion of a C-series: a different, logical way of describing time. The C-series and B-series are similar, but are different in one important way: the
constituents in the C-series are actually mental states. Events are related to each other conceptually as well as in terms of temporal location. However, this C-series isn’t given too much attention by philosophers, because there are so many unanswered questions relating to the Cseries, such as, how exactly is the illustration of time created? Mactaggart himself admitted to not knowing the answer to this question. McTaggart’s argument has had a huge influence on philosophy. It’s caused a major schism in the ways philosophers look at time as a concept: some prefer to look at it as the A-series, and some prefer to look at it as a B-series. People on the ‘B’ side argue that the A-series is contradictory, while people on the ‘A’ side argue that the Bseries doesn’t have a sense of change, and that change is the essence of what time is. It’s still a controversial matter, even a century after it was first published.
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Lord of the Flies: What Does It All Mean? by Emma Jones For most people I’ve talked to, Lord of the Flies tends to conjure up memories of seventh grade English class. Most snot-nosed twelve year olds do not really appreciate being asked to consider the depth of human nature when their biggest concerns are bar mitzvahs and acne. For an angsty, existentially minded twelve year old like me, it immediately became my favorite book for its vibrant characters, rich, gory descriptions and atmospheric language--but this was not everyone’s experience. It was a book where the characters were supposed to be your age yet seemed to think and talk in a bland, unfamiliar way. Students look back on it as that book about humans being inherently savage and animalistic, and roll their eyes. But, years later, I realized that there are so many more levels to what Lord of the Flies is about. Lord of the Flies is a deeply philosophical novel that does call human nature into question. But there is a whole other side to it; Lord of the Flies is so often read without any context at all, and within its historical context it can be best appreciated as the chilling, whip-smart satire of western exceptionalism that it is. One must be hesitant about saying that any book ‘is’ anything, because literature cannot really be read objectively, but the straight facts are that Lord of the Flies is written as a parallel to another, more lighthearted novel.
In 1858 Scottish author R.M. Ballantyne published The Coral Island, an adventure story about a group of boys stranded on an island. Ralph, Jack, and Peterkin are middle class Victorian English boys who must fend for themselves on an island only inhabited by South Sea islanders. The Coral Island’s primary theme is the superiority and resourcefulness of the English over the savagery of the aforementioned South Sea islanders. It is a book that rewards its protagonists and constantly assures them that they are good and innocent. It reaffirms the inherence of social hierarchies, and has the boys building a society that mirrors that of their homeland and sees it triumph and baffle the South Sea natives. The Coral Island’s moral can be boiled down to “The British way is the right way.” Sir William Golding read The Coral Island and saw a story that not only had no depth to it, but also did nothing but pat British readers on the back and encourage them not to question a system that had undeniable flaws. Lord of the Flies is a satire of boys’ adventure fiction, but it is in many ways directly a parallel to The Coral Island: Golding named his central characters Jack and Ralph-and Piggy arguably as a parallel to Peterkin--to create a direct association in readers’ minds to The Coral Island. It is even referenced by name in Lord of the Flies, by the naval officer who discovers the boys in the midst of a barbaric hunt to murder Ralph. He looks at the enormous number of young boys and comments that it must have been a “jolly good show. Like The Coral Island.” Lord of the Flies argues that by building up a society that thrives on inequality and rewards injustice we make what bubbles beneath the surface more and more ugly. It is not a book about some nameless, subjective Lord%of%the%Flies% 8%
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human nature but rather about how naïve we all are. The trouble with the protagonists of The Coral Island is that they never learn, never think that the way they live could be wrong because they have never suffered beneath the system they live in. “We’re not savages,” Jack remarks. “We’re English, and the English are the best at everything.” Ralph and Jack are golden boys in high-ranking positions who seem like natural leaders and who everyone flock towards to trust. Ralph is certain his navy officer father will come to their rescue. Lord of the Flies begins with stark certainty, a society of boys holding meetings and coming up with rules. Simon, one of the boys who came onto the island with Jack, is an outsider to the system to begin with. He is physically frail and more disposed towards nature and beauty than he is towards hunting and horsing around. Simon, unlike Ralph and Jack and Piggy, disregards the societal boundaries because he has accepted that they no longer apply to him. He is an outsider, yet he is at peace, and this is why he becomes one of the book’s casualties. In a mental haze, he is encountered by the titular “lord of the flies,” a pig head on a stick killed by Jack. “You’re just a silly little boy,” Simon imagines it saying to him. “You knew, didn’t you? I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are the way they are,” the grotesque image continues.
This scene gets to the very heart of the issue of inherent violence versus societal violence. Simon feels like the way others treat him is not his fault, and that he is bearing the
miserable burden of something he does not truly understand. He is watching the microaggressions of the schoolyard take form into something horrifying, and he feels powerless. Simon is Piggy’s role as an outsider without his jaded mentality, and on the island Simon’s innocence and goodness of heart is tested and eventually is destroyed. The increasingly dire consequences of conventional morality and conventional thinking make Ralph more and more doubtful in Lord of the Flies. After Simon, who had done nothing wrong, is murdered by a mob that Ralph unwittingly took part in, Ralph begins to realize that the society they’ve created is crumbling. As he sees himself become a casualty of their makeshift system, he loses faith in it and comes to think that perhaps Piggy, scorned and bullied and distrustful, is right. He and Piggy both still believe in goodness and hope in others, but Piggy understands cruelty in a way that Ralph does not. And yet after Simon is killed, it’s Ralph who wants to call it murder and Piggy who reasons it out as an accident. Golding shows that things like death and civilization are not simple. There is no monolithic adventure story protagonist that will always do the right thing. Lord of the Flies is a goldmine of themes and readings and everyone interprets it differently, but I find it to be a shame that we are never taught about it as it applies to our own lives. It is frankly lazy to say that the moral of Lord of the Flies is “humans are inherently savages.” The moral of Lord of the Flies buried much deeper in the text is that humans will keep making mistakes until the consequences are drastic. It warns us to learn from what we do wrong before somebody gets hurt, because we are privileged enough to live inside societal barriers where most pain is micro-aggressively dealt with. When the barriers are stripped away, that pain can become fatal. Lord%of%the%Flies% 9%
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Emotivism and Morality by Becca Siegel Emotivism is the philosophical idea that moral constructs are a lie. What society deems as “wrong” or “right” has been influenced by the emotions of each person. You are taught from a young age that murder is wrong, that you should hate it, while someone without this premonition might not see murder as immoral. Essentially, what the idea says is that all ethical and value judgements are made based upon emotion rather than on tangible, physical evidence. Moral statements are based on what the speaker feels and how passionate they are; this is why there are disagreements on the moral value of ideas. A chief example is the moral value of a life in regards to the death penalty. Whereas some people see the death penalty as necessary and moral, others view it as the opposite. This divisive concept of morality is, in fact not considered morality in emotivism; it is the dueling of two personal opinions, both influenced heavily by the emotion that they feel is appropriate towards an incarcerated human life. The later developments in the emotivist idea deal with the effect that one person will try to have on another by use of moral language; meaning that the speaker will try and enhance the moral effect of what they are saying through use of weighted, persuasive words. Using language that is heavily morally-weighted will most likely incentivize those listening into doing what the speaker wants. Moral language and the threat of disobeying the laws of morality in
our society holds so much power that it influences the decisions of people. “It’s the right thing,” some may say. “G-d is watching you.” Words and phrases that invoke morality hold the power to greatly influence a listener. People are motivated by the concept of morality to the extent that moral language can be used in order to persuade someone into doing something that they normally would not have done. Morality is based upon word of mouth. Whatever one person wants another to do and convinces them through moral force will lead to that person having the idea of morality that the speaker forces on them. A person’s conception of morality depends on what he or she has been told and what he or she wants to happen, not on some omniscient force that establishes “right and wrong.” Emotivism raises an issue with the basis of society. Morality is a governing force, something that prevents most people from acting out in an un-societal manner, not committing murder for example. People perceive of morality as intervention of G-d. To those who are religious, obeying the moral guidelines of G-d is a way to receive something somewhere after life, whether it be Heaven or something else. Emotivism undermines this entire concept–it discredits idea of morality itself. In accordance with emotivism, morals are considered direct responses to people’s emotions and thereby are meaningless.
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The Wall: Album Analysis by Emma Jones Pink Floyd’s The Wall is a grand, philosophical
epic and a masterpiece of storytelling, but it cannot be divorced from the reality of Syd Barrett’s and Roger Waters’ lives and the deep, personal unraveling that Waters went through in writing it. A concept album is a musical story, a fictionalized narrative told through rock, and The Wall is certainly fantastical. But in almost a meta-theme, one of the things that sets The Wall apart is its sharp awareness of the relationship between the rock musician, using deeply personal experience to create art, and the music industry, which commercializes the musician’s soul. The Wall begins as a lament of the life of a rock musician and ends as a meditation on his inevitable descent into madness. The Wall is the story of Pink, a man trapped in an oppressive lifestyle from a very young age by his fretting mother and his abusive schoolteachers. In a sense, The Wall explores the Freudian idea of how a person’s early life shapes him as an adult through the metaphor of “bricks in the wall.” Throughout his early life and young adulthood, Pink is battered by abuse, which fuels his bad decisions to the point where he no longer has any sense of self or judgement. Pink goes on to become a rock singer, and the sense of urgency and catastrophe in his psyche builds and unravels onstage in front of millions. The Wall plays on the metaphor of “hitting a wall” or “the walls we put up” by letting the listener in on the building of Pink’s psychological wall, his entrapment inside of it, and the meltdown that eventually leads to Pink’s realization in “Comfortably Numb” that the wall is part of him and as it breaks down there is very little of him left. One of the central themes of The Wall is the idea of human life having a never ending cyclical nature. An image that comes to
mind is a carousel that’s impossible to get off of. The opening track “In The Flesh?” and the ending track “Outside The Wall” share a melody, and “Outside The Wall’s” final line of “Isn’t this where…” is abruptly cut off and then finished in the very beginning of the album with “...we came in?” The band linked various songs to each other by having them transition into each other, as one would in a traditional opera where there is a continuous flow of music as narrative. The Wall is Pink Floyd’s attempt to use music to simulate the living of a life; of course it’s dramatized, but using transition and narrative, the band captures the machinations of Pink’s very human and very real life. Part of the album’s genius is that it uses the operatic concept of music as narrative and applies it to the genre of rock, hence being a “rock opera.” Rock opera often uses parallels in chord progression and key to create narrative because of the focus on instrumentation in rock music--it takes the dramatic storytelling of traditional opera and applies to the rock genre. It is not surprising that director Alan Parker and animator Gerald Scarfe created a psychological horror film to follow the story of The Wall, but listening to the album on its own, it’s hard not to marvel at how the elements of a rock song become the elements of storytelling coherent enough to become a film in the first place. The climax of The Wall’s story is when Pink takes prescription drugs with the intention of medicating his depression, and goes into a hallucination onstage where he believes he is a character called “The Dictator” who sees certain fans as unworthy and even deserving of death in his fit of rage. This can be interpreted as The$Wall$ 12$
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Waters’ meditation on being a rock performer, especially one as idolized as a member of Pink Floyd, and how much power he and the other members of Pink Floyd have over millions of people that they will probably never meet. Pink’s transformation into The Dictator is what first prompts him to realize that he exists outside of himself. Pink becomes aware that he is a performer and his actions, no matter how personal they are to him, will have an effect on the millions of people who come to his concerts and idolize him. This is a deeply frightening thing to come to terms with, and The Wall creates something of a musical nightmare sequence to picture it. The Wall becomes both the narrative of Pink Floyd, the real band that Roger Waters, Syd Barrett, and David Gilmour saw fall apart and had to be patched back together time after time, and the character of Pink, always teetering over
the point of no return. What results is something bitter and deeply sad—The tracks “In The Flesh?” and “In The Flesh” make reference in their titles to the 1977 In The Flesh Tour wherein Waters spits on a fan in the crowd who was trying to climb over a fence and get onstage, an incident that Waters said inspired the writing of the album. The fan (apart from just being crazy) was trying to break down the wall between the performer and the audience, and one could argue that that may have made Waters realize how deep the personal issues in Pink Floyd ran and how paradoxical the role of a rock musician really is; You bare your soul on stage to someone who will never know you. In a way, the role of a rock musician is a perfect embodiment of someone with a wall around them, because you are always far enough from real personal connection to isolate yourself…that is, until the wall breaks down.
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Immanuel Kant: An Introduction by Euwan Kim Immanuel Kant was an 18th century philosopher known as a father of modern philosophy. The core of his thoughts lies in human autonomy, and he firmly believed that human interpretation should be the source of general laws of conduct. Kant’s philosophy is used in several sectors of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, and other fields, where his ideas on human understanding distinguishes justified belief and opinion and the formation of an environment around a person.
Immanuel Kant was born in April 22, 1724 in Konigsberg, Prussia (modern day Kaliningrad, Russia) into a family of artisans. Kant’s parents were Pietists, evangelical Lutherans who believed in emphasized conversion, divine grace, religious emotions, and personal devotions. Kant attended a Pietist school from age 8 to 15, where he formed strong opinions against the “forced soul-searching” preached heavily by the church, and thus, mature in this thinking, Kant argued that reason and autonomy were the foundations of human understanding rather than emotion and dependence on grace or authority. The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant’s second book in his “critique series”,
studies determinism and asks the question ‘Can we predict our own actions?’ In the “Practical Reason”, Kant introduces the concept that laws must be universal to be effective. People will only obey laws if they are willing to. Thus, humans make their own laws according to their willingness to follow them. At this point, Kant starts to outline his iconic transcendental arguments. He argues that the internal structure of our mind and external objects in our environment combine to create reason, which in turn forms our perception of the universe. More specifically, Kant believed that the analytic and a posteriori can coexist and the synthetic and a priori can coexist. Analytic statements are those that define the context of something within the statement itself. For example, in the statement ‘apples are fruit’, an apple’s property of being a fruit is explicitly part of the definition of fruit. A synthetic statement is the opposite, where an object in the statement is being connected to another object defined by its own context, like in the statement ‘an apple can grow on a tree’. A priori relates to reasoning beforehand (or innate), while a posteriori relates to experiences given after. So in simpler terms, Kant believed that people can only define an object by experiencing an environment consciously, but a human can understand the object and its functions without going through sensory experience. Hence, Kant believed that a human can not define a law but rather understand what a law could do, thus causing the human to create a law that aligns to whatever function conceived of. Kant’s transcendental arguments can be further explored in his thoughts on selfconsciousness. Kant believed that identity could only be understood if humans only have one perception of the universe. It would create existential conflict if there were Immanuel(Kant( 14(
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multiple representations of identity within multiple perceptions of the universe. If that were the case, human philosophy would be limited to asking the question “Who am I?” Through Kant’s transcendental arguments, we understand that humans create their own understandings of the universe, their own understandings of themselves within their universe, and ultimately self-consciousness. Kant’s moral philosophy emphasizes Kant’s transcendental arguments even further. The core of Kant’s moral philosophy is the categorical imperative, a rationally necessary and unrestricted principle that people must always follow despite having natural desires or inclinations. Kant argues that when a human creates a categorical imperative, he thinks the law is free, autonomous, and just, because he himself is the author of the law. Because the human creates the law according to how they perceive the universe, the human can only agree to follow that moral law. Moreover, because the human makes that natural law depending on his own experience within an environment and his mind’s internal structure,
a human’s perception defines what the human finds moral and immoral. Additionally, Kant’s moral philosophy provides an analysis of the “highest good”. Because humans create their own universal laws, they perceive those laws as universally accepted. Thus, to do the “right” thing or make the “moral choice”, humans always follow their universal laws because it is a natural phenomenon, an impulse built into their mind created by themselves. Kant makes a note of how humans also make the “right” choice also because they feel better about themselves after, but this, he argues, is not the driving force behind why humans perform the action in the first place. In sum, Immanuel Kant was a founding pioneer of modern philosophy and developed a synthesis between early rationalism and empiricism, two theories that are in perpetual conflict. Kant’s ideas were not only unorthodox in their time, but they also provided a revolutionary explanation for the nature of humankind, experiences that mold human perception, and forces behind human actions.
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A History of Toothpaste by Neal Tolunsky Dental hygiene, as far as anthropologists know, began with the Egyptians around 5000 BC. Early recipes used powder from ox hooves, ashes, burnt eggshells, and pumice. It would later be sweetened with honey and myrrh oil in an attempt to soften this very abrasive mixture. To make it even rougher, Ancient Greeks and Romans added crushed bones and oyster shells to the mix. The oldest written formula for toothpaste is from around 4th century AD, probably dictated by a monk (they were also physicians at the time) and recorded by a scribe. It contained various proportions of rock salt, mint, grains of pepper, and dried iris flower. These ingredients grinded together and mixed with saliva should form, according to a piece of dusty papyrus, “powder for white and perfect teeth.” In China, toothpastes were a bit more palatable, usually composed of ginseng (a medicinal plant root), herbal mints, and salt. At around 1000 AD, the Persians began to move away from rough powders. Indian toothpaste—usually replaced by chew sticks—was composed of nectar and oil. In the 1700s, not much had improved in the way of toothpaste. People were using a powder made of burnt bread. In 1824, a dentist called Dr. Peabody pioneered a paste made mostly of soap. John Harris began adding chalk in the 1850s. In England, they used areca nut. Homemade formulas in books used ground charcoal as the main ingredient. In order to make toothpaste more like a paste, soap was replaced by Sodium lauryl sulfate (commonly found in today’s toothpaste). Toothpastes were mostly packaged in porcelain pots and jars. A dental surgeon named Dr. Washington Sheffield produced the first tube of paste in 1892. In 1914, fluoride was added to toothpaste when it was found that it lowers the risk of dental abscesses. In the second half of the 20th century, modern toothpastes were developed (containing numerous ingredients) with the purpose of treating specific diseases such as hypersensitivity. From there on, toothpastes didn’t change much from today, with minor updates such as coloring, whitening, flavoring, sweetener, triclosan, foam paste, moist paste, smooth paste etc. Pragmatists believe the ultimate goal of all human efforts should be “progress” with regard to things such as equality, science, liberty, quality of life, and toothpaste.* But all things will rot and die eventually, lost in the inexorable passage of time. And that includes your denticles. The great poet Dr. Seuss once had a bout of anguish and refused to brush his teeth for a year. Asked why, he simply said, “I will not brush them in a house, I will not brush them with a mouse, I will not brush them here or there, I will not brush them anywhere.”** *Note: This is what happens when you write two paragraphs about toothpaste and then forget why. **This is the real story behind Green Eggs and Ham.
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An Atheist’s God By Theodore Rashkover I was born into a godless world. Having been reared agnostically, taught life without assumptions, I had little understanding of the idea of a god throughout my early childhood, went to no synagogue, and spoke no prayer. As all children do, I stumbled upon the term God and—like with death to a young child—I couldn’t understand the idea, interpreting “god” as a monosyllabic collection of letters, comprising no meaning. As with death, out of circumstance, my parents disclosed the mysterious significance of the word: there may exist a great puppet master who knows all, sees all, and controls all at his, her, or its leisure. The description being transcendental, like death, and incomprehensible by nature, I couldn’t understand god; however, it made sense to me that there is a distinction between death and god: death’s existence is confirmable, and while neither death nor god could be completely understood, there is evidence for death, whereas there is none for God. Thus, I lived like a preschooler, enlightened by the epiphany that, say, Santa Claus can’t and, therefore, doesn’t exist, eager to demonstrate my finding to my peers, and exploit it for the sake of demonstrating intellectual superiority. Reflecting on my own experiences and those of people around me, some nonbelievers seem particularly driven to behave in the aforementioned arrogant manner. Of course, some, such as Richard Dawkins and Bill Nye assert that religion harms mankind, citing tendencies in religious populations to resist social and scientific progressivism, warfare, and all of the terrible things motivated by religion. This point of view rests on the assumption of truth, with atheists assuming correctness, thus enabling them to state that lives and quality of life are paramount to a nonexistent post-death reality,
and with religious individuals assuming truthfulness, leading to the conclusion that satisfying the objectives laid out by a religion, such as conversion, enslavement, or warfare, regardless of consequences, is paramount to harming others. Assuming either set of moral postulates, the corresponding outcomes would be justified, neither process being illogical, both producing on-net positive outcomes. Herein lies the distinction between religion and atheism, it being the adherence to subjective truth. Religion fundamentally cannot exist without belief and atheism cannot exist without exclusively antagonizing religion, so to prove atheism’s objective truthfulness, one must counter all instances of religion, yet disproving even one single element of some religions, supernatural creation requires a complete model of existence that necessarily excludes religious creation, a seemingly impossible feat. I, personally, accept the unlikelihood of religion or god, given human existence seems justified without god or any godsupported ideas such as free will or human purpose. As I stated, neither can I prove the thesis’ truth as conclusively, nor can I claim its objectivity; yet, like my notion of death, the system appears logically complete, barring the assumption of religious hypotheticals. Assuming a perfect set of laws of physics, human actions are a set of nearly infinite combinations of particle states. Humans exist as a pocket of pause in the decline of entropy, able to continue this trend against entropy through reproduction. The notion that humans are driven to eat, breathe, and reproduce is inevitable – humans wouldn’t be able to exist as a system if they couldn’t sustain themselves. The ideas of “good” and “bad” aren’t universal constants, but, rather, An#Atheist’s#God# 17#
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the brain’s reinforcement mechanism, which evolved to permit good behavior and prevent bad, using a sort of good/bad logic, just like how a computer program won’t execute a function if binary, true/false logic doesn’t permit it. This line of thinking doesn’t differentiate between any sort of living being or nonliving, determining their existence by an entropic bubble, with our being alive being tantamount to a rock at the edge of a hill’s potential, but not presently falling. This model shows complete impartiality to suicide, compared to continued sustenance, and, thus, it is contradictory: if the atheist is to believe in the aforementioned validation of suicide, how does atheism evolutionarily survive? Given the concept of memetic evolution, that ideas, like
genes, propagate through a system, producing fitness payoffs, determining how they continue to be spread, the meme of atheism should die off, like a wildly detrimental gene mutation.
This creates my god, the notion that atheism is a detrimental meme, and, therefore, I, unable to resist my hard determinist good/bad logic, am genetically bound to counter the atheist meme, despite my belief in its truth. I, by my internal and social sustainability mechanisms, am religious. I live bound by Orwellian doublethink to the god that I must be.
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Hilary Putnam: A Tribute by Noah Phillips On March 13, 2016, the intellectual community lost one of their most prolific and influential thinkers, Hilary Putnam. While notoriously known for his frequent stance reversal on philosophical issues, Putnam has long been revered as an extraordinary thinker. Putnam received great acclaim for his ideas in the surprisingly varied fields of philosophy of science, mathematics, and language. He traveled an uncommon path and made many lasting contributions to the field of philosophy.
Born in Chicago in 1926, Putnam was raised into an ardently liberal and communist family. His father wrote for publications supporting the American Communist Party and as a consequence, Putnam grew secular despite his mother having Jewish roots. Later in his life and towards the end of his career, Putnam became an observant Jew and was outspoken on many issues regarding Israel. He lived in France until 1934, followed by Philadelphia where his family remained for a duration of time. Putnam attended the University of Pennsylvania and received his undergraduate degree followed by extensive graduate work at Harvard. To conclude his education Putnam received his Ph.D from
UCLA under a leading philosopher: Hans Reichenbach. Putnam began his professional career at Northwestern University from 1951-1952. His acumen as a philosopher was soon recognized and Putnam was able to teach at Princeton University, where he worked from 1953-1961. Putnam was granted tenure during his time in New Jersey in both the Department of Philosophy and Department of Mathematics. Despite his success at a university of such esteem, Putnam moved once again, to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1961-1965). In his final career change, he went to Harvard where he remained until his retirement in 2000. Throughout his time at Harvard, Putnam was awarded the title of Cogan University Professor Emeritus, one of the most prestigious ranks at Harvard. Throughout his career, Putnam was jointly appointed as a high-ranking member of numerous philosophical organizations. Among these were the American Philosophical Organization, Philosophy of Science Association, the American Philosophical Society, and numerous others. Shockingly, the institutions listed above are only those that Putnam served as president of, a true testament to his philosophical expertise. But beyond the countless accolades and remarkable positions he held in his lifetime, Putnam utilized his stature for political reasons and asserted himself as a prominent activist for an emerging left-wing society in alignment with the former political beliefs of his father. While at MIT, he assembled groups of students to oppose the Vietnam war and was known as a vocal advocate of the Civil Rights Movement. At Harvard, Putnam joined the Progressive Labor Society. In an effort to supplement his Hilary'Putnam' 19'
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philosophical theories, Putnam influenced large groups of Americans and preached what he believed to be the most efficient way to govern the United States. Still, it was his intellectual capabilities that brought him such stature. With regards to his famous philosophy of the mind research, Putnam contradicted numerous theories proposed in his time, amending, if not discarding them completely. The most known of these theories is Putnam’s hypothesis of Multiple Realizability. This conclusion was drawn from numerous examples regarding pain in the field of neuroanatomy and physiology. He acknowledged other studies regarding pain and the physical states that triggered the sensation which proved his theory. Previous to Putnam’s endeavours, pain was accepted as the direct and sole result of the C-fibre firing nerves in the peripheral nervous system. Putnam cast doubt on this conclusion by asserting that animals, even those with very different bodily systems than our own, experience pain which can not be
completely attributed to their C-fiber. A second well known work of Putnam was his “brain in a vat” theory of epistemology. This theory states that if someone were to claim that they were a brain in a vat with all images being fed by a “mad scientist,” this would be illogical and thus invalid because the brain could not verify what it perceives , rather the only “seeing” that is being done is from the images created and installed by the experimenter. This in essence states epistemological externalism which claims that knowledge or understanding cannot be solely based on internal experiences but should include external ones. With the loss of Hilary Putnam, the philosophical world is deprived of a one-of-akind thinker. One, who unlike so many other people, is unafraid of losing his reputation or credibility but rather is concerned with human advancement. Putnam’s ability to criticize himself so freely and openly is what truly allowed him to be such an exceptional philosopher and personality.
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