Category: Essays

What is the physician’s role regarding empathy? The words “empathy” and “physician” go hand-in-hand with our expectations of the world today. From weeding through the applications of potential medical students to a patient evaluating which attending physician they may want as their primary care doctor, empathy is viewed as a necessity in the eyes of… Continue reading The Physician’s Role Regarding Empathy

There is a tingling drive that emerges within a corner of all of our consciousnesses every so often that prompts the phrase: “What is the point?” This question has been attacked from all sides ever since consciousness and wonder arose in the human mind. Answers to this have come from various religious ideologies, spiritual beliefs,… Continue reading On Art as the Meaning of Life

Stoicism is a complex ancient philosophical system that millions of people throughout its multi-thousand-year history have taken up into their lives to help improve themselves. Its core belief consists of aspiring toward a path of virtue using rational, intellectual means. Famously, it is a philosophy whose members have included people from slaves to emperors, exemplifying… Continue reading To be Human is to not Limit One’s Humanness

The Values of Plato’s Democracy Make for an Imperfect but Sustainably Positive Civilization… In Book XIII of The Republic, Plato works through various forms of government, each of them a version decaying from the last toward the utmost corruption of tyranny. Each government type also has a comrade of a specific type of person who has… Continue reading Plato’s Democracy Reevaluated

“Reason and History” by Hilary Putnam takes the reader on a journey of the absurdness of opinion and morality. The rise of STEM fields in the recent decades has pushed away many humanities subjects of knowledgeable pursuit such as politics, moral thinking, philosophy, and art. An argument can be made that the stated social sciences… Continue reading Pondering on Putnam’s “Reason and History”

The Medieval philosophers Thomas Aquinas and Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali were two of the most influential of their age. That time of philosophy was primarily tied with religion and new ideas of what God may mean for us that have passed on to our current ideologies today. In the present day, however, science has largely taken… Continue reading How Medieval Answers on Faith Disprove the Rationality of Science at its Most Fundamental Level

The Background: The Story: “The Grand Inquisitor” Argument: P1: Jesus Christ resisted three temptations that Satan offered Him in the desert: a. To turn stones into loaves of bread in order to satisfy His hunger after fasting for many days. b. To jump from a high tower in order to prove that God would send… Continue reading “The Grand Inquisitor” and the Problem of Freedom within Religion

Christian Smith elaborates in his article “Disruptive Religion” about how leadership qualities, financial resources, communication channels, tools, identity, and more can all come from an inner devotion to religion which can then be used to apply to one’s religious movement/activism. His conclusion can then be discerned as religious mindsets providing the foundation and motivation for… Continue reading Pondering on Smith’s “Disruptive Religion”

In the Categories and the Metaphysics, the philosopher Aristotle attempts to define “being” in a variety of ways, disproving many options, but eventually accepting a plausible possibility. The conclusion that he puts forward for the readers is one of combining actuality and potentiality as a definition for a “substance.” However, the complicated road it takes for him to get… Continue reading The Insufficiency of Words on Being

The current theologian view of God is a Being who is perfect in all aspects. With this understanding, followers of the main monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam lead their lives in service of a Being who is powerful enough to create the universe, knowledgeable enough to share His wisdom with prophets, and good… Continue reading Defending Hume’s Argument for an Alternative View on God