Philosophy

Reference notes on philosophical questions that sit close to the technical material in the other sections — foundations of mathematics, the nature of meaning and truth, and the interpretation of formal systems. These pages aim to be careful and self-contained, cross-linking to the logic pages where the formal machinery lives.

Contents

• Free Will — whether agents can be the genuine sources of their own actions, and whether such freedom is compatible with the causal order: determinism, indeterminism, and the main positions.
• Philosophy of Religion — whether there is a God or transcendent reality, whether the concept is coherent, and whether religious belief can be rational: the arguments for and against theism, the problem of evil, religious epistemology, and the bearing of religion on morality and meaning.
• Philosophy of Space and Time — what space and time are (substances, relations, or structure), whether the passage of time is real, and what status geometry has: substantivalism and relationism, the A/B-theory and presentism/eternalism debates, the continuum, and what relativity and quantum gravity imply for all of them.
• Remarks — short, focused discussions of individual philosophical questions, notably the theory of meaning and the status of semantics.