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.
• Ontology — what there is, in general: the concept of existence and whether it is univocal, the categories under which entities fall, and the criterion by which a theory's ontological commitments are read off. The general theory of which the space-and-time pages are a regional instance.
• Philosophy of Probability — what probability statements mean and what makes them true: objective chance versus degrees of belief, the interpretations (frequency, propensity, logical, Bayesian, best-system), why rational credence should track known chances, and the bearing of probability on induction, confirmation, and causation. Takes the mathematics as given and asks what it represents.
• Philosophy of Mind — what minds and mental states are, how they fit into the physical world, and how they can be conscious, representational, and causally effective. Separates consciousness from cognition, intelligence, agency, and personhood, and treats first-person, behavioural, and neural evidence as mutually constraining.
• Remarks — short, focused discussions of individual philosophical questions, notably the theory of meaning and the status of semantics.