Online Resources

This is a list of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries that I will (continue to) utilize in my research. I will update occasionally.


The Philosophy of Mind


Culture, Memetics and Evolutionary Theory


Semantics, Logic and Information


Knowledge and Method



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Introduction: the why and how of this blog

The aim of this blog is to document and further my studies in philosophy. I'm planning on applying to a PhD program--most likely in the fall of 2025, and most likely in Poland--and I have a lot of work to do before I can confidently approach a dissertation topic and make myself a desirable PhD candidate.       Until very recently, I hadn't engaged with philosophy at all for about ten years. I'm a bit daunted by my decision to return to the discipline after such a break. The thing is, I don't simply want to catch up on what's been going on in the past ten years; I also need to fill in a lot of gaps in my education.       See, I never earned a philosophy degree. Though Philosophy was one of my dual majors (the other was Mathematics) when I began my undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, I graduated with a degree in Literary & Cultural Studies and only a minor in Philosophy. I went on to work towards an MA in Philosophy at t...
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Notes on Kripke's "Naming and Necessity," Lecture 1, Part 1 of 2 (pp. 22-53)

1. On sense and reference On page 30 of Naming and Necessity , Kripke says,  If 'Aristotle' meant the man who taught Alexander the Great, then saying 'Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander the Great' would be a mere tautology. But surely it isn't; it expresses the fact that Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, something we could discover to be false. So, being the teacher of Alexander the Great cannot be part of [the sense of] the name. Let us suppose that a student learns the name “Aristotle" by learning that  (P) Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander the Great.  The typical student will assume that Aristotle was a human who lived at a particular historical time, and could further deduce that Aristotle was a person of competence and reputation. Further deductions, based on knowledge of history, could include that Aristotle was a man, that he lived well into his adult years, and so on. Thus, P attributes a property to a person (from which other properti...
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Notes on Kripke "Naming and Necessity," Lecture 3, Part 2 of 2 (pp. 136-155)

1. Continuing on p. 136, where Kripke is in the middle of discussing his distinction between a priori and necessary knowledge, he portrays the “simple" way we referentially fix the natural phenomena we directly observe with our senses by presenting it as an equation:   “Heat = that which is sensed by sensation S .” But isn’t heat the sensation itself? Other natural phenomena he says are “identified as the causes of certain concrete experimental effects.” Okay - but then, such phenomena are "baptised" via description. It would seem that the only objects that can be baptised without description are the immediate contents of perception, and here Kripke seems blocked by a failure to distinguish between the sensation and what it is a sensation of . This issue will come up at the end of the lecture, when he attempts to argue against identity theory. Now we reach the third main point of Kripke’s argument : Once we have identified a natural kind (by virtue of paradigmatic ca...
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