Jeffrey Alexander Martin

I did an Ancestry DNA test a few years ago and ended up finding an older sister a few states over. My mother, father, and I have taken different approaches to giving her and her family gifts. I've sent books, of course, and so did my mother. But, they didn't get an enthusiastic reception. And books are about 90 percent of my gift-giving. Then my mother took my idea of giving out events as gifts and started applying it. I like doing that because I then go to the event with them. I make sure that I get one I'll like, so no matter what happens the gift is at least appreciated by one person. Lol. Being a few states away it's a bit different in this case, but events are still fun gifts. Last year my mother sent them family tickets to a movie theater near them in Nebraska. That worked out well. Now that theater is out of business. My mother looked around for something else. She almost got paintball passes, but they only got you in t...

Philosophy applies to life. And life adds perspective to philosophy. Often these two things end up disconnected. Here's the question for this essay. - - - - - - - What is the sorites paradox? Is there any satisfying way to resolve it? - - - - - - - And here are the few notes that I wrote down. - - - - - - - tree stumps affordances sorites blight - - - - - - - My general idea was that I wanted to make the answer to this practical. An actual application in the world. I thought about talking about grinding tree stumps, and I thought about going with the political issue of blight. In the end I went with sand. - - - - - - - There is a difference between things being general, ambiguous, and vague. If I say "Cats are cute." I'm talking about all cats, or more reasonably, most cats. It's a general ...

I have two essays on logic to write today. And we're going to see one of the reasons that I don't particularly like academia right away. Here is a note about the essays. - - - - - - - Remember when answering that one of the key things you're aiming to do in an assessment essay is to demonstrate your understanding, so more fundamental than trying to make difficult arguments is honing your ability to clearly lay out the debate. - - - - - - - I understand the value of this approach. Most things that people are trying to solve they can just look up the answer to if they would work on researching more, or it's unsolvable and they would realize that by researching more. Nevertheless, I like to struggle with solving the problems themselves. To succeed in academia is a rather straightforward endeavor. You take the information that they're giving you, and then you repeat it back to them. I just have a dislike for parroting information ...

Philosophy is inescapable. It is ignorable, which is what most people do with it. There are parts that I find quite interesting, enjoyable, and useful. Technical logic is not exactly one of the areas that excite me, but it can be useful, and is important. Maybe the most important thing about it is understanding the difficulty of the problems, and the complexity that underlies the set of problems. In this course on logic there were two sets of six questions posed. The idea is to give a short answer to one from each set. The first set has to do with descriptions. I chose question number four. Here is the question and my answer. - - - - - - - 4. Suppose I say "When I use the term "The King of France", I'm just talking about my idea of the King of France." How well does this account for the way we speak? In view of the idea that we speak to communicate, having a purely subjective referent obstructs the primary purpose of spee...