The club meets every Friday 1-2 pm in the lobby of Zuhl Library. The meetings consist of engaging in the philosophical dialectic — presenting certain problems/puzzles/paradoxes regarding some philosophical topic, proposing theories to solve those problems/puzzles/paradoxes, then presenting objections to those proposals, if there are any.
Some past topics include:
- Evaluating the motivations and plausibility of Berkeley’s immaterialism (subjective idealism).
- Theories regarding the nature of time, as well as their ramifications on free will issues.
- Examining Plato’s Theory of the Forms — its motivations, claims, and objections.
- Problems with the JTB (or TAK) theory of knowledge.
- Book IX of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
- Arguments for the existence of God: Anselm’s ontological arg., Leibniz’s cosmological arg., Plantinga’s modal arg., Descartes’ ontological arg., Gödel’s ontological arg., Aquinas’ causal arg.
- Arguments against the existence of God: Kant’s refutation of the ontological arg., The Problem of Evil, Frege’s first-order/second-order predicate distinction.
- Examining David Lewis’ doctrine of Modal Realism.
- Existentialism: existence precedes essence.
- An analysis of Frege’s theory of sense and reference.
- Accounts of what constitutes death — which inevitably leads to questions regarding what constitutes life.
- Exploring Universalist, Nihilist, and Restriction accounts of mereological composition.
- Existentialism: Nietzsche’s unprofessional approach to philosophy.
