SOPHIA

SOPHIA is the official philosophy club at NMSU. The club is open to all. There is no fee to participate. There are no pre-requisites or prior exposure to philosophy required for activity with the club. There is no censorship. There is the love of wisdom and the pursuit of truth, nothing more.

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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.