This category overlaps with Appearance and Reality Idea of "Other" Idea of Time Human Nature Language Science Souls-Self-Consciousness Teleology
The "Epistemology" category remained "Thought Process" until the very end of classification of sources with concepts. Many journal entries retain the term "Thought Process for links to this page. I thought about renaming the category "Knowledge" renaming instead "Epistemology" because the linked sources cover all four of Wikipedia's core areas of debate within the subject:
- Philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification.
- Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony.
- Structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs.
- Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments.
Perhaps I became a skeptic to refute all arguments in the locker room at Davidson in August 1964. We were having an election-year political discussion (Johnson vrs Goldwater). I being the valedictorian in conservative New Castle, Indiana and raised by die-hard conservative republican parents did not encounter many Johnson supporters and they were easy to defeat in an argument by the question, "Do want a Socialist running the country?" I raised the same question in the locker room full of Johnson support in still democratic but conservative Davidson, North Carolina. One of the football players asked, "What's wrong with socialism?" I was dumbfounded and didn't have anything to answer because "all" New Castle knew socialism was bad. I vowed then and there never to lose an argument again. Perhaps I started down the long lonely road to skepticism (and associated contrariansim) in that locker room at Davidson.
I am dumbfounded still and can't refute God or the gods though I prefer random chance as the summum bonum. I am a self-taught philosopher scientist that thinks I am god, or at least the closest thing in this world that I have met. I have a few favorite takes on what we can and can't know and what makes us human:
- We can know much but not everything.
- We can know nothing of the spirit world, the "other" world beyond the senses, beyond language. That world only exists in the human imagination, the mind. Both mathematics and God live in this "other" world.
- A favorite conjuring of my imagination is we, each person, the earth, the sun is the center of the universe. Hubble and Einstein's Special Relativity taught us that.
- Another favorite is the concept that the self is the whole universe, at least the whole universe the self has access to. We invented god rather than the other way around. This concept is related to why I think I am god.
- This self, soul, consciousness, whatever is the essence of the individual will die. There is no afterlife, neither of the soul nor consciousness. Epicurus ....... rises from the dead. The only afterlife was what Achilles wanted: that his name be sung forever.
(the same sin of pride "is why I write this web site).
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