Distance Learning

Distance learning is the thing without which it is impossible to learn in the future. System of distance learning has to have modern studying materials and interesting resources, where student can interact with everything which is there. Below I will give some examples of why it is worth investing and developing this system

Thinking Impossible Things

“There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass. It is a rather common view among philosophers that one cannot, properly speaking, be said to believe, conceive, imagine, hope for, or seek what is impossible. Some philosophers, for instance George Berkeley and the early Wittgenstein, thought that logically contradictory propositions lack cognitive meaning (informational content) and cannot, therefore, be thought or believed. Philosophers who do not go as far as Berkeley and Wittgenstein in denying that impossible propositions or states of affairs are thinkable, may still claim that it is impossible to rationally believe an impossible proposition. On a classical “Cartesian” view of belief, belief is a purely mental state of the agent holding true a proposition p that she “grasps” and is directly acquainted with. But if the agent is directly acquainted with an impossible proposition, then, presumably, she must know that it is impossible. But surely no rational agent can hold true a proposition that she knows is impossible. Hence, no rational agent can believe an impossible proposition. Thus it seems that on the Cartesian view of propositional attitudes as inner mental states in which proposition are immediately apprehended by the mind, it is impossible for a rational agent to believe, imagine or conceive an impossible proposition. Ruth Barcan Marcus (1983) has suggested that a belief attribution is defeated once it is discovered that the proposition, or state of affairs that is believed is impossible. According to her intuition, just as knowledge implies truth, belief implies possibility. It is commonplace that people claim to believe propositions that later turn out to be impossible. According to Barcan Marcus, the correct thing to say in such a situation is not: I once believed that A but I don’t believe it any longer since I have come to realize that it is impossible that A. What one should say is instead: It once appeared to me that I believed that A, but I did not, since it is impossible that A. Thus, Barcan Marcus defends what we might call Alice’s thesis: Necessarily, for any proposition p and any subject x, if x believes p, then p is possible. Alice’s thesis that it is impossible to hold impossible beliefs, seems to come into conflict with our ordinary practices of attributing beliefs. Consider a mathematical example. Some mathematicians believe that CH (the continuum hypothesis) is true and others believe that it is false. But if CH is true, then it is necessarily true; and if it is false, then it is necessarily false. Regardless of whether CH is true or false, the conclusion seems to be that there are mathematicians who believe impossible propositions. Examples of apparent beliefs in impossible propositions outside of mathematics are also easy to come by. Consider, for example, Kripke’s (1999) story of the Frenchman Pierre who without realizing it has two different names ‘London’ and ‘Londres’ for the same city, London. After having arrived in London, Pierre may assent to ‘Londres is beautiful and London is not beautiful’ without being in any way irrational. It seems reasonably to infer from this that Pierre believes that Londres is beautiful and London is not beautiful. But since ‘Londres’ and ‘London’ are rigid designators for the same city, it seems to follow from this that Pierre believes the inconsistent proposition that we may express as ‘London is both beautiful and not beautiful’

Do not let the dead bite! : different scenarios of the zombie epidemic reexamined

The Zombie Epidemic is a fun framework for investigating different scenarios of spreading disease. An extended Kermack - McKendrick model is analyzed. The only thing that can save humanity is to not get bitten or to find a remedy for the "zombie virus" (both almost impossible)

The Novelty Search of Prior Art Requires a Lawyer

ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: THE NOVELTY SEARCH OF PRIOR ART REQUIRES A LAWYER Mark Earnhart, Masters of Fine Art, 2013 Thesis Directed By: Professor Foon Sham Department of Art "Things are complicated" is a very true statement in which the vagueness is fitting, the utterance reprehensible and the implications impossible. But, things are complicated. They are not simply objects, although they might take the form; they might have mass and volume, substance and presence. But the object is tied to the act of perception, the thing is not; the thing can exist in no physical way but still maintain presence. What happens when encountering a thing? Does one rely on the tools of perception solely? Or is there something immeasurable in combination with what is present? Encountering a thing requires an ability to make connections, relate personally and internalize the situation. If the thing is known we put to work a relation of familiarity and if unknown the mechanism required for retrieval becomes infinitely complex

Konsistensi Will dan Thing-in-Itself: Menafsir Ulang Metafisika Schopenhauer

This article aims to present a different reading from the mainstream interpretation that corners Schopenhauer: a consistent interpretation. The authors use a method of acquiring knowledge by acquaintance and description. Schopenhauer’s theory is often considered inconsistent because it concludes will as a thing-in-itself. The will, which is obtained through direct observation of the body, is a representation that is still shrouded in the veil of time form, while thing-in-itself is completely different from representation, and is beyond the reach of space, time, and causality, with reference to principle of sufficient reason. Concluding will as a thing-in-itself is therefore considered inconsistent. However, this interpretation might be wrong because Schopenhauer never claimed that direct observation of the body would yield knowledge of the thing-in-itself. From the very beginning, he realised that direct knowledge of thing-in-itself was impossible, because the knowledge, regardless of its form, was always knowledge of appearances. He knows that will does not qualify as a thing-in-itself. The true function of the will in Schopenhauer's metaphysics lies in the name and concept by which one can think about thing-in-itself objectively

Konsistensi Will dan Thing-in-Itself: Menafsir Ulang Metafisika Schopenhauer

This article aims to present a different reading from the mainstream interpretation that corners Schopenhauer: a consistent interpretation. The authors use a method of acquiring knowledge by acquaintance and description. Schopenhauer’s theory is often considered inconsistent because it concludes will as a thing-in-itself. The will, which is obtained through direct observation of the body, is a representation that is still shrouded in the veil of time form, while thing-in-itself is completely different from representation, and is beyond the reach of space, time, and causality, with reference to principle of sufficient reason. Concluding will as a thing-in-itself is therefore considered inconsistent. However, this interpretation might be wrong because Schopenhauer never claimed that direct observation of the body would yield knowledge of the thing-in-itself. From the very beginning, he realised that direct knowledge of thing-in-itself was impossible, because the knowledge, regardless of its form, was always knowledge of appearances. He knows that will does not qualify as a thing-in-itself. The true function of the will in Schopenhauer's metaphysics lies in the name and concept by which one can think about thing-in-itself objectively

Fichte's Deduction of the Moral Law

It is often assumed that Fichte's aim in Part I of the System of Ethics is to provide a deduction of the moral law, the very thing that Kant – after years of unsuccessful attempts – deemed impossible. On this familiar reading, what Kant eventually viewed as an underivable 'fact' (Factum), the authority of the moral law, is what Fichte traces to its highest ground in what he calls the principle of the 'I'. However, scholars have largely overlooked a passage in the System of Ethics where Fichte explicitly invokes Kant's doctrine of the fact of reason with approval, claiming that consciousness of the moral law grounds our belief in freedom (GA I/5:65). On the reading I defend, Fichte's invocation of the Factum is consistent with the structure of Part I when we distinguish (a) the feeling of moral compulsion from (b) the moral law itself

THE POSSIBILITY OF REASONABLE DISAGREEMENT

In the essay “Reasonable Religious Disagreements,” Dr. Richard Feldman examines reasonable disagreements between peers. More specifically, he asks whether such disagreements are possible, and also whether the parties to such a disagreement could think that both their own belief and the belief of their peer with whom they disagree are reasonable. Feldman argues that there cannot be any such thing as a reasonable disagreement, and furthermore, that the parties to a disagreement are not epistemically licensed to think that their own belief and their opponents belief are both reasonable. As Feldman notes, “open and honest discussion seems to have the puzzling effect of making reasonable disagreement impossible”. My project herein will be (in §2) to explain Feldman’s notion of a reasonable disagreement, and then reconstruct and assess his argumentation, and (in §3) advance three objections to Feldman’s argument. I will focus on denying Feldman’s answer to his first question—that reasonable disagreement between peers is not possible—and my suggestion is that if any of these three objections to Feldman’s argument go through, then the argument falls. And if Feldman’s argument falls, then his argument no longer provides grounds for our thinking that reasonable disagreement is impossible

The paradox of increase

[FIRST PARAGRAPHS] It seems evident that things sometimes get bigger by acquiring new parts. But there is an ancient argument purporting to show that this is impossible: the paradox of increase or growing argument. Here is a sketch of the paradox. Suppose we have an object, A, and we want to make it bigger by adding a part, B. That is, we want to bring it about that A first lacks and then has B as a part. Imagine, then, that we conjoin B to A in some appropriate way. Never mind what A and B are, or what this conjoining amounts to: let A be anything that can gain a part if anything can gain a part, and let B be the sort of thing that can become a part of A, and suppose we do whatever it would take to make B come to be a part of A if this is possible at all. Have we thereby made B a part of A

Heat Isolators on a Vacuum Flask

The thing which makes the vacuum flask system useful is the vacuum between the two bottles. Producers of the vacuum flask try to create a perfect vacuum between the two bottles, but it is impossible. Little air goes inside, too. This situation creates my experiment and research question. There are many heat isolators so can there be any material that can be more successful in conserving the temperature of the liquid added than the vacuum flask system? To find an answer to my question, I chose 3 heat isolators (perlite, fire brick and silicone) and put them into the flasks instead of the vacuum. In order to investigate their performance and compare with the vacuum flask system, I planned four experiments. I added to the flasks different liquids, water at the different temperature and water at different amounts and measured the temperatures of the added liquids in different times. According to the results from these 4 experiments, I reach to a conclusion that these isolators couldn’t perform a better performance than vacuum in conserving the temperature of the liquid