- Descartes
- # Descartes
René Descartes was a French philosopher and mathematician from the 1600s who fundamentally changed how people think about knowledge and the mind. He's famous for the idea "I think, therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum), which means that the very fact that you can think proves you exist—a foundation for modern philosophy. He also invented the coordinate system used in mathematics (the x and y axes on a graph), which connects geometry and algebra in practical ways we still use today.
- Kripke
- Kripke refers to Saul Kripke, an influential American philosopher and logician known for revolutionizing how we think about names, meaning, and possibility. He argued that names like "Albert Einstein" refer directly to the actual person rather than through descriptions of their properties, which changed philosophy fundamentally. His work also introduced "possible worlds" as a way to understand concepts like necessity and possibility, making him one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.
- Mind-Body Problem(Traditional philosophy of mind)
- The metaphysical question concerning the status of mind in relation to the physical world
- Necessary a posteriori truths(Kripke's example of truths that show conceivability can mislead us about what's really possible)
- Facts that are definitely, absolutely true about how reality works, but can only be discovered through experience or observation rather than pure thinking.
- Real distinctness(what Descartes was trying to prove about mind and body)
- The claim that two things are actually separate or different in reality, not just in how we think about them.
- a posteriori(Used to classify the epistemic status of necessary statements post-Kripke)
- Knowable, but not independently of empirical experience
- a priori(Frege treats 'analytic' as entailing 'a priori' for arithmetic.)
- Knowable independently of empirical experience; here treated as a consequence of analyticity.
- conceivability(Qualified as 'properly circumscribed' to distinguish it from naive or unreflective conceivability)
- The ability to coherently imagine or suppose a state of affairs without contradiction
- metaphysical possibility(Distinguished from mathematical possibility to argue that some mathematically consistent results are ruled out by the nature of concrete reality)
- What is possible in the concrete world, which is a more restrictive domain than mathematical possibility