University of the Philippines-Diliman

College of Social Sciences and Philosophy

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

Thesis Statements

1. Fog hinders clear vision and philosophy cuts through it.

2. Sometimes, however, the fog itself is the point.
3. Empirical questions are not philosophical questions.
4. Philosophical questions are conceptual questions.
5. Philosophy has four branches: logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and value theory.
6. Ambiguity refers to the confusing multiplicity of the uses of a certain term.

7. “You could not step into the same river twice.” (Heraclitus)
8. The multiplicity of things in the world necessitates humans to abstract.
9. PROPER NAMES refer to things while other words refer to classes.
10. Classification is both objective and arbitrary.
11. Classification may lead us to commit the COLLECTIVIST FALLACY.
12. Because language commits the collectivist fallacy, either it is inadequate or certain things indeed
have common characteristics.
13. “The meaning of a word is its use in language.” (L. Wittgenstein)

14. The totality of DEFINING FEATURES is designated by the word.

15. ACCOMPANYING FEATURES can always be present while retaining their status as
accompanying.
16. The existence of a thing is not determined by a definition.
17. The test for a BAD definition is “its exclusion of what we are resolved to retain, or its inclusion
of what we are resolved to reject.” (J. Venn)
18. A definition can either be STIPULATIVE or REPORTIVE.
19. In classical philosophy, definitions are known to be discovered.
20. In contemporary philosophy, definitions are known to be agreed upon.

21. VAGUENESS means the lack of clarity of the range of application of a certain term.
22. Sometimes, however, vagueness is brought about by FAMILY RESEMBLANCES.
23. CONNOTATION, as opposed to DENOTATION, is sometimes called SECONDARY or
METAPHORICAL meaning.
24. EMOTIVE meaning is sometimes context dependent, sometimes word-inherent.
25. Children learn words through ostensive definition.
26. Some words sometimes resist being ostensively defined.
27. Some words also resist being verbally defined because the concept is either too broad or too
narrow.
28. For David Hume, all our warranted knowledge-claims are reducible to our IMPRESSIONS.
29. Critics of Hume, however, say that such reduction is impossible with highly abstract objects.

30. Falsehood is different from meaninglessness.

31. Certain contexts render certain meaningless statements meaningful.
32. Certain philosophical questions are rendered pseudo-questions by certain ways of demarcating
meaning.

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 University of the Philippines-Diliman
College of Social Sciences and Philosophy
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

33. KNOWING HOW is different from knowing BY ACQUAINTANCE, and KNOWING-THAT,

i.e. propositional knowledge.
34. One cannot know something without believing it.
35. One cannot know something without knowing it to be true.
36. Knowledge is different from CERTAINTY.
37. Whether truth is absolute or relative is a conundrum.
38. If truth is CORRESPONDENCE, the meaning of correspondence seems vague.
39. If truth is COHERENCE, a body of false statements can easily be coherent.
40. If truth is PRAGMATIC, the requirement of “what works” seems vague.
41. The STRONG SENSE of knowing requires conclusive evidence.
42. The WEAK SENSE of knowing requires a preponderance of evidence for it and the absence of
evidence against it.

43. There are two principal sources of knowledge: REASON and EXPERIENCE.
44. Knowledge from experience is generally less reliable than knowledge based on reason.
45. Logic, which studies correct reasoning, differentiates VALIDITY from SOUNDNESS,
INDUCTIVE from DEDUCTIVE reasoning.
46. Aristotle first stated the presuppositions of all reasoning: the three laws of thought.
47. The privacy of mental phenomena poses the problem of self-deception in introspection and
perception.
48. A perpetual state of naivete seems to be “better” than a perpetual state of skepticism.

49. “Cogito ergo sum.” (R. Descartes)

50. Life may be conceived as a dream, i.e. panaginip.
51. DIFFERENCE, however, conceiving life as a dream would make “dream” a nonsense.
52. MATTER is conceived as (1) independent of perception, (2) accessible to more than one of the
senses, and (3) having causal powers.
53. Our senses, however, can always lead us to illusions and hallucinations.
54. Viewing devices and invisible particles blur the age-old conception of “phenomenon.”
55. John Locke distinguishers between PRIMARY and SECONDARY qualities.

56. There seems to be no reason to reject the notion that primary qualities are all in the mind as well.
57. IDEALISM states that only minds and their ideas exist.
58. “Esse est percipi.” (G. Berkeley)
59. WEAK IDEALISM holds that if things indeed exist unobserved, we wouldn’t really know.
60. STRONG IDEALISM holds that nothing can exist unobserved.
61. SUBSTANCE is what we believe to cause our sense impressions.
62. According to Berkeley, God is an infinite mind that ensures regularity in reality.
63. If God exists and esse est percipi, his existence seems to require that he be perceived.
64. PHENOMENALISM addresses the problematic “esse est percipi” and accounts for the fact that
we are only acquainted with our ideas.
65. SENSE-DATA is different from SENSATION.
66. Our knowledge of physical objects is an inference.

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College of Social Sciences and Philosophy
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

67. Sense-data, however, appears to have no determinate colors.

68. The notion of sense-data as foundation is undermined by the possibility of misinterpretation.
69. DIRECT REALISM, on the other hand, holds that we perceive things directly.

70. There are PRESCRIPTIVE laws and DESCRIPTIVE laws.

71. Scientific laws are descriptive laws.
72. Scientific laws present us no options while prescriptive laws do.
73. Descriptive laws may not require a lawmaker while prescriptive laws do.
74. Scientific laws are discovered while prescriptive laws may not necessarily be discovered.
75. Laws of nature are arguably universal, open-ended, hypothetical, and general.
76. Scientific explanations answer why things behave the way they do.

77. The logic of the sciences seems to rest on the affirming the consequent fallacy.
78. The sciences, according to Karl Popper, actually follow a FALSIFICATIONIST model.
79. Thomas Kuhn, however, observes that in the history of the sciences, a universal logic is obscured
by socio-political factos, among others, in determining the reigning paradigm.
80. Scientific explanations rest on a principle known as OCKHAM’S RAZOR.

81. There are different kinds of impossibilities: empirical, technical, and logical.
82. The PROBLEM OF INDUCTION deals with the difficulty of induction’s justification.
83. The LINGUISTIC solution seems to evade the problem rather than solve it.
84. The PRAGMATIC solution, on the other hand, seems to undermine the metaphysical privilege
of the sciences and neglect the problem of demarcation.
85. The whole quest for the justification of induction, however, seems to be too demanding.

86. Mathematical truths, like the truths of logic, are necessarily true.
87. ANALYTIC judgments are different from SYNTHETIC judgments.
88. A PRIORI knowledge is different from A POSTERIORI knowledge.
89. Anlyticity and syntheticity are semantic categories while the other binary of a priori and a
posteriori is epistemological.
90. Immanuel Kant grounds certain necessities in the synthetic a priori.
91. The consequence of Kant’s notion of necessity is the divide between the NOUMENA and the
PHENOMENA.

92. Hume conceived of causation as constant conjunction.

93. John Stuart Mill differentiates NECESSARY from SUFFICIENT condition.
94. If A is a necessary condition for B, the absence of A means the absence of B while the presence
of A does not necessarily mean the presence of B.
95. If A is a sufficient condition for B, the absence of A does not necessarily mean the absence of B
while the presence of A means the presence of B.
96. The PRINCIPIUM CAUSALITATIS is synthetic a priori.

97. There are two types of freedom: NEGATIVE and POSITIVE.

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 University of the Philippines-Diliman
College of Social Sciences and Philosophy
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

98. The AKRATIC individual is slave to his base desires and is therefore not free from them.
99. DETERMINISM claims that everything is caused, even our own actions.
100. FATALISM claims that everything that happens is fated to happen.
101. INDETERMINISM claims that some things are not caused, like our actions.
102. “Freedom presupposed determinism and is inconceivable without it.” (J. Hospers)
103. Determinism, however, seems to imply predictability.
104. Chance does not necessarily imply indeterminism.

105. Physical and mental substances are entirely different.

106. Although physical causes of mental experience can be located, the experiences themselves
cannot.
107. Pain can be located but only in phenomenal space.
108. Physical objects are publicly observable, mental experiences are not.
109. There is a difficulty in proving the existence of other minds.
110. J. S. Mill argues for the existence of other minds’ pain via analogy.
111. If an AI exhibits pain-behavior, it is difficult to admit that it is in pain.
112. The causal connection between the physical and the mental is shrouded in mystery.
113. EPIPHENOMENALISM claims that the mental is nothing but an accidental feature of the
physical.
114. METHODOLOGICAL BEHAVIORISM claims that the correct object of study of psychology is
behavior.
115. METAPHYSICAL BEHAVIORISM, on the other hand, claims that mental states are mere
dispositional states.
116. IDENTITY THEORY states that mental states are nothing but brain states.
117. Identity theory, however, does not seem to take into account QUALIA.

118. DEISM believes in an impersonal god while THEISM believes in a god that is otherwise.
119. Some people prove the existence of God by invoking a “religious experience” which is a vague
term.
120. If religious experiences provide us access to an absolute, it is curious that people describe them
as relative, even contradictory at times.
121. The omnipresence of religions does not justify its existence nor its claims.

122. The ONTOLOGICAL argument holds that by definition, God exists.

123. Kant, however, argues against the ontological argument by saying that existence is not a
property.
124. The COSMOLOGICAL argument comes in three forms: (1) God as the Unmoved Mover, (2)
God as the First Cause, and (3) God as the Necessary Being.
125. The Big Bang Theory cannot accommodate an Unmoved Mover.
126. Proving the existence of God from the claim that everything has a cause is contradictory.
127. There are brute facts which need no explanation at all.
128. Kant claims that the cosmological argument actually presupposes the ontological argument.

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 University of the Philippines-Diliman
College of Social Sciences and Philosophy
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

129. As the existence of a watch implies a watchmaker, the TELEOLOGICAL argument claims that
the orderliness of the universe implies the existence of God.
130. “Order,” however, is a vague term.
131. Hume claims that order would only count as evidence for a designer if it was observed to be
imposed.
132. Although evolution was not able to categorically refute an intelligent design, it does deny the
designer’s benevolence.
133. The PROBLEM OF EVIL questions God’s omnipotence and his benevolence.
134. St. Augustine talks of evil as a lack but this does not make much difference.
135. Evil could be conceived as a means for a greater good but as an omnipotent being, God should
be able to devise better ways to achieve the same end.
136. It may be defended that God’s goodness is different from the goodness that we know but if he
appears evil to us, nothing compels us to worship him.
137. Rooting evil in human freedom, however, does not take into account natural evils.
138. Teleological arguments are often arguments from analogy and this type of argument is never
conclusive.

139. God, in many cultures, has been conceived in an ANTHROPOMORPHIC manner.

140. Today, God is conceived as a disembodied mind with superlative attributes.
141. God as a mind, however, cannot be conceived as timeless as well.
142. MYSTICISM holds that every talk of God is metaphorical.
143. The religious hypothesis can never be scientific.
144. Some people argue for the existence of God on the basis of the utility of religion.

145. In the early 20th century, there were two major approaches in ethics: NORMATIVE ethics and
META-ETHICS.
146. Whether ethical assertions have any cognitive meaning or not is debatable.
147. EMOTIVISM argues that there are no moral truths and that ethical assertions merely express
approval or disapproval.
148. Other than expressing approval, however, ethical assertions state a felt approval.
149. The ancient Greeks conceived of the good as excellence in proper functioning (arete).
150. “Proper functioning,” however, is a vague term,
151. Through G. E. Moore’s OPEN QUESTION TECHNIQUE, we realize that ethical assertions are
always underdetermined by facts.
152. “It is only the concept of ‘life’ that makes the concept of ‘value’ possible.” (A. Rand)

153. Different versions of ETHICAL EGOISM argue that it is against our own self-interests to do evil
and that this is our motivation to do good.
154. ALTRUISTS argue that we do good selflessly.
155. If the golden rule is followed, the motivation for action seems to be helplessly selfish.
156. DEONTOLOGY holds that the determinants of a good action are” (1) universalizability, and (2)
human rights.
157. UTILITARIANISM holds that the determinant of good action is the GREATEST HAPPINESS
PRINCIPLE.

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