Credits
Of course I cannot possibly recognize or credit every influence on my thought, but I have attempted to list the most important contributions that I can think of, and from very early on in my discovery of philosophy I have tried to remember their influence, and acknowledge their influence on my thought.
This page includes the ideas of other philosophers that I was introduced to that eventually helped me to break down incorrect thought processes and to focus on what would, during this process, allow my own system of thoughts to develop. So that the reader is aware, I recognize and admit my debt to these philosophers.
I owe my discovery of philosophy and basically what it deals with, basic concepts of metaphysics, ethical systems, skepticism, doubt and analysis on AI, increased awareness of formalized good and bad arguments, to my Introduction to Philosophy class in my sophomore year of college.
DesCartes's Meditations introduced me to the concept of rationalism, systematic doubt, and the concept of the Ontological argument. I owe my awareness of the fact that multiple inconsistent theories and possibilities can be supported by the exact same evidence, including that which is presented in the natural perspective and to common sense.
To Leibniz I owe my focus on logic and its importance, the concepts and investigation and significance of predicates and subjects, and the awareness of the ideal of a symbolic logic (and a lingua franca). I also owe my awareness of concept of Occasionalism and the concept of a cosmological argument for the existence of God.
To Plato I owe my awareness of the concept of Universals, the Socratic Method, the concept of relativism, and the concept of timelessness.
To Hume I owe my awareness of the absence of logical necessity and the subjective association of events in causation, the analysis of the source and limits for reason itself and its consequence of the fallacy in the Argument from Design, and the fallacy of the Cogito implying the existence of a thinker.
To Berkeley I owe my awareness of the idea that the different senses give us such drastically different information about an object that it does not make sense to link them.
To Russell I owe my awareness of the misleading tendencies of language, the importance of exactly defining and clarifying our concepts, the influence on our thinking of the structure of sentences and his attempts to solve ontological problems by reconstituting sentences the way he did, the concept of reducing arithmetic to logic, and the fallacy with Pascal's Wager.
To Kant I owe my awareness of deontological ethics, his Categorical Imperative, and the a priori, a posteriori, analytic, and synthetic distinctions, and the concept of a transcendental argument.
To Schopenhauer I owe the recognition for the need to account for the personal will.
I owe to Bentham and to Mill the basic concept of Utilitarianism, Consequentialism, and Hedonic Calculus.
To Spinoza I owe my awareness of the concept of holism.
To Heidegger I owe my awareness of the concept of an amorphous ontology based on how our lived life appears to us, and the unique view of how our lived life can actually appear to us.
To Husserl I owe my awareness of intentionality, based on my very crude understanding of his intentionality at that time.
To Wittgenstein I owe my awareness that words are still used even when the definition is extremely vague.
Kant's move of "there is something wrong with the question", Hume's analysis of the origin and limits of reason, and Russell's "square-circle is nonsense" are the foundations of my investigation of the mental faculty.
To Zeno of Elea I owe my awareness of the reductio ad absurdum argument, and the use of infinity in such arguments.
My greatest influences are due to Socrates, Descartes, and Hume.
Obviously, I would also have been influenced by some of what an average American would receive through common culture during the 80's and 90's, though not as much as one might think. For the most part, I was cut off from normal socializing, tv, and music. I hardly read, I was a poor student, I did not have serious conversations with people (except perhaps with a couple people, mainly centered around religion, however, I did have a number of friends from different ethnic and religious backgrounds), and I was quite out-of-touch with norms and what people thought. I can add as a critical influence what a young, interested but unsophisticated Protestant Christian would have learned from the Bible. I first became serious about studying in my freshman year of college, but I still did not have the background context to understand much of what I studied. I also realize that many of the ideas I have would only be possible in my cultural-historical context (for example, my individualism due to my being brought up in a Western culture, especially the United States; my ideas of freedom, Capitalism, and equality, to my being an American; familiarity with concepts of time-travel, evolution, and the subconscious; examples of film, binary representation, digital computers, etc.). I am not intending to short-change, minimize, or underestimate the extent and number of these cultural influences, but I simply cannot offer a satisfactory list.
Of course many more ideas were introduced at a subconscious level of which I cannot take an account.
Apart from these tremendous contributions to my understanding, the thoughts on this site are my own and were arrived at independently. And although this content is sincerely believed to have been arrived at independently, I was trying to think logically and so there might not be anything that strikes the reader as particularly new and original, especially since I have subsequently learned, after I had independently thought of ideas, that many of these thoughts had already been considered. My debt to the above thinkers cannot be understated though, and if there is anything here of any value it is only because I am a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants, to borrow that very old platitude.
© 2009