1st essay prompt: Occam’s Razor
What is atheism? What is agnosticism? What is the difference between the two?
What is Occam’s razor? How might one employ Occam’s razor in an argument for atheism?
Critically evaluate the resulting argument.
Recall that you needn’t reveal your actual position in order to do this. The goal is to demonstrate that you have the skills required to argue persuasively for your evaluation. This doesn’t require that either you or I actually be persuaded, but it does require that you engage with the argument at hand rather than merely repeating the definitions of validity, soundness, and non-circularity.
2nd essay prompt: The Cosmic Question
How would Descartes respond to the cosmic question? Spinoza? Hurston? Christina? Connect each philosopher to a type of response identified by Nagel (either the religious response, the dismissive response, existential despair, existential defiance, humanism, non-teleological evolutionary naturalism, or teleological evolutionary naturalism). For each of these four thinkers, say (a) what, according to Nagel, characterizes the type of response they are most likely to give (in other words, define the response as we did in class), and (b) what about the views of the thinker in question suggests they might give that type of response (in other words, give specific details about the thinker’s view that align with that type of response).
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|