A long standing problem in the philosophy of mind concerns the subjective indistinguishability of hallucinations and normal perception. Macbeth’s phenomenal perception of the dagger cannot be differentiated from a normal phenomenal perception of a dagger. So there seems to be no way in which we can tell abnormal perception from normal perception. (Are hallucinations subjectively …
Continue reading “The Mind-dependence of psychosis: properties of hallucinations and delusions”
By Ranger Mills and Lishan Chan (printed in Because of the Night zine) Alongside with the disciplines of philosophy and the sciences, art is a generative activity, from which ideas and new ways of thinking can originate. In recent times, however, there has been a change from the perspective of art as generative to art …
Continue reading “Has Singapore Killed Art? And then Propping it up through the Management of Art?”
A government is a system by which the community is being organised and run. According to one tradition in political philosophy, we have a government because it is necessary to prevent us from harming each other and as such to enable us to live together as a community. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes held that in …
Continue reading “Why is there a government? Can civil disobedience be justified?”
The question of why Singapore has no global brand can be explained by way of Singapore’s small population, or by way of America’s domination of the global brands board. But it can also be rephrased as a question of why Singaporeans lack the creativity, innovation, passion and ambition to create, develop and market products and …
Continue reading “Why does Singapore not have a global brand?”
Discussions on the arts in Singapore have not, to my knowledge, touched upon the subject of philosophy. Philosophy is thought to be a subject only for academic pursuit. Alternatively, philosophy is thought of as a topic intertwined with religion- Buddhism, say, is a philosophy. Consequently, the idea of philosophy, as being in relation to the …
Democritus argued that if seeing is dependent on our psychological and physiological condition, there are no colours in things, since colours exist by virtue of our faculties of perception. The Kanizsa triangle supports his argument. There is no triangle overlapping the entire image, but it appears to us that there is one. So the existence …
At first glance, it is difficult to see that science is compatible with religion. Too often, the Church has opposed scientific advancement, seeing it as a threat to its power. But Herbert Spencer argued that if science recognises the unknowable, then science and religion are compatible, since religion is about the unknowable. In this way, …
A man cannot inquire either about which he knows, or that which he does not know. For if he knows, he has no need to inquire, and if he does not, he cannot. For he does not know the very subject he is to inquire. Socrates’ response: (1) The soul is immortal. (2) All learning …
There are many questions that can be asked in the philosophy of mental illness. For example, is mental illness a disease/ illness or is it a culturally determined label? Thomas Szasz (1961) famously argued that mental illness is simply a deviation from societal norms. According to Szasz, mental illness is a metaphor and not a …
CHAN LI SHAN 