
Academic Essays
More serious things on a variety of topics, including Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and more.
All rights reserved. Please kindly cite or get in touch.

Short Critique of Martin Luther King Jr’s Criteria for Just Laws and Legal Obedience
Mainly taking issue with the conjunctive nature of King’s criteria for determining just laws, I argue that these criteria are not defined clearly enough to be generalized. I then extend this critique to show that his criteria for just law can be internally contradictory and lead to a dilemma. Following from this discussion, in the second part, I point out that King’s way of establishing the moral obligation to obey or disobey laws is currently too inadequate to be applied more generally, as more nuances need to be considered before establishing negative moral obligation.

Surprise Exam Paradox: can the students know beforehand?
In this short piece, I discuss the famous surprise exam paradox and argue that the student cannot know the surprise statement beforehand.

Establishing the (special) Obligation to Obey the Orders of the State During a Public Health Crisis
Zooming in on government orders such as mandatory mask-wearing during public health crises, I argue from an instrumentalist view that we do have obligations to obey such orders. However, the extent to which this obligation is ‘special’ depends on which concept of obligation we employ.

A Short Note on Kronercker’s “God created the natural numbers, the rest is the work of man.”
As a commentary on Kronecker’s quote, I first demonstrate in this short piece the idea that given the set of natural numbers, we can ‘arbitrarily’ construct all other sets of numbers. Secondly, I show how the set of natural numbers, is somehow ‘provided’.

Thoughts on “the Knowledge Argument” as an objection to the view that all facts are ‘book-learning’ facts
The knowledge argument, more commonly known as “Mary’s Room” thought experiment, can be understood as an objection to the view that all facts are ‘book-learning’ facts: facts the learning of which does not require you to have a certain kind of experience or occupy a certain position in the world. I comment on this characterisation by Tim Crane.

Plato as an Authoritarian Thinker
Plato is indeed a totalitarian thinker. But we should spare him the charges implicated by the negative connotations that usually come with the term…