foundationalist?

Moving things to storage, I came across a box of every paper I ever wrote in college. (philosophy, Young's comm., Eicher's comm., even some high school papers.) I opened up a test from philosophy. Remember, Ci and Nic, how all the tests were part essay? I was actually laughing at my own test so I thought I'd share.

Part II.
Essay A:

The global skepticism of philosophers like Keith Lehrer is unreasonable. And yes, I believe Hosper's argument successfully defeats local skeptics like David Hume as well.

It all comes back to William James and pragmatism. Skepticism really is not practical. Even Hume, after saying we cannot rely on the past to predict the future, says it would be sub-human not to learn from experience. As a philosopher Hume is an empiricist but every human that expects to function without becoming insane must think practically.

There are many things that we, as people or philosophers, cannot escape. All things seem to be infinite. We use everything to justify itself. We look at an effect and say it must have a cause; this leads to infinite regression. We use inductive reasoning to justify inductive reasoning. From the fact that every raven ever examined was black, we assume the unobserved ravens are also black. Induction is founded on the belief, the hope, that the world is not essentially deceptive. We like to believe, and must, that the seeming regularities of the world are genuine. Induction vs. skepticism? Induction has stood the test of time, therefore it should be reliable in the future... now that just cracks me up more than anything.


Right by the sentence We use everything to justify itself., she wrote "You are a foundationalist!" You girls took that class with me. I don't remember foundationalism. Do you? Could you refresh me? She sounded pretty excited about it.

Also- does anyone else ever feel like there really are white ravens staying just without their sight, like those girl scout brats?

Sometimes I feel like I'm on the Truman show. Any second I'm going to hit the outer wall, walk up the stairs, and out the door.

Stay tuned for my paper about God, the self-actualizing actualizer.