Philosophy and critical thinking overview

I recently completed Philosophy and Critical Thinking (Syllabus), an edX course. The course took about 2 weeks, on and off. This is my second course in philosophy, and my earlier writing on a previous course can be found here.

The course contains 6 modules in total. The format is, for each module there are submodules, and most submodules have text that explains the ideas, accompanied by videos that are a distilled version of the text. Finally, each module includes a graded quiz. The course intertwines philosophy (philosophical ideas i.e. who said what at some point) and critical thinking (logic).

(Meta) The way I consumed the contents:

Skimming through the texts, including ChatGPT section summaries (this was particularly useful)
Watching all videos
Taking notes (thus this blog post)

(Meta Meta) Talking about the way I consumed the content gives more information about what my actions might have been during the course 🙂

In this blog post, I will briefly overview the ideas being discussed.

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Hva er filosofi overview

In this blog post, I will write an overview of the book “Hva er filosofi” (What is philosophy?) by Lars Svendsen.

At a local bookstore, I bought a version that was translated into my native language. The translation isn’t the best, but I still finished the book as I found the content interesting and was able to get past the syntactical issues by ignoring them and merely focusing on the content 🙂 As a matter of fact, I think the syntactical issues were actually a good thing. I mostly write blog posts like this one because it helps me with crystallizing ideas, and when I try to explain parts of the book I can’t just copy/paste, I have to work on paraphrasing using (hopefully, what is) non-broken grammar.

I have read a couple of philosophy books in the past period, and I have to say that this book is probably the most meta of them all. I had one picture in mind as to what philosophy represents (argument+idea), but reading this book extended that view: philosophy is everything and nothing.

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Writing your third program with Budge-TP

In a previous blog post, we showed an implementation of a subset formal system of Peano’s axioms that could represent numbers and the addition operator. In a blog post before that, we showed and implemented a formal system that could represent numbers and the addition operator at a more basic level.

This blog post will show yet another way to represent numbers and arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Finally, we’ll extend this system to also support complex arithmetic operations (combining the previous basic operations).

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Guest at the CodePub.dev podcast

I recently guested the CodePub podcast, hosted by a close friend of mine – Darko Bozhinovski. We talk about my start with computers and programming, programming languages, my previous and current interests, hackerspaces, etc. Make sure to check it out! 🙂

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Write a mathematical proof generator for AoC 1-1 2022

For last year’s AoC, I decided to use 20 different programming languages. For the year before that, I used Haskell. This year I decided to not participate as I’m already busy with other stuff, but I thought I could try something different.

So the first task of AoC day 1 is essentially giving you a list of lists, and you need to sum each element and find the max. Here’s a one-liner in Python:

max([ sum(x) for x in L ])

But I thought to myself, why write code in a “normal” programming language to solve an easy problem? Why not complicate things a little bit and write a code that generates mathematical proof in Budge-TP? In this post, we will write a Python script that will solve AoC 1-1 by generating Budge-TP code.

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