Methodists Vs. Particularists

In Intuition in Philosophy, I suggested that one difference between, say, mathematicians and philosophers is that philosophers will willingly privilege an intuition over a derived result whereas the mathematician will reject the intuition in favor of the derived result. To some extent I think this characterization may not have been entirely accurate. At the very least some clarification needs to be made.

I here will argue that many philosophers are particularists whereas mathematicians tend to be methodists. "Intuition" plays a role in what particulars the philosopher claims to have knowledge. This allows for there to be something along the line of "mathematical intuition" of which I think is believed to be present by many mathematicians. I will briefly sketch out the issue here.

On the Existence of Santa Claus

While this is a very broad topic which this one blog cannot do justice, I would like to consider one argument against the existence of Santa Claus in more detail. The strategy will be to show that this argument is inadequate given two considerations.

The crucial piece of evidence for this argument is a statistical tendency for children of wealthy families to receive gifts totaling a higher value than children of poor families. This leads to two general claims.