I'm still alive.

I apologize for the age long gap in entries. University has started again, and I've been quite busy this past summer and thus far into the fall semester.

Today I'd like to write about a topic that has been on my mind for quite some time.
The philosophical sense on certainty versus a promise.
Now off the bat, you'd assume [or at least I did] that a promise is an abstract belief, defined by a culture, and that certainty is a type of a priori knowledge that is independent of sense experience [and coincidentally, culture].
However, in philosophy, philosophical certainty - even certainty in general is the ability to lack doubt. Merriam Webster's English dictionary defines certainty [well certain] as: being incapable of failing; an assured mind or action;
Therefore, as implied a philosophical skeptic can never be certain. In one of my courses, a classmate of mine who once described himself of being a skeptic, stated that he was "certain of his knowledge." A statement which, in addition to his previous claim was self defeating.
However, this statement also brought up another question, of personal identity. Derek Parfit, a British philosopher who specializes in Ethics and Philosophy of Mind, raises the following thought experiment:

Suppose that a man aged ninety, one of the few
rightful holders of the Nobel Peace Prize, confesses
that it was he who, at the age of twenty, injured a
policeman in a drunken brawl. Though this was a
serious crime, this man may not now deserve to be
punished.

[Source: Parfit Reasons and Persons 326 (reprinted in Schick and Vaughn 275).]

Like the Nobel Prize Winner, my classmate may have reformed his ideas, (though granted the situation was far less drastic.) but this still leaves us with the question: Can there ever be certainty? Maybe there can be. Maybe there can not be. Possibly, quite possibly, though we need to leave the idea of certainty, and promises for that matter not to be defined by a culture, or other group, but to a person - to each their own.