272). There were great changes taking place during that period in history, and not all of those changes had to do specifically with science. Some of them stemmed from science in other ways, and were encouraged to develop because they had a better fr Continue Reading...
Speaking of innate and universal "truths," Locke argues: "If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths; which, since t Continue Reading...
Morality therefore comes within but is associated with the results generated within as well: The force of an internal sanction derives from the feeling of pleasure which is experienced when a moral law is obeyed and the feeling of pain which accomp Continue Reading...
Descartes In philosophy, there is a theory that holds that we humans do not know things directly, but only by their particular impressions on what we observe, or attempt to understand. In other words, all knowledge is expressed through doubt and ske Continue Reading...
Pascal's View Of The Heart Pascal seemed, on the surface to make one of the most famous reasoned and calculated defenses of Western Christian philosophy when the French thinker made his 'wager' that it was better to suppose that God existed, rather Continue Reading...
Absolute reality thus is impossible in the world of Descartes. The way Kant began argument for his form of metaphysics began with the critique of pure reason. That involves the realm of the unknown -- moving to the unknown from the known, and this c Continue Reading...
To cultivate genius when it does appear, a society must be free for all, not just the recognized geniuses. or, as Mill more eloquently puts it, "it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they [geniuses] grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an Continue Reading...
Trial and Death of Socrates Several of Plato's works explicate the details of Socrates life, especially his trial, sentence and execution. The novel, Trial and Death of Socrates too work around the same ideals, and present to the audience a man of g Continue Reading...
Heidegger In his seminal text Being and Time, Martin Heidegger attempts to investigate the nature of being, and by extension, human consciousness, in an intelligible way that allows one to actually make useful claims regarding the nature of Being de Continue Reading...
Hobbes and Rousseau The notion of the social contract -- the concept that human society is fundamentally a human construct -- originated in seventeenth-century European thought and was developed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, r Continue Reading...
As activists in women's liberation, discussing and analyzing the oppression and inequalities they experienced as women, they felt it imperative to find out about the lives of their foremothers -- and found very little scholarship in print" (Women's Continue Reading...
The Greeks believe that the soul is an essential part of the body since it gives it life. The soul thinks, feels, and chooses[footnoteRef:1]. The interaction between the body and soul influences one another giving rise to the concept of dualism. They Continue Reading...
Justice equalled virtuosity. The goal was a rather pragmatic one since what the philosopher had in mind was the ideal functioning of the city (where a happy city would mean happy people). It is important to understand the fact that a city can reach Continue Reading...
Plato's Theory Of The Tripartite Soul The Republic is an influential dialogue by Plato, written in the first half of the 4th century BC. This Socratic dialogue mainly concerns political philosophy and ethics. The political ideas are clarified by pic Continue Reading...
Lastly, the abolition and non-subsistence to the principles of capitalism leads to the reinforcement of a communal society. This also eliminates the emergence of class conflict as a result of the inherent class division that develops from capitalism Continue Reading...
Phantom Limbs When we ask ourselves what is knowledge (as we do when we are engaged in the process of philosophy) we are effectively asking what is our relationship with the world. V.S. Ramachandran - as is the norm for philosophers - asks the quest Continue Reading...
How is it possible, then, that we can come to know anything? Methodological doubt is best represented in the first of the Meditations, "What can be called into doubt." In this meditation, the meditator is forced to think about everything that he h Continue Reading...
Socrates asked them to come forward with their thoughts if they were "still doubtful about the argument." The two proceed to make a sophisticated argument, contrary to Socrates' points, that were counterexamples to the points about the body and the Continue Reading...
Social Theory in the View of Phenomenology: Alfred Schutz Who was Alfred Schutz, and why was his work on social theory and phenomenology so important? This is an important question that must be answered here, and will be answered, but there are oth Continue Reading...
Instead, he challenges the reliability of the person who claims knowledge, by asking him for a definition that would hold for all circumstances. The point is not to ascertain whether he is right in this case, but to see whether his claim could hold Continue Reading...
Thus we ought to take seriously the suggestion that, insofar as "the human individual develops biologically in a continuous fashion... The rights of a human person might develop in the same way (on the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion). Finally, Continue Reading...
Wulf, S.J. (2000). "The skeptical life in Hume's political thought. Polity, 33(1), 77. Wulf uses David Hume's well-known skepticism to advance his concerning the extreme degrees to which philosophy had been taken before returning to less radical m Continue Reading...
Efforts were made to check the power of the majority as well as the minority, for to achieve justice not simply in the perfection of the individual soul but to create a functioning and just government that has effective checks and balances that stym Continue Reading...
Civil Society and the Rights of Individuals Through the years, civil society and the rights of man have come to know many things. Many philosophers have helped lay the groundwork for how we govern ourselves today. We have words like democracy, autoc Continue Reading...
James believed that belief in God could be contemplated in terms of "live and dead hypotheses" (James 2010). He argues that when one is trying to find an argument for God existing or God not existing, we must consider three things: 1) Living or dea Continue Reading...
Personal Theory Self-Exploration When will you begin that long journey into yourself? One of the most famous philosophers in history of mankind, Rumi emphasized on exploring or discovering one self. Self-exploration is one of the fundamentals of p Continue Reading...
Realistically Heidegger was at least vaguely a theist, which is rather contrary to the existentialist mind set of humanism, but his point was still existential and in his early work, at least he attempted to clearly deduce a way of stressing the nee Continue Reading...
Plato vs. De Tocqueville -- The ideal vs. The real vision of the democratic character and the democratic state Both the Greek philosopher Plato and French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville approached different 'lived' versions of contemporary democracy Continue Reading...
The metaphysical constructivists who are successful hardly take the truth of a substantive normative claim for granted. Transcendence In his phenomenological descriptions, Levinas used various accounts of transcendence to refer to the tradition an Continue Reading...
If it was a dream, then the programmers clearly attempted to incorporate background realism. For example, the characters get dirty; like sweat, dirt is not something that the programmers would need to create to have realistic humans, but there is di Continue Reading...
Plato conceived that there were two great causes of human corruption, viz., bad or ill-directed education, and the corrupt influence of the body on the soul. His ethical discussions, therefore, have for their object, the limiting of the desires, an Continue Reading...
This then leads Plato to a consideration of how morality can be applied to reason. The basis of morality -- or virtue -- for the philosopher is happiness. Reason dictates that the greatest joy (or the highest good) is in living according to the dic Continue Reading...
It was with the Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being, that Spinoza challenged the rabbinate by advocating complete freedom of thought. According to Jewish tradition, dissent was traditionally confined to people in the clergy. However, Spinoza p Continue Reading...
Relationship of Certainty to God From Descartes Compare With Gassedi, Pascal, and Spinoza The French philosopher Rene Descartes was one of the most transformational figures of his time and his work is now considered one of the pillars of modern West Continue Reading...
Philosophical Analysis of Animal-Human Interactions Both animal rights and ecocentrism discourage hunting, although for different reasons. Thesis: Animal rights philosophy views hunting from a moral perspective, as the unnecessary infliction of suff Continue Reading...
slavery and citizenship in Aristotle's Politic: Aristotle believes that most people in the world can be enslaved devoid of injustice as they are born to be slaves. At the same time some are born to be free and dominate as masters. Most modern criti Continue Reading...
In addition, the philosopher will approach the manner in which man achieves the understanding of the world. In his opinion, the knowledge which man generally has is not a pure one. On the contrary he will generally deal with appearances. He underli Continue Reading...
So in order for the good to spread and evil to be eradicated, Divine Law had to arbitrate (Thomas Aquinas, 1947). Conclusion It is clear that no one can dispute the fact that every creature is born with certain fundamental rights, known as Natural Continue Reading...
Then, by beginning with the idea that there may or may not be a chair present at all, one can begin building on those truths that remain to establish more truths and eventually establish the presence of the chair. Descartes uses such reasoning not Continue Reading...
