belief -- or idealism -- and the way humans must evolve through a process to become actualized. In essence, we are presented with a dark cave in which there are prisoners who have been chained since birth so they can look only forward. Behind these unfortunates is a fire, the only light in their universe. Behind the fire are people manipulating puppets so that shadows are cast on the walls. So, the only "reality" the prisoners know are the lessons from the shadows -- reality, or their view of idealism. If suddenly a prisoner is freed he notices that the shadows are not real, but the puppets are. Now imagine if this same prisoner is forced out of the cave and into the light. As soon as the pain from the brightness diminishes he discovers that the most real things, the ideal, are those physical outside of the cave (Huard, 2006). This forms the notion that as humans, we are chained by society and blinded by culture so we lose our ability to think, to imagine, and to actualize. This also prevents us from seeing the truth of the ideal, which is universal. When Russell tells us that if we say things known must be in the mind, then we have a more subjective notion of relationships between experience and the world (data being input). In the modern world...
One cannot, for instance, walk on Mars to understand, through media and study, that Mars does exist and has form and features. "If I am acquainted with a thing which exists, my acquaintance gives me knowledge that it exists" (Russell). By the same token, technology has advanced far enough that through computer and digital manipulation, things may appear that are patently false -- placing figures into places they have never been, CGI movie creatures, etc. Thus, idealism, coupled with a healthy dose of intellectual skepticism may be the only way we can make sense of the modern world.
As a teacher of the very young therefore, idealism in the sense of the attainment of higher values and aims has a special and positive significance in my profession and personal life. Dealing with very young minds places a particularly heavy burden on the teacher. The teacher has a responsibility to shape these minds. It is a truism but also a reality that the early years of education are often
Human Beings Make Sense of Things In the early-1900s, Edmund Husserl sought to provide psychology with a truly scientific basis, not by copying the physical sciences but through the description of conscious experiences. This would be a truly humanistic psychology, grounded in human life and experience rather than materialistic and mechanistic theories like functionalism and behaviorism. Karl Jaspers called for a psychology that would describe phenomena such as "hallucinations, delusions,
Philosophy: Empiricism Empiricism: Does it Collapse into Idealism? What is Empiricism? It is important at first to identify the fact that "empiricism" may refer to a method -- for example, the "empirical method" of observing child behavior, or an "empirical study of cancer in rats" -- and it also may refer to the philosophy (or the theory) that embraces empiricism. That philosophy of empiricism, by one definition, "has its roots in dualist theories
Philosophy Field Trip Realism: A flower is a flower. Idealism: A flower is an ultimate idea. Pragmatism: A flower is what I take it to be. Existentialism: A flower exists for me Rationalism: A flower is this way for now. Realism is a development of the Platonic theory of Forms which stated that universals such as "red" or "man" have an independent, objective existence, either in a realm of their own or in the mind of
Berkley stated that because the senses were potentially faulty, everyone's sense perceptions and thus everyone's 'truth' was unique and variable. However, most empiricists like Locke believed that some (few) things could be known with certainty, like shape and color, even if other properties of things could not be known. The empiricists come from the Aristotelian rather than the Platonic tradition of philosophy, and had rigorous standards of truth based upon
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 has believed throughout the course of his life. He must then make a conscious decision to do away with all of these lies and begin again so that the
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