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 sensory experience rather than reason alone. Another way of phrasing the debate between empiricism and rationalism is that it is an essential conflict between the superiority of a posteriori reasoning vs. A priori reasoning.
A posteriori reasoning depends upon what we know about past events and information to make inferences, in short, observations and experience. A priori reasoning suggests just the opposite, suggesting that everything is there, if only we can learn to think correctly in a deductive manner. Thus geometry or deduction is the epitome of rationalism, in contrast to the scientific method deployed by empiricism. But eventually, empiricism's emphasis on science began to unravel, as David Hume's radical empiricism postulated that an individual could not create general laws about behavior, instead someone only make statements about specific instances. This truth-standard seemed to undercut the scientific value of empiricism, since even science requires some scientific, consistent laws to be valuable.
The conflict between empiricists and rationalists was to some extent resolved, or at least bridged in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, later called the founder of German Idealism, attempted through his categorical imperative to provide a moral law and guide for human behavior, suggesting that certain rules of conduct must be observed and obeyed as if they were to set the law for all time (reflecting the deductive logic exemplified in Platonism and rationalism). But he bridged both of the questions that arise in previous thinker's philosophies by suggesting that neither the rationalists nor the empiricists could be judged entirely correct. Kant stated there was a mind that existed before 'experience,' contrary to the empiricists' assertion. For 'experiences' to occur there must be a pre-existing mind. But unlike the rationalists, Kant did not believe that there were pre-existing ideas in the pre-experiential mind, like the existence of God.
Kierkegaard, along with Kant, is called one of the founders of modern philosophy, but Kierkegaard is particularly associated with existentialism, the radical freedom and sense of loneliness and alienation human beings experience in the world. Man exists in a state of anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, which could temporarily be remedied by pleasure, but a truly ethical man must make a leap of faith beyond rationality and believe in God, beyond all reason, to feel fulfilled. However,...
Yet rather than understand this revelation as something which is freeing, Sartre experienced it as something fearful. He speaks of this freedom as being a form of damnation: Man is condemned to be free... condemned because he has not created himself - and is nevertheless free. Because having once been hurled into the world, he is responsible for everything he does..." (Gaarder, 379-380) If one is free, then one has not
Philosophy If Freud, in his Psychoanalysis Theory, believes that each person - from infancy - represses impulses or desires, which its parents reject - and shuts these unwanted impulses out into the unconscious. These are what he calls repressed thoughts. He suggests that, since this process happens throughout life, that infant grows into adulthood, doing things out of the command of those repressed impulses and desires in the unconscious mind. He
Philosophy Sigmund Freud enumerates that the human psyche consists of the unconscious id, the ego (which is partly conscious and partly unconscious), and the superego (also partly conscious and partly unconscious). At first, a newborn has only an id, which consists of blind drives that seek satisfaction. In a few months, the ego is developed when the newborn experiences resistance and frustration of its drives by the outside world: it realizes
The court case of MacKinnon and Dworkin refers to the instance in which anti-pornography radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon along with other members of the feminist anti-pornography movement proposed a series of local ordinances, called the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which qualified pornography as being a violation of women's civil rights. The ordinances could not be accepted by city officials because of the fact that they seemed absurd
Nearing the end of the 1960s, the analytic or language philosophy became the central focus point which led to the isolation of the classroom setting and the problems that came with it (Greene, 2000). Most of the educational philosophers of the time were inclined towards restricting themselves to the official aspects and problems like the sovereignty of the system without any influence from the society and the surrounding environment and
Euthyphro then offers the third definition, derived from the second one: I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious. Socrates then replies with the creation of a dilemma -- would the things and people be considered pious because they are loved by gods, or would the gods all love them because they are pious. After a deeper process
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now