Jordan Mashal Professor Landers PHI 344 24 Septemeber 2017 Dualism Prompt 1: The central claim of substance dualism relies on the non identity of the mind and the body. Gotfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a German philosopher, articulated a law that defines the notion of identity as: for any x and y, if x is identical to y, then x and y have all the same properties. Further, any two things that have all and only the same properties as one another are identical to each other. Finally, if there is…
In this paper, I will be doing a critical summary of the parts of the soul by Plato in The Republic. Plato argues that the soul has three parts. These three parts are the Spirited, the Calculating and the Desiring. The calculating part he says, is that which makes man think rationally while the desiring part is more irrational as it is guided by desires and pleasures rather than logic. The spirited part on the other hand, is that which represents an emotional reaction for what seems to be just,…
Is it better to live life as a happy fool, or as to have great wisdom at the expense of happiness? Do we think greatly of the knowledge we possess, or are we aware that despite the great sum of the knowledge we have, there is far more about which we are ignorant. These are among the questions we are forced to examine in reading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the later Apology, and Voltaire’s Story of a Good Brahmin. In the allegory of the Cave, Plato poses a question which contrasts our…
Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, put focus on simplicity, silence, obedience, and frequent self-examination, not unlike Socrates. One major belief of Pythagoras was the transfiguration of souls, which is a type of reincarnation. Pythagoras believed that after each death, the soul changes onto different animals, until it eventually is transfigured into a human’s body as it is being born. Because of this belief, Pythagoras believed it was morally wrong to eat other animals. In a…
Much of the world can be seen through the lenses of dualities. Phenomena such as dark and light, life and death, and day and night are important to understanding the world. Both parts exist in the same whole, and both are important for sustaining the world we live in. In the sacred Hindu text The Bhagavad-Gita, dualities are put on a unique pedestal, where they are both praised for being how the cosmos function and criticized for their tendency to lead to worldly obsession. A reflection of both…
Locke’s central thesis was that personal identity consists, not in sameness of substance, but in ‘sameness of consciousness’(Shoemaker on the Memory Theory). When something psychological like soul, memory and something immaterial etc. are assumed to account for persistence through time, which is the numerical identity between objects at different times(Seymour, Lecture 4/4), they are categorized as the non-physical accounts. In Locke’s view, consciousness was used as a synonym of memory…
aspects to human beings, an empirical body and a soul which is not of the empirical world; this belief is the core of his theory about body and soul. Plato believed that our body, being empirical, used senses to gain knowledge which he saw as an unreliable guide to the truth. Because our body is driven and focussed more around pleasures, such as eating and sleeping, this gets in the way of philosophical and intellectual pursuits. He saw that our souls or ‘psyche’…
Author, Christopher Hawke, wrote, “How shallow to presume war exists only within the physical world. Battles are waged for mind and soul, where things far from comprehension are confronted.” David Foster Wallace’s use of characterization throughout “Good People” paints a picture of a protagonist fighting several simultaneous inner battles for his own mind and soul. As Lane A. Dean weighs superficial predicaments like his pending relationship with Sheri and the fate of their unborn child, his…
from death”. He claimed that they need to get rid of the body in order to receive clean knowledge; therefore, death is a good thing depending on what they desire. He said that philosophers make a practice off to leave because they desire to have the soul itself. Therefore, it tells the reader that he is prepared for death, and since he seeks for knowledge, will not care to leave his body as well.…
paragraph 6 he talks about 3 different types of knowledge. The first type of knowledge he speaks of is true knowledge. He describes this type of knowledge as “...the colourless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul.” He describes it in this way to stress the fact that knowledge isn’t a real thing. It is something that only the mind can use. It isn’t useful for anything but the mind. True knowledge is not an item, but a product of the mind. The second type…