A priori

This drove Descartes to find a sound solution to this issue of existence. He concluded that our senses cannot be trusted and that anything we perceive as a posteriori knowledge, anything that is gained from experience prior to previous knowledge (a priori) can be trusted based on the lack of influence by those external. He came up with this theory after studying the senses and noticing that at any given moment ones senses cannot be trusted and can ever so deceptive. He touches on the senses…

The source that I chose to critique assignment is entitled “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in 19th Century America” and was written by Carol Smith-Rosenberg for the 1975 edition of the Journal of Women in Culture and Society. My critique is not based on what is in this piece, but rather what is missing. Smith-Rosenberg does a magnificent job portraying the intimacies shared between women privately. She uses thousands of written correspondence between women in the…

wit, Relations of ideas, and Matters of Fact (Enquiry IV). Hume views Relations of ideas to be the beliefs of the sciences of Math and everything that is intuitively or demonstratively certain. Hume views these beliefs to be attained by reasonings a priori; meaning they are discoverable by operation of thought without the need of experience. Hume views Matters of Fact as the beliefs that report the nature of things that are already in existent. All reasonings concerning Matter of Fact seem to be…

all be in a never ending dream. Descartes concluded that there is no way to distinguish between sensory perceptions in and out of a dream, it is possible for use to be in a dream twenty for seven. Lastly, Descartes beings into doubt our belief of a priori knowledge because he suggests that it could be the case that God is an evil genius that deceives us. The evil genius could make it so we are fooled into believing the what is true is false. After Descartes has torn down everything that he holds…

David Hume is an empiricist. Empiricism is the ideology that all knowledge is obtained through sense experience, or interactions with the world through sight, taste, touch, smell, and sound (Markie, 2017). This school of thought also encompasses a posteriori thinking. The term a posteriori refers to drawing conclusions only after having experienced something through the senses. These are the bases of Hume’s understanding of knowledge and philosophy. In his work, An Enquiry Concerning Human…

Starting out, George Berkeley begins with having a clear understanding and characterization of common sense. He says that there are two principles by which we characterize “commonsense realism”. George Berkeley says the two principles are, “1. Things exist independently of our perceiving that they do. 2. Things have the qualities they seem to have: The rose we see is really red, the sugar on our tongue is really sweet, and the fire we approach is really hot” (Melchert 382). Previously, Galileo,…

An ontological argument is a deductive argument with a priori premises. It was first offered by St. Anslem in the 11th century. St. Anslem was a Benedictine monk, priest and scholar. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to his death in 1109. (Lecture) The ontological argument aims to prove the existence of God from a priori premises including the definition of God: a being than which no greater being can be conceived. A priori proposition is knowledge that is gained through deduction.…

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant purportedly sets out to bridge the gap between rationalism and empiricism arguing that knowledge exists both a priori and a posteriori; that is through experience (sensible intuition) and independent of experience. In doing so, Kant hopes to get closer to a formal system and/or science of philosophy. Insofar as establishing philosophy as a science is possible, Kant believed that this system could stem from a small set of mutually dependent principles. After…

possession of knowledge of space, it is impossible to experience objects spatially. Metaphysical exposition also involves the proof that space is a pre-condition of all physical experience and yet “not as a determination dependent on them, and is an a priori representation that, necessarily grounds outer appearances." In other terms, physical objects cannot be imagined without space but we can imagine space without any existence of physical objects. These two points establish the pureness of…

If one takes the first premise of any of the 3 different formulations of the argument to be true then the conclusion must be accepted because of it being a priori argument it is logically necessary. Being a priori argument that “proves” the existence of God through definitions makes the argument an analytic argument, relying on the meaning of the words used to determine it is validity. Hence, following a “rational” train of thought…