Baruch Spinoza

“Dare to Know” The medieval man considered religion above all else, with life composed and ordered by God. His duty was to accept the Word, live accordingly, and reach salvation. As the seventeenth century matured, man’s ideas and theories began to mature and change. Certain men, “philosophes,” began to confront the medieval man’s way of thinking. Instead of relying on societal tradition, philosophes such as Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Denis Diderot, and Immanuel Kant challenged their contemporaries…

tradition, ask themselves three questions. First, are the ideas that tradition purports clear, coherent and credible? Inventions such as the printing press paved the way for the creation of fields such as source criticism. Individuals such as Baruch Spinoza were able to apply this form of textual analysis to religious documents. This later became a critical component of this discipline. The role played by the Protestant reformation in the discipline cannot be forgotten. Before the…

events, mental events do not have the ability or capacity to impact any kind of physical events, including behaviors (1874). This form of emergentism is called epiphenomenalism. More interestingly, Baruch Spinoza proposed a related dualist theory, which is known as double aspectism. According to Spinoza, the mind and body are similar to two sides of the same coin that they are different but inseparable from each other. He believed that physical events happening to the material body can be…

ignorance of this that gives him the illusion of freedom. Baruch Spinoza too believed that we are causally determined. He believed that experience teaches us to think that we are free because we are conscious of our actions, yet we know nothing of the causes so we experience the illusion of freedom, in the same way, decision making deceives us into thinking that free will exists. Believing that we are free does not make us free. Spinoza stated that those who believe they are free ‘dream with…

Throughout human history, different era’s have developed among societies, progressing mankind towards what it currently is today. Characterized by their many different newfound ideologies, these era’s show growth in the ability to think, act, and feel both as an individual, and also as a society. Topics such as religion, government, the economy, and philosophy were all stated, contested, and then evolved repeatedly, defining what people were like all throughout the different time periods. Two…

example, Martin van Creveld?s text The Transformation of War takes on the once untouchable theories of Clausewitz and attempts to create a modernized version of Vom Kriege. Waltz credits many classical authors, including Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Spinoza, Mill and others, for creating and defending the foundation for his arguments in Man, the State, and War. Additionally, much like their predecessors, contemporary authors cite trends within the international landscape. Those from the Italian…

Introduction A common issue persisting throughout the history of psychology is the ongoing debate on the relation of the cognitive mind and physical body. Inquiry surrounding this issue deals with the perceived entities of mind and body and concerns their nature, existence, and interaction. It is important to the field because physiology and psychology are generally seen as interacting and the outcome of this interaction has consequences on both, one influencing the other. The Ancients The…

Human rights are something that each and every person has, but what are human rights? Human rights are a set of rights that are inherited by individuals to protect them in society and it helps society give everyone an equal status of worth. Human rights have many traits including universality and incontrovertibility. Whether or not human rights are universal and incontrovertible is one of the most argued and most discussed issue in human rights. But what does it mean for human rights to be…

Canadian literature, especially at the beginning of its time, has had a tendency to be defined as the stories of Christian caucasian men and women. Abraham Moses (A.M) Klein breaks us away from this phenomenon as one of the greatest Canadian poets who came from a Jewish lineage instead. He was born in Ratno, Ukraine in 1909 and moved to Montreal, Quebec Canada a year later (Trehearne, 2010, 133). He was born into an orthodox Jewish family, and his exposure to the Jewish faith deeply influenced…