Buddhist philosophy

In chapter 7 Zack talks about different philosopher view on what is right and wrong. The first philosopher mention is Immanuel Kant and his deontological ethics. Kant’s deontological ethics surround what it means to be good. According to Zack, he is premier theorist on secular human dignity. In other words, he is one of those philosophers who believe religions should not be used to determine what is good. Kant thinks to determine what is right we must take different things into consideration.…

The Significance of Morals in Storytelling According to Merriam-Webster, a moral is a lesson, especially one concerning what is right or prudent, that can be derived from a story. Morals are very significant in storytelling, and often teach lessons. Morals are the deeper meaning behind what is being told, and often the main point the audience is supposed to take away from the story. Many stories have a clear and obvious moral behind them, while other stories have more than one moral and the…

Is coherentism about justification plausible? When it comes to the acquisition of a true belief leading to knowledge, it is thought that these beliefs should be justified. Coherentism is a form of internal, non-linear justification which holds the idea that for a belief to be justified in any way it must cohere with a current system of beliefs. BonJour wrote that 'what justifies beliefs is the way they fit together' , in essence, for beliefs to be justified they must metaphorically form a…

Modernity and the Jewish individual are the topics being discussed in the entry titled Modern Jewish Thought by Leora Batnitzky. Leora Batnitzky addresses the complicated question “What value is there to Judaism in an age in which Jews do not have to be defined as Jews?”. Using modern jewish philosophers and as well their beliefs and cultural backgrounds Leora aims to answer this complex question as well as lead the reader to ask and form their own opinions on this topic. In order to begin…

For example, whilst writing The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides saw his peers plagued by anxiety, unsure whether studying philosophy would be sacrilegious and feeling as if they had to choose between the two. Throughout The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides maintains the belief that they can do both. His views of prophecy reflect this. Though Maimonides makes strong philosophical…

In the free will vs. determinism debate, hard determinism seems to be a dominant belief. Hard determinism is the belief that free will and determinism are incompatible ideas, and that it is not possible to truly believe in both without being logically inconsistent. Under hard determinism, there is a view called hard incompatibilism which Smilansky subscribes to. Hard incompatibilism is the belief that determinism is incompatible with both human freedom and moral responsibility. Saul Smilansky…

The ontological status of non spatiotemporal entities is often a controversial issue among philosophers. Fictional characters are discussed in particular because of their prominence in our ? culture. Amie L. Thomasson and Alexius Meinong address this ontological controversy surrounding fictional characters found in literature through different positions. Amie L. Thomasson’s paper, “If We Postulated Fictional Objects, What Would They Be?” introduces the artifactual theory in which fictional…

Central to Russell’s “On Denoting” view is the propositional function. The propositional function is an abstract entity that comes about from the extraction of the denoting phrase such that a gap is produced or some variable, x, that is “essentially and wholly undetermined” (“On Denoting”, 480). In the proposition “an Athenian studied with Plato”, the logical form for such a sentence is “there is an x, x is Athenian, x studied with Plato”. Russell’s analysis of the phrase “an Athenian studied…

In Phaedo, Socrates claims, in his second argument, that learning is essentially the art of recollecting things we knew before we were born. He goes on to give a definition of recollection, that states that true knowledge is found in the eternal forms that exists outside of perceptible reality. Socrates insists that the process of recollection works in a way that if you see a “lyre” or an article of clothing of a beloved, you will immediately be reminded of whose lyre or clothing it belongs to.…

In order to tease apart the puzzle, Haslanger defines possible meanings of "should believe" (Haslanger, 73-74). There are two senses of "should believe" involved in this puzzle. There is an epistemic "should believe", where one should believe something because it is the truth; and, there is a moral "should believe", where one should not believe something because of moral reasons (Haslanger, 73-74). Haslanger argues that once these two senses of "should believe" are distinguished, the puzzle…