Concepts in epistemology

one of the five theories of knowledge. There is empiricism, skepticism, science and transcendental idealism. People should use their own reason than to follow a specific logic.Rationalist believes that believing in God is innate.An innate idea is a concept or item if knowledge which is said to be universal to all humanity. This is something people are born with rather than something people have learned through experience . Rationalism has somewhat different meaning in different situations or…

Realism is another epistemology position which relates to scientific enquiry. The realism is that what the senses show us as reality is the truth: the objects have an existence independent of the human mind. Realism begins from the position that the picture that science paints of the world is a true and accurate one (Chia and Holt 2006)There are two type of realism one is direct realism another is critical realism. Direct realism says that what you see is what you get: what we experience through…

Descartes, the famous French philosopher and brilliant 17th century Scholar is credited worldwide as the founder of modern western philosophy for his works in the fields of Ontology – a branch of metaphysics regarding the ‘nature of being’- and Epistemology – the study of knowledge. What set him apart from the ancient philosophers was his avoidance of the scholastic traditions to write only in Latin (the language that only highly educated people were trained in) and instead wrote in French so…

Arwa Alnasser G00038951 PHI201 Descartes Vs. Locke René Descartes and John Locke are two philosophers who study metaphysics and epistemology. They try to answer the questions related to that field of philosophy asking: What is knowledge? what can we know? and what is the difference between opinion and knowledge? The answers to those questions for Descartes are radically different than those of Locke. The former comes from a rationalist’s point of view while the later comes from an empiricist…

Humanity as a species is preoccupied with the concept of truth. Study and research in most fields is ultimately about what we can say is true about that discipline. In politics and current events, we want to know if key political figures or information sources are “telling us the truth”. In philosophy, fields like ontology are focused on determining the truth of existence, whereas epistemology studies how we know things and whether our method for acquiring knowledge leads us to the truth. In…

The question, “Who are you?" characterizes Sophie as a critical thinker. When she finds the small letter addressed to her without a stamp in her mailbox she begins to wonder who she really is in a critical way. She wonders if her name and appearance matter in the question of who she really is. She realizes these questions are easy to think about but almost imposable to answer. Sophie begins her path to philosophical thinking. We see that Sophie is taking these questions seriously, she does not…

judgements, those being Empiricism and Rationalism. Rationalism or analytic judgement depends wholly on the Law of Contradiction and a priori knowledge. “It expresses nothing in the predicate but what has been already actually thought in the concept of the subject, though not so distinctly or with the same (full) consciousness.” (Fieser & Lillegard, 2005, p. 351) Empiricism or synthetic judgement which “require a different Principle from the Law of Contradiction, are made up of both…

The latter explains that our knowledge is wrong and that we cannot rely upon only the senses. The dream argument suggests the possibility that dreaming about the universe proves that senses are not always reliable. Three-dream case challenges the epistemology of Aristotle. While the evil demon debate goes away, the analogy of a painter who gets vision concludes that arithmetic is pure cerebral research, and more particular compared to astronomy and science. They are a fundamental step from the…

Defending Descartes: A Textual and Philosophical Analysis of Descartes’s Cogito Ergo Sum Regarding every fundamental philosophical quandary, including questions of epistemology, morality, ontology, and axiology, there are leaders of the major movements to answer these questions. These are often the most memorable and sound arguments of the time, or the most influential on the ideologies held today. Rene Descartes is certainly one of these aforementioned philosophers. In his Meditations on First…

ideas of skepticism given by Rene´ Descartes and Al-ghazali will be examined in the light of philosophical views. It will be examined that how the ideas of both philosophers were similar and ran parallel to each other in order to establish the epistemology of truth. It will be argued that the thoughts and solution presented by both was different in terms of religious theology as the thoughts of Descartes revolved around the idea of secularism and natural science while that of Ghazali remained in…