Metaphysics

most notably recognized in the field of metaphysics. He was born as an Athenian Greek around 428-348 B.C.E and was the disciple of the great Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. Plato wrote many books discussing philosophy through dialect and in fact, Plato was the one to record all of Socrates teachings. The works most known today are the Republic and Law. Plato’s most famous work is the Republic in which he discusses many aspects of his view of metaphysics. The Republic discussed many…

worthless. One thinker I did not discuss in TLS is Spinoza, who puts forward a critique of final causes in the Appendix to Book I of the Ethics. Spinoza’s metaphysics is notoriously idiosyncratic and has had few defenders, which is why I did not devote space to him in the book. His critique of final causality is closely tied to that metaphysics, and inherits its weaknesses. Still, Spinoza is one of the chief architects of modernity: the militantly secularist liberalism which has now displaced…

Descartes didn’t want to have the same fate as Galileo so he did not confront the church directly with his findings. He believes in God but also believes that there is a link between him and philosophy. At this point in history, the church put the fear of God into everyone. People had to agree with the church on everything. People were expected to not stray away, like Galileo, and discover the world in a different manner. Descartes wanted to bring the church and philosophers together, and wrote…

judgments are possible. A synthetic judgment, by description, is derived from familiarity but a priori entails independence of understanding. (Stumpf pg. 276) Kant illustrated that in several subjects such as: ethics, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics that we do make decisions including synthetics with a priori. For instance, 8 plus 3 equals 11 as judgment is a priori because it obtains the mark of requirements; 8 plus 3 must equal 11 and constantly has to do so. Although, this judgment is…

The model for Dr. Pangloss is Gottfried Leibniz, as shown by the corollary between their philosophies. From the text it is clear that Voltaire shows how Leibniz’s philosophy is useless…. perhaps even a hindrance at times. In his Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz explains that God possesses “supreme and infinite wisdom” and therefore, “acts in the most perfect manner”. In Leibniz’s La Monadologie, He states that the number of possible universes in God’s imagination is infinite. Since only one of…

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 Philosophy, Descartes explores many subtopics in the overarching theme of metaphysics, defined by Oxford Dictionaries as the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance,…

In Meditations on First Philosophy Rene Descartes attempts to reconcile a Christian metaphysics with a new epistemology contrary to the scholastic, Aristotelian worldview. He seeks new foundations that knowledge can be built upon and tries to accomplish this by identifying basic, indubitable axioms to derive more complex truths by. As Descartes had a background in mathematics and geometry, these tenets are proposed alike mathematical truths in that they are self-evidential. He calls these axioms…

Ontology: the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such. Ontological Argument: Philosophical argument for the existence of God. God (Christian): the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority, the Supreme Being. With the ontological argument, the existence of a Christian God cannot be established through rational argument. A religious monk proposed the concept that because God is so perfect, he can’t exist only in our minds, and that…

Schelling's assessment of religious representations is grounded on the combination of such a metaphysics of participation and the doctrine of potencies. This follows, insofar as these representations are the fruits of our participation in God’s creativity and in that they must be explained as living expressions of the three potencies. According to Schelling, the three prime principles or three potencies are “what serve as a mediation between the empirical being and the prime cause [God]”. As we…

Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals by Kant in 1785 introduced deontological moral philosophy, having the centralized philosophical concept of the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative states ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’ – Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals Immanuel Kant praised the absolute truth, rejecting at all costs any lie. The dilemma of truth and lying, Kant believed,…