Ontology

1 Knowledge of the outside world is something we can only attain through our senses. Unfortunately, we can easily fall for illusions. Descartes explains in his First Meditation that he cannot trust his senses to obtain knowledge of the external world because they have deceived him before ( Descartes, 1 ). The major deception of the senses is dreaming. So dreams falter the true knowledge we obtain through our senses. The argument of lacking trust in senses due to dreams is commonly viewed…

Peter Morath 12/22/2017 Philosophy of Mind 330 Prof. Jon Stoltz In Defense of Disjunctivist Theories of Mind Confronting Naïve Realism Most philosophers agree that some forms of hallucination might not be subjectively distinguishable from proper perception. This agreement, however, does not bring unity to ideas of perception. The intentionalist claims that because these two experiences cannot be subjectively distinguished, then they must be experiences of the same kind. The disjunctivist,…

The Allegory of the Cave is a hypothesis put into perspective by Plato, regarding human awareness. In the short story a group of prisoners have been confined in a cavern ever since birth with no knowledge of the outside world. They are chained facing a wall unable to turn their heads. While a fire behind them gives off a faint light. Sometimes people pass by carrying figures of animals and other objects that cast shadows on the wall. The prisoners believe that the shadows are real and they begin…

At the beginning of his fourth meditation, Descartes begins reflecting on the three main certainties that he has developed so far: 1) that God exists, 2) that God is not a deceiver, and 3) that God created him and is therefore responsible for all his faculties, including his faculty of judgment. Descartes seems satisfied with the first two convictions, however, he begins to explore the conflict that arises with the third; that, “if everything that is in me comes from God, and he did not endow me…

Love in Carver. Carver doesn't talk about Love. He doesn't mention love. The word love comes up only twice in Will you please be quiet, please? just as a vocative. It's not used at all in A small, good thing. Does Carver talk about love? What links these people? What brought them together in the first place? And, what's love from his point of view? In the beginning of Will you please be quiet, please?, Carver says that Ralph's father told him that life was a 'very serious matter'. Ralph,…

Blaise Pascal Pascal's Wager is an argument in philosophy presented by the seventeenth-century French philosopher. He thinks that people are betting on their lives that God exists or not. In Pascal’s view, he argues that a person should live as if God exists and believe in God. If in reality the God does not exist, they still can get the profits in their life. He also developed the theory of modern probability, and believed the reason cannot prove or not prove the existence of God.…

Descartes argues that the only way to arrive at the truth is to postpone on judgment until something is “clearly and distinctly understood.” He comes to this conclusion by first stating that as a creation of God we are imbued with free will and understanding, and since God is a being of ultimate goodness, he therefore would not imbue us with gifts that would deceive us as “trickery or deception are always indicative of some imperfection (54).” Descartes also posits that although humans are made…

Timelessness Elegance is timeless. Absolute beauty is timeless. Eternity is a term used to express the concept of something that has no end and/or no beginning. God has no beginning or end. He is outside the realm of time. Eternity is not something that can be absolutely related to God. God is even beyond eternity. God is timeless rather than being eternally in time or being beyond time. Time was simply created by God as a limited part of His creation for accommodating the workings of His…

Traditionally, epistemology has been defined as the theory of knowledge in which the primary goal has been to obtain truth while avoiding false beliefs . Knowledge was defined and universally accepted to be “Justified True Belief”. However, this was challenged when Edmund Gettier released a 1963 paper which demonstrated that justified true beliefs are intuitively not sufficient for knowledge due to epistemic luck. This sudden revelation triggered “a cottage industry of knowledge-analysers” ,…

Space-time is like a mirror. Nothing exists in the mirror, but mirror can manifest everything at all its points. However, any given point of a mirror can project only one entity to any given observer. No observer can see a point of mirror projecting more than one entity, but another observer located at a different angle will see a different entity at the same point. A mirror can manifest different physical entities at the same point, but not to the same observer. Space-time remains unaffected by…