Ontology

Answering the Checklist Questions: The Critical Decisions 1. Scale of measurement? Both the F and the A-S scales are considered to be interval measures distributed normally in the population. Use Fig. 10. 2. Hypothesis? The hypothesis in this case is one of association. (One group is being measured on two different response dimensions). We can never test for differences between completely unrelated measures. 3. If the hypothesis of difference is tested, are the groups independent or…

Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican Monk during the time of the 11th century. Thomas Aquinas believe that “God was revealed through reason (natural revelation) and faith (special revelation)”(69). In one of his works “Proofs for the Existence of God”(70), Aquinas works out five ways that prove of God’s existence, going on to say “it is possible to demonstrates God’s existence, although not a priori (by pure reason), yet a posterior from some work of His more surely known to us”(70). In other terms to…

In “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” Nietzsche sets out to show that humans have developed our own senses of truth and formation of concept, which are mere lies. He says it starts with a stimulus that creates an image metaphor, which leads to a sound metaphor, which creates language. In Ignorance: How It Drives Science, Stuart Firestein’s explains that knowledge does not come after ignorance, it is the other way around. Nietzsche asserts that there is no thing as absolute truth. To him…

Saint Aquinas was a significant Christian philosopher and theologian of the Medieval Ages. In addition to attempting to Christianize Aristotle’s arguments, Aquinas also stressed the idea of actuality, connecting the “act” with the esse, or being of the object. He argued that something without an essence could not have actuality. Similarly, an nonexistent object cannot have an essence. Aquinas elaborated on his idea of the “acts of being” by putting objects in a hierarchical structure based on…

Without philosophy, the study of human existence and reality, the world would be a dark and confusing place. We use philosophy to try and answer the seemingly unanswerable questions about life. Unlike science, which seeks to discover how the universe works, philosophy studies why the universe works. Because philosophy is subjective, there are many different theories about how people should conduct their lives. Countless philosophers have written down their philosophies over hundreds of years,…

The cosmological argument is one theory for the existence of God; it is based upon the existence of a unique being, which is commonly referred to as God. This based upon facts regarding causation, contingency, motion, change and finitude relative to the processes within the universe. In this essay I am going to describe the arguments of Aristotle, one of the founders of this argument and Leibniz, who argues for the principle of sufficient reason; a theory that goes hand in hand with the…

In Descartes’ Meditation II. ¶ 1­3 Descartes concludes, "'I am, I exist' is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind." Descartes reaches this conclusion by first asserting that his method of doubt so far has left him doubting his senses. He intends on further using his method of doubt to, like Archimedes, discover at least one thing that is certain, even if this one thing is that nothing is certain. Descartes reasons that his sensory concept of an object cannot…

Had they been alive in 1511, imagine the reaction of Pico della Mirandola, author of the key text of Renaissance humanism called the Oration on the Dignity of Man, and his contemporary Savonarola, the reactionary Christian preacher/prophet who condemned Renaissance secular art and culture, if together they had entered the Stanza della Segnatura library of Pope Julius II. On opposite walls they would have seen two contrasting fresco masterpieces of the young Renaissance painter Raphael: “The…

McKenna Delton Professor Navarro English 2010 10 December 2015 The Myth of Utopia A society is a group of people who share a common culture as a consequence of their overlapping interactions. This bond is the result of communal institutions, beliefs, resources, characteristics, or regions. The concept of a Utopia, or an ideal society, was first introduced by Sir Thomas More in his book of the same name. In Utopia, More details a civilization in which everything is held in common, from property…

Assuming an understanding of Sartre’s division of the Being in-itself from the Being for-itself and the characterization of the being for-itself with its relation to nothingness, we may advance a description of Sartre’s concept of bad faith as a lie to ourselves in which we attempt to construct our Being into a “little God” (Sartre, 1984, pp. 81) by asserting our essence in the Being in-itself while maintaining our transcendence. This comes as a desire to assuage the anguish brought upon by the…