Philosophy of language

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.…

Introduction In philosophy, selfishness is the hypothesis that one's self is, or ought to be, the inspiration and the objective of one's own activity. Egoism has two variations, descriptive or normative . The descriptive (or positive) variation imagines selfishness as a real depiction of human issues. That is, people are roused by their own advantages and cravings, and they can't be depicted something else. The normative variation recommends that people ought to be so spurred, paying little…

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…

a supreme being, or a supreme good, separated these two philosophies to act as conflicting works. To Aristotle, this “good” was the human mind’s ability to understand and achieve eudaimonia, wisdom, and truth; when St. Augustine believed that the “good”…

Megan Sanders Phil 101 Explain Socrates’ view of the fear of death (see 29a-c, 40c-e). Is any of this plausible? Socrates views death as something we should not fear. He believes we have no right to be afraid of death because we do not know what or who awaits us after we pass; and for the people who are afraid of it are considered ignorant. As in they believe it is something to fear because they do not know what is going to happen next. Socrates believes that is considered ignorant or…

There are strong similarities in the relationship between critical thinking and ethics. To obtain the most beneficial outcome when critical thinking or in an ethical situation, the process is basically the same. Throughout this paper I will be discussing what critical thinking is, and my opinion of an ethical situation. I will also discuss the six critical-thinking steps and their benefits. My personal opinion is critical thinking is a self- directed way of justifying an outline of…

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” ,…

The movie I chose for this paper was, The Matrix. While watching this movie not only did the special effects and fight scenes interest me and make me think it was a good movie, but, additionally I noticed a lot of philosophical parallels. It's easy to see that The Matrix is based off of Plato's allegory, the cave. The cave is about a prison that people are trapped in and can't get out, they are seeing these images and shadows in front of them, but they are not aware that the real images are…

Joseph Campbell was a writer and professor who studied mythology, Campbell was very knowledgeable about myths and believed that myths were always evolving and adapting in order to fulfill the needs of modern day audiences, as he so eloquently stated: “…myths offer life models. But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And…

Response to Rachels “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism” Different cultures have different conceptions of right and wrong. The Eskimos, for instance, commit infanticide often, leaving their babies to die in the snow. Although we uphold the same value of caring for our offspring, an Eskimo family may be unable to care for their child and select death as their final option. In our culture this is viewed as horrific, but to the Eskimos, it is a part of life (Rachels 35). Cultural relativism says…