Résumé

Though humans have been perceived and acknowledge matter through senses including taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing, but activity of the brain is not considered to be a sense. Descartes believed that there are solely two substances to ever exist, mind and matter. Descartes supposed that the body is nothing but a statue or a machine where the way the body functions can be accounted for mechanically except for the activities of the mind where none can be seen, touched, smelled, tasted or…

The subject of philosophy is a study that can be viewed in many different ways. Some ways vary in extremes from one another, but they all wish to pursue the same thing; the understanding of knowledge and human excellence. One of the most popular arguments is the comparison of mind and body. Through this paper I will go in depth on the individuals theories and discoveries, then compare them using the ideas from Plato’s Phaedo and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Both philosophers…

Love and Alienation: Love Is Blind A great mind once said that “Love is blind”, which has come to mean that if you love someone, you cannot see any faults in that person. Some believe this is a lifelong feeling, but I believe it is only temporary. In the film Her by Spike Jonze, Theodore falls in love with his operating system and is forced to grow out of the honeymoon phase as the operating system advances. When Theodore first starts to fall in love with Samantha (his OS), he is blind to the…

Dolegui Wilfried Nanfack PHIL 2101-(ET6) For this paper, I’ll be talking about Descartes’s argument for dualism in the “sixth Meditation” and “multiple personalities”. Descartes, both as a philosopher and scientist, is at two levels of understanding of the real. It’s back to nature in a mechanistic framework to which the body is subjected, and at the same time, it supports a dualism of soul and body in which the soul escapes the body determinations. In his sixth…

Within this essay I aim to compare the different discussions of language found in Hobbes (Leviathan, Chapter IV: Of Speech), Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk.III: Chapter I: Of Words of Language in General) and Berkeley (A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction §19 ff). To do this, I will be providing an account of each of the scholar’s views and from this distinguishing the similarities and differences of these views. The philosophy of language…

Throughout his “Meditations” Descartes will demonstrate that he is breaking away from the traditional way of thinking and metaphysics. And, throughout the text Descarte will lay out a foundation to a different way of thinking. One in which one does not solely rely on the senses to know things, but instead rely on an inspection of the mind. But, this conflicts with other philosophers of Descartes time, and it conflicts with what is being taught within the schools, Around Descartes time, many of…

The human mind has proliferated much polemic discussions questioning the origin of mankind’s knowledge. Rationalism proponents, who claim that the mind developed based on reason, rebutted the theory that the mind developed based on experiences. Other proponents, the advocators of empiricism, believed that human knowledge derived from sensory experiences. In addition, empiricist philosophers adamantly supported the tabula rasa, preaching how humans were born with a clear mind where experiences…

The 15th through the 18th centuries was a time for major changes in the way the people viewed the world. It was the beginning of a movement that would forever change the way of life. I am going to discuss the major intellectual developments of Europe in the 15th through the 18th centuries. I will talk about whom some of the great thinkers were and what their new ideas were. I will also analyze how these new ideas changed the way the European people viewed their world and themselves. Starting in…

The state of nature is like being in a zombie movie. It sucks. This is the plot for the popular series “The Walking Dead”. No one can be trusted, and those we do are held to a verbal and at times armed contract, “I scratch your back, you scratch mine”. In forming these contracts, we give up our freedom for protection and security. This is the thinking of 16th century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. Pessimistic, he believed that all human acts were motivated by self-interest and the quest for power.…

After the events of WWII, to say that America had changed drastically was an understatement; with the entirety of the Cold War, amongst other political strife at home and abroad, America during this time was an era of conflicting ideals. Consequently, literature changed its perspective; most commonly, however, was the transition from modernist ideals to postmodernist ideals. Much like modernism, post-modernism offered to reject the ideals presented by popular trends during their time; yet for…