René Magritte

As stated by the famous surrealist artist, Rene Magritte, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see”. Majority of his paintings were done during the surrealism movement. This movement began in the 20th century and it allowed artists and writers to tap into the unconscious minds of individuals through their creative works. Rene Magritte used common everyday objects in his paintings and transformed them into cryptic and thought provoking images by using veils, colors, and proper placement of objects and people. In order to understand the meaning behind Magritte’s paintings, one must understand the artist. At the ripe age of fourteen, Rene Magritte was forced to deal with the death of his mother. She committed suicide and her body was found in a nearby river. Magritte watched as he body was carried out from the waters with a cloth covering her face. In his famous paintings The Lovers I and II, the characters faces are covered in cloth. When his artwork is viewed without the knowledge of events in his life such as this, then the artwork has a very narrow…

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…

The role of God in Descartes’ meditations is very significant, and I believe that he is indeed entitled to use God’s existence in this way. The purpose of this essay is to set out Descartes’ main arguments of God. Firstly, I will briefly discuss a fundamental philosophical topic – how could I have been created if there were no God? Secondly, I will assess one of Descartes’ main arguments of the roots of knowledge and God’s role with this, and finally I will speak about Descartes’ ontological…

Throughout the history of Philosophy the topic that is filled with the most arguments is the existence of a perfect being. Many people believe that a “perfect being” is capable of existing while others believe that the “perfect being” only exists in the form of God. Philosophy is flooded with arguments for and against the existence of God. I chose the photograph of The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci because the picture itself is of a man who seems to be completely proportional, a man who is…

The Ontological Exercise: The Cartesian and Kantian Positions In the book Philosophy of Religion, John Hicks summarizes the main point of Rene Descartes’s version of the ontological argument as: “The essence or defining nature of each kind of thing includes certain predicates, and Descartes’s ontological argument claims that existence must be among the defining predicates of God… [s]o existence is a necessary characteristic of a supremely perfect being” (Hick 18). The main premise of…

The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.” Throughout history technology has changed the way people see the world. As the internet is becoming more and more demanding and our primary source for information, it is also affecting our ability to read any sort of medium. In Carr’s article “Is Google making…

Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes have different views on human nature. leading to what the government should do to overcome this lazy and aggressive behaviour. Kant is a philosopher from the 1700s who believed in people becoming enlightened. “Enlightenment is man 's emergence from his self- imposed immaturity” (Garside, Lecture: Kant 2014). Enlightenment causes people to question themselves and others which can also lead to becoming independent within society. Hobbes was a philosopher in the…

Our minds and body correlate to each other and are the reason we can move and willingly do what we want. However, are our minds and body distinct? Can we even exist without a mind or without a body? Rene Descartes’ theory of “Mind-Body Dualism” discusses such philosophical questions and claims that although our mind and bodies are synced, they are not similar by way of division. Many questions remain on how “Mind-Body Dualism” works, many of which will be discussed in this paper, beginning with…

Outline Introduce the problem 1-2 sentences 50 words Decades have passed and the science community researched and were still not able to discover the biological function of the pituitary gland that was said to be the " seat of the soul". Philosophers have claimed that the pituitary gland is the habitat of the soul Before criticizing the claim, articulate it clearly so that we understand why someone would make each a claim. In other words, present the argument of your opponent in debate,…

When attempting to solve the problem concerning the immortality of the soul, both Plato and Hume must rely on analogy. Plato, being a rationalist, argues that the soul is immortal and is comparable to a form, for it is invisible and incomposite, unlike material objects. Hume, on the other hand, believes that the soul is mortal and compares souls to perishable objects such as bodies. Although neither analogy can offer any validity, Hume 's argument for the mortality of the soul is far more…