René Descartes

is good and what is evil or what is right and wrong. Moral values govern the behaviour, decisions and feelings of an individual. When determining wether it is morally acceptable to experiment on animals, such views as Peter Singer’s speciesism, Rene Descartes’ Cartesian theory and Immanuel Kant’s Kantian ethics can be used to examine both sides of this question. Speciesism proposes that experimenters indicate a failure to give equal consideration to the interests of all beings, irrespective of…

Within chapter ten of Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga creates and shapes the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, which begins with a premise titled “Darwin’s Doubt.” This premise argues that true belief, given the existence of evolution by way of naturalism, is extremely low, if not entirely impossible. Plantinga strengthens this argument by discussing material naturalism (specifically reductive and nonreductive materialism). However, over the course of his argument, he…

The modern church is yet to get on the same page with scientific revolution. The war between religion and science has been in play for centuries and with technology growing at the current lightening speed, the science side will take fewer casualties this time unlike before. Both science and religion were in existence by the 16th and 17th centuries and so was their war. The Catholic Church was full with fear that heretics would spread opinions and teachings that were in contradiction with the…

However, the brain of the classics was a singular organ of matter. Rene Descartes, who studied the brain in the 1600’s, theorized that the mind and the body were separate entities. The mental existed independent of the body. Descartes chose a singular structure in the brain as the unifying structure of the mental and the body. That structure known as the pineal gland is often to this day referred to as “the seat of the soul.” Descartes suggested, then there was no biological basis to rational…

Rationalism and Empiricism ; focussing on Rationalism When we do somethings whose results are known to us, like throwing an object in the air, so we know that it will fall back on the ground, How can we say this? Is it because we’ve seen things fall if we toss them up in the air or is it because of us learning some laws of physics ( the gravitation law ) The above example shows Empirisicm and Rationalism in the respective cases. This has been a famous argument in philosophy for a long time.…

Introduction to Philosophy (U73100) Title of essay: Is the Mind/Brain identity theory a defensible position? In this essay I will show that the mind/brain identity theory is the only logically defensible position when it comes to the mind/body problem. To do this I will be looking at the most popular arguments and positions concerning the mind body problem. I will begin by discussing what is meant by the term 'mind body problem', the mind body problem is a philosophical issue concerning…

change the world like men can, unable to live their lives freely as me, and mostly unaware of their own oppression. We can also include the ideas and methods of the famous French philosopher, Rene Descartes, in which I would think he would agree on the point of women being considered…

Consciousness The study of consciousness is more valuable than just the fulfilment of human interest arguments that consciousness plays a large role in can be influenced gravely if we were able to state exactly where consciousness exists and if we're able to demonstrate it. Consciousness is defined as the individual subjective experience that one has of the world either based on or involving the qualia. Qualia can be defined as are the communicable involuntary conscious mental…

The natural inclination to understand phenomena in scientific ways is an innately human tendency (Haas, 2011). This desire to seek scientific explanations, particularly to explain empirical phenomena, is pervasive not only in scientific fields but also various disciplines. An exorbitant amount of research aims to investigate the impact that scientific phenomena have on social and cultural contexts, among others. Moreover, with continued scientific advancements, this desire is driven by…

opposite. A name for the argument against the identity theory is eliminative materialism also known as Dualism. This states that there is no such thing as mental states or thoughts, the exact opposite of physicalism. Rene Descartes is the most famous supporter of this ideology. Descartes states in his Sixth Meditation, his mind is a thinking, non-extended thing while his body is an extended, non-thinking thing therefore they cannot be the same thing. Carruthers disagrees with this theory very…