Risk perception

Descartes, Plato, and The Matrix: A Comparison The Matrix, The Republic, and Meditations on First Philosophy all provide some valuable food for thought on the issues of reality and what we think we know to be true. Through their similarities and differences, we can explore some interesting perspectives on the age-old questions of “what can we know for sure if anything?” and “how do we know what we know?” As they have been, these questions will likely continue to be debated and explored for…

(2013:49) argues that “the term ‘chronicity’ is able to create types of ‘chronic’ beings.” He further discussed how “identities emerge from and are sustained by social relationships, allowing individuals to see themselves as apart from the imagined... perceptions of others” (von Peter 2013:49). The impact of such discrimination was summarised as “a reciprocal escalation by which every one of the individual’s traits is blanketed by the stigma, affecting the person’s entire presentation and…

Descartes thinks that the first premise is true because he cannot distinguish between his senses of perceptions in his dream and in reality. For example, eating food in your dream would feel as real as eating food while you are awake. Descartes believes that when we are dreaming, we are doing a certain thing and perceiving the environments and sensual stimuli…

A glimpse of realty in Christopher’s perception Mark Haddon’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the improbable story of fifteen year old boy named Christopher Boone, who has a quest to investigate the murder of the neighbor’s dog however, he stumbles upon a secret that forever changes his life. Throughout the story there are numerous examples of his odd reactions that illuminate the way his mind works so precisely and demonstrate a consistent pattern of Christopher’s…

The classical understanding of sense perception in the western tradition dates from Aristotle and his work on “the nature of living things”, discussed in the treatise “De Anima”. In an attempt to manage the cognitive data produced by the experience of the world, perception was divided into the five classical senses visus-sight, auditus-hearing, odoratus-smell, gustus-taste, and tactus-touch, mediated by…

• Berkeley is saying in this paragraph that all the world is made up of are ideas and that there are three different ways that you can get these ideas, one is the senses, another is the operations/passions of the mind and finally there is memory and imagination. • He also argues that a combination of ideas gives us objects such as apples or stones as some ideas always go together such as the colour and taste of the apple. • Berkeley then goes on the say that there has to be something to…

Research Essay In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the main character is isolated by her husband due to her illness of postpartum depression. Society should be against Isolation or Alienation because social interaction is important and loneliness can create stress and take a toll on one’s physical and emotional health. The character in the story displayed signs of an illness and also begins having illusions that were imagined due to her isolation. Although, to some, Isolation or Alienation does…

In the section of the Phaedo we read, Socrates argues that one has knowledge of the form absolute equality prior to birth, and that learning is a “recovering of knowledge which is natural to us” (40). Socrates’ argument for theory of recollection and that one cannot acquire knowledge of absolute equality through empirical means does succeed despite some minor issues with it. Socrates first proves that there is no example of absolute equality in one’s own experience. To do this Socrates and his…

Since human knowledge is relative, human beings consciously (or often unconsciously) dismiss the relative by creating an absolute. This absolute is created by an absolute which, by virtue of its human origins, is relative. However, it functions in both the practical and theoretical life of human as a genuine absolute. Thus, the absolute is relatively absolutized by the human person. Being simply humans we try to make sense of the inexplicable, but what do we really now and can we possibly know…

In Michael Huemer’s essay, “The Lure of Radical Skepticism,” he expands on the idea that ‘we cannot know anything,’ by outlining four different arguments supporting the claim. (Huemer 47-57) René Descartes holds the opposite opinion, which he discusses in ‘Meditations One and Two.’ While there is validity to both sides of the argument, Huemer’s essay proves to be more reliable after dissecting Descartes’ concepts of existence. Huemer proposes that no one can know anything about the external…