Tabula rasa

Why is there evil in this world? Although you may have not directly thought about the wickedness of society, you react on it. You are precarious of caliginous streets when the only light in the sky is the moon, you stray from those who believe would cause you harm, and you sometimes lie about your age or address just to avoid injury. The reason you protect yourself from pain is because of people equivalent to H.H. Holmes and Jeffrey Dahmer. Serial killers are described as, “a person kills…

“A DEVIL, BORN DEVIL UPON WHOSE NATURE, NURTURE WILL NEVER STICK” THE TEMPEST (WILLIAM SHKESPARE) According to Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), Nature is everything which a man brings with himself to the world while Nature is every influence that affects him after birth. The nature versus nurture debate has been a controversial issue and it can be traced to about 150years ago. In 300BC some philosophers questioned nature vs nurture in human behaviour. A Greek philosopher named Plato (428 BCE –…

Unlike rationalism, empiricism revolves around the concept of beginning one’s life with a blank slate–tabula rasa–an empty mind with essentially no existing rules, reasons, or ideas. It is the idea that one’s thoughts, ideas, and knowledge are formed and conceived based from experience. These thoughts arise through a posteriori, which means it is gained after…

In New York museums are buildings whose histories are tied into the fabric of the city. While some buildings of a different program might slide under the radar, a new museum could not be commissioned in the city without fanfare or skepticism or protest. The controversy can be credited to the fact that even in our contemporary time critics, architects, artists, and the sponsoring agents, and even the public all have different expectations on what a museum should be. It has been a challenge to…

Throughout the semester short stories were the main focus of English Composition II, and so a number of short stories were assigned for reading. Though each short story can be viewed as fundamentally different, each of the stories had something in common with one another. Each short story had theme(s) within them, which allowed the reader to better understand the story being told. A theme of a story is easy to point out in the story when it is given to you, or when it is as simple as black and…

He denied innate knowledge at birth. He said at birth our mind is a tabula rasa, an empty slate. But knowledge is one way in the senses and another way in our intellect. The process of knowledge begins with sense experience, sense data is unified by sensus communis (how else would we know that the white pigeon (our visual…

Even social attitudes and opinions can be shaped by genetic factors. A person’s fondness for roller coasters can be attributed to genes passed along to him or her from a parent. The fears that humans indicate they have can be seen as genetically predisposed survival tactics. "We are survival machines," Richard Dawkins writes in The Selfish Gene, "robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” (Dee, 2010). As behaviors are practiced by humans, who survive long…

to philosophers and scientists, and memory as we scientifically know it today has only been recently established. In fact, the study of human memory dates back to the time of Aristotle. In his book De Anima, Aristotle introduced the concept of tabula rasa - blank slate - as the nature of our minds at birth. He theorized that when we are born, we are devoid of any knowldege or experience - that our minds are completely empty. Memory then, for him, is like etching words on an empty tablet,…

Geraldson D’Haiti Professor Shannon Kincaid Philosophy 101 December 10,2017 Race? Race is defined as a group of persons related by common descent or heredity. Yet, such a simple definition has been the core of many heated confrontations. Race has constantly been used in arguments concerning classism, socialism, wealth, etc. However, one of the most controversial issues that involve race is slavery. There has been a plethora of views as to how slavery was commenced and…

Building on the work of Huxley, Tinbergen (1963) formulated four questions to tap into how organisms were structured and why they evolved the way they did (p. 411). Evolutionary questions typically fall into the why group as they address the ultimate levels of inference. Conversely, questions of ontology seek developmental answers for observable changes. Psychology is primarily concerned with the individual level of analysis, but in the case evolutionary psychology the theoretical and practical…