Tess Gaerthé

Looking at the picture of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I can notice several things right away. The picture shows a cave that resembles a grave. People are living in the cave and there is an obvious contrast to the person and the world outside the cave. Life for those people in the cave looks dismal, pathetic and sad. It makes me have questions about them, like what happened? A small part of the picture shows a better situation. The allegory describes the people in the cave to be like…

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…

Searle and Descartes being separated by nearly four centuries provides a rough landscape for a philosophical discussion to be conducted upon. Both Searle and Descartes have inherent biases based upon their location on the timeline, Searle with modern science and Descartes with religion and the church. Being that the two are opposed, I think that Searle is able to articulate effectively his positions and respond to Descartes’ claims properly. If positioned at the same location along the timeline…

When we fall asleep and we dream how do we distinguish if what we are seeing or imagining is real or not? How do we even know if we are imagining what we are seeing, or if what we are seeing is actuality? Based on The Matrix, humans are always in a dream-like state. The film depicts humans attached to a huge artificial intelligence system called the Matrix run by evil machines. This system controls the human mind and conveys it with virtual reality depicting life. In the film, after Morpheus…

Human beings are thinking creatures but they are more than that. They live their lives with different memories and experiences to guide them along the way. To prove that a person knows whom they are by proving that they think is nonsensical. Within Descartes’s meditation is the nature of humans will be shown through the thinking thing or cogito but this is not accurate at all because humans are more complex beings than just thinking things. First, I will demonstrate what the second meditation,…

Descartes is trying to prove the existence of God, and the reason he is doing so he can further try to prove the existence of everything else. He did so by going through a series of meditations. In his fifth meditation Descartes said that the mind and the body are two distinct substances. His main premise was Cogito Ergo Sum which means I think therefore I am. With Cogito Ergo Sum he is certain of his existence. He differentiates understanding a concept and imagination, then goes onto say that…

In the Unlikely Event of a Water landing Tragedies such as murder and rape are thought to be horrendous crimes; acts so violent and malicious that the perpetrators must spend their lives in prison to pay their dues, but these crimes occur so often they rarely make headlines anymore. Every once in a while a big “story” will hit the news and the masses will cry out in outrage but even then the outrage dies down and the victims are forgotten. Many times there are witnesses to these crimes that do…

Is our universe one complicated computer game with us being mere artificial intelligence made of ones and zeros? This is a strange question, one that I believe cannot be totally disproven or proven but what can we know no matter the answer? The philosopher Descartes wrestled with similar questions. He was concerned about the nature of our reality and more specifically the nature of our knowledge. (Descartes 166-167) He wanted to form a base for knowledge and a method to prove that what we know…

The unique and foremost influence to psychology that Descartes had was his consideration of the mind-body interaction. Descartes lived as a French philosopher and mathematician who; in the early 17th century, agreed with the notion of a clockwork universe. According to the text, this notion of the times proposed that the universe could be likened to a clock due to the fact of its constancy, predictability, and exactitude. The clock could act as an allegory to expound upon the workings of the…

In this essay, I outline two similarities of Descartes and Spinoza—belief in apriori knowledge, and God as the infinite substance—as well as two differences—contrasting conceptions of God’s relation to the world, and mind-body relations. Both Spinoza and Descartes subscribe to the rationalist epistemology which claims that knowledge must be self-evident and derived from reasoning, rather than experience. As such, both philosophers believe in apriori knowledge, in which true knowledge is derived…