Treatise

Jaiden Fallo 2/4/16 World Lit Belief Statements (Existentialism) I believe in the philosophy that people are born as blank slates (tabula rasa). Blank slate, I believe, means the mind does not have innate concepts. Reflexes, urges, or any other involuntary primitive emotions (fear, hunger, pain, etc...), muscle movements are not concepts. That a baby can crawl, eat, breathe, grasp, cry and even walk before ever saying the first word, or concept, it learns is no disproof of tabula rasa. I think…

While Thomas Jefferson was just one of many delegates who signed their name to the American Declaration of Independence, he is remembered as the primary drafter of the document. With continued significance, the Declaration has become a record, both of colonial feelings during the era of the Revolution and of Jefferson himself. A highly astute and educated man, Jefferson incorporated numerous ideological influences throughout his writing. This leads to questioning of not only who impacted the…

Back in early European history, there were often many disagreements between people, especially when it came to religion. These disagreements can lead to a wide variety of things, whether it be war, compromise, or just flat out tension. In one of the bigger disputes of religion in European history, Martin Luther and John Calvin vs. the Catholic Church, there was no clear winner or loser towards the beginning, once the two men proposed their ideas of why the Catholic Church wasn’t to be followed…

opposite of absolute war, and absolute war is a theory that fails as a construct. This essay discusses the two groups or types of war (absolute and limited) and the category subsets of those two groups that Carl von Clausewitz first discussed in his treatise On War. Categories of war, as defined by Carl von Clausewitz, are absolute war, ideal war, limited war, real war, war to disarm the enemy, war of limited objectives, and war to overthrow the enemy. These categories fall into two groups;…

He understands what justice is ought to be, but knows what it actually is. Some consider Machiavellianism to be linked with emotionless and a detachment from morality. However in his treatise Machiavelli doesn’t fully detach morality from politics. Just that when and if the time arrives a ruler must set them aside to do what is needed to ensure order. If a ruler is morally bounded he cannot do what is ever necessary to help his subjects…

if a government did not promote these "natural" rights of the people, the people had the inherent right to change or overthrow it. Jefferson, and countless other of the Founding Fathers, took much from Locke. Several passages from Locke's Second Treatise were directly…

Locke claimed that the role of the government was to preserve the natural rights of life, liberty, and property. During the turmoil of Shays Rebellion, both sides of the conflict believed they were acting justly according to Lockean theory. The poor farmers of western Massachusetts, led by Daniel Shays, would have argued that the government they had fought so hard to create was not preserving these rights, specifically the right to property. On the other hand, the wealthy elite of eastern…

blamed everything that went wrong in their lives on witchcraft. For example: if their cow could not make milk or the butter churner could not church, or the horse went lame, it was all because of witchcraft. James I, the king of New England wrote a treatise on witchcraft called “demonologies” which made the people fear witchcraft even more. the strange behavior of John Goodwin’s’ 4 children was the 1st recorded incident of what people behaved like when “possessed by the devil”. The children…

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli is a treatise that states many points. One of the points is “It is better to be feared than loved”. Macbeth by William Shakespeare is a play about ambition and tragedy. In chapters 14-17 of The Prince, Machiavelli describes how a ruler should act. In Macbeth, Shakespeare does the exact opposite of what Machiavelli is advising a ruler to do. Not following these theories would be the death of Macbeth. In Chapter 14, Machiavelli states that the easiest way to…

Moses Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed written between 1137 and 1190, concerns Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the astronomers’ conflicting truths. Around the twelfth century, most were a devoted Aristotelian, and educated people knew that stars in the celestial realm only had one motion, to revolve in a spherical motion around the centre of the universe . What Maimonides notes however, is that Aristotelian physics could not infer the existence of epicycles and eccentric circles.…