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Mere performance is no match for appearance
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Kiribati, Butaritari, Butaritari
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Last Login: 12/01/2008
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http://www.handshakesdemo.com/profiles/mitchell |
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Profile Brief
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| Member since: |
10/04/2006 |
| Profile last updated: |
10/04/2006 |
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Offline |
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7 |
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If people did not give up their rights, they could not leave the State of Nature. Rousseau claims that everyone gives up his or her rights equally:
Plato answers by claiming that morality is a necessary cause of happiness, that one's happiness is correlary to one's moral behavior. Therefore, an immoral person would be motivated to be moral if he wants to be happy. The happy person, according to Plato, is the just person, a claim that he posits in two ways:
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Descartes was a rationalist. Like many philosophers, novelists, and poets of his time, he questioned his own existence, and his reason for being, man's purpose in the scheme of the universe. Descartes...
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The prerequisites before embarking on a metaphysical path requires the two following things: a belief in a God and the possibility of an afterlife. If these two concepts are not met, one will have tro...
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Another rebuttal is that probability theory is a mathematical model, thus it has a form. Probability theory, however, is not an abstraction. It is a concrete consideration of the likelihood of any eve...
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John Dewey reflected upon the traditional philosophic works and saw that they were out of tune with a world that is constantly changing. The goal of traditional philosophy was to discover concrete tru...
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Since Marxism is more a critique of capitalist society and only very rarely a predicative tool, how does it fit in to Popper's definition of science. In other words, when Marx makes predictions, such ...
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Charlie was released on parole in 1954 at the age of 19. Early in 1955 Charlie married and had a son, Charles Manson Jr. Later that year, while in Los Angeles with his wife and child, Charlie was sent...
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Therefore, it could be argued that for Descartes there are two things which cannot be argued. They are "I think, therefore, I am," and "I think, therefore there is a God!" Descartes knows he is a thin...
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21/12/2008 23:05
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No man has the obligation to put his life on the line unless to do so would cause the downfall of the sovereign. Hobbes states that "when the defence of the commonwealth, requireth at once the help of...
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15/12/2008 08:51
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Regardless of the government or law Hobbes believes "no man can transferre his Right to save himselfe from Death, Wounds, and Imprisonment" (Hobbes 199).
There are many things to learn from Plato's "...
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04/12/2008 19:08
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Mill believes a person should never be punished because his actions set a bad example or because the public feels they can not act responsibly concerning their own being(76).
Socrates asserts that on...
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11/12/2008 21:52
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The young are stronger, but the old more cunning. The older an animal or human gets, the more knowledge they possess. This knowledge is gained mostly through experience. A person can spend years in a ...
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The nineteenth century philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that for man to be truly free the rights and liberties of the individual must be guaranteed. Mill was concerned with what he called "Civil ...
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In defense of his teacher, and to disclose to all the truth of Socrates trial, Plato writes his version of the truth as he heard it. In the Apology Plato writes from the persona of his teacher, in the...
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The discussion in part I on despair and the causes and results of this despair is a fairly scientific description of observable phenomenon in the human psyche. The dialectical method of examination of...
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Machiavelli, however, was a realist. He was concerned with how things were in reality, not how things could be if the world was perfect. He was greatly influenced by his failures in public life. He ha...
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A person could argue that yes this makes sense, but how do you explain the different degrees of knowledge people attain. Since we all gather experiences throughout our life, we must actually be ration...
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Plato in seeking the truth, figured a military coup would never succeed in over throwing the government that killed his teacher, and tried to silence his teacher's teachings. The best way to implement...
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A man of mild manners can form no idea of inveterate revenge or cruelty; nor can a selfish heart easily conceive the heights of friendship and generosity. It is readily allowed, that other beings may ...
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Machiavelli, however, was a realist. He was concerned with how things were in reality, not how things could be if the world was perfect. He was greatly influenced by his failures in public life. He ha...
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Machiavelli greatly admires the works of Plato and other sophists.
The statement is confusing. It seems that Dewey wishes to have his cake and eat it too. He spends over four hundred pages arguing th...
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29/11/2008
He then proceeds to eliminate the body and the senses from being without doubt, until he comes up with the one verifiable truth: Sensing? There can be no sensing in the absence of body; and besides I have seemed during sleep to apprehend things which does belong to me: it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I exist. This is certain. How often? As often as I think. For it might indeed be that if I entirely ceased to think, I should thereupon altogether cease to exist. I am not at present admitting anything, that is to say, a mind an understanding or reason--terms the significance of which has hitherto been unknown to me. I am, then, a real thing, and really existent. What thing? I have said it a thinking thing. (Descartes, Rene, "Meditations," Struhl, Paula Rothenberg, and Struhl Karsten J., editors, Philosophy Now. Random House: 1980)
Augustine's discussion of Grace versus free will is especially interesting. There are several points in Augustine's arguments which rely on some sort of ambiguous, undefined concept to support a "we can't understand god" type of mentality. One prime example of this is Augustine's explication of the trinity. The trinity represents unity yet three distinct avatars of god. This understanding of the trinity is an amorphous understanding of omission. It runs something like this: we can't understand the trinity by human rationale, but through an intense and encompassing belief-investigation, we can come to terms with this seeming paradox.
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28/11/2008
Locke's argument would be valid if there was good and enough for others to labour upon and gain wealth (Locke, 20), but since there is not because of unequal property, he has merely set up a system in which the government could be overthrown, but wealth maintained in the same hands. If no man should appropriate more than he can use and beyond this share is for others (Locke, 20), what right does man have to massive property when others are starving and have none? Locke would probably argue that the fruits of their labour will grant them property and that they should work harder, but on what property should they labour upon, if all property has been divided? Today, farmers are paid not to grow or to burn excess grain and food. Does not this unused share of land and the right to labour upon it then belong to others? If unequal ownership is started with the appropriation of property, do not the laws that applied to that appropriation apply ad infinitum?
Hume, David, 1711-76, Scottish philosopher and historian. Hume carried the empiricism of John Locke and George Berkeley to the logical extreme of radical skepticism. He repudiated the possibility of certain knowledge, finding in the mind nothing but a series of sensations, and held that cause-and-effect in the natural world derives solely from the conjunction of two impressions. Hume's skepticism is also evident in his writings on religion, in which he rejected any rational or natural theology. David Hume lived in the constitutional monarchy of George II under the Prime Ministers Walpole, Pelham and Pitt, a Britain which had thoroughly established a stable bourgeois system of government and was interested in building its Empire. Hume died in the year of the American War of Independence. Hume denied theological doctrines and acknowledged the evils that religion had wrought upon humanity. How was one to develop then a "secular" system of philosophy and morality. What answer could be given to Berkeley's "proof" that the concept of a material world beyond sensation was a "metaphysical absurdity"? How could we get on with science and industry, trade and conquest, without religion? Hume accepted Berkeley's proof, but developed the philosophy of Skepticism, a British compromise, in which, while the knowledge we gain from experience cannot constitute theoretical knowledge or necessity, it is good enough for practical purposes, sufficient for practical life. Hume says:
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26/11/2008
Descartes develops a correspondence theory of truth. However, for Descartes, truth is always going to have to remain private. He believes we have direct and immediate contact with our own ideas. Whatever we see we bring back to our minds. If we don not like what that something, then we distort it. Our eyes and other senses distort the truth and can deceive us. Descarte says: I have accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty I have learned either from the senses or through the senses. Now these senses I have sometimes found to be deceptive; and it is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived. (Descartes, Rene, "Meditations," Struhl, Paula Rothenberg, and Struhl Karsten J., editors, Philosophy Now. Random House: 1980, P. 88)
John Locke believed that all people were equal and independent, and that no one had the right to harm another's "life, health, liberty, or possessions." Locke was not only a renowned philosopher in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but he was an Oxford scholar, medical researcher and physician, political operative, economist and spokesman for a revolutionary movement.
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23/11/2008
At the end of Section 9 Hume writes: "But our wonder will perhaps cease or diminish when we consider that the experimental (experiential) reasoning itself, which we possess in common with beasts, and on which the whole of conduct depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power that acts in us unknown to ourselves, and in its chief operations is not directed by any such relations or comparison of ideas as are the proper objects of our intellectual faculties." Hume's argument that human instincts are similar to animal instincts, however humans differ from animals in regards to the facts makes sense, but it makes more sense to combine experience with thought.
The knowledge gained from these experiences is not gathered through reasoning, but instinct.
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01/12/2008
Mill argues that society has control over a person's liberty when they are a child (77). It is society's job to educate a young person and make "them capable of rational conduct" (77). If society fails to educate a person to its mode of proper conduct, society as a whole is guilty, and the individual, as long as he has not harmed others, does not deserve to be punished (77).
Locke's concept of the state of nature, however, is equally questionable with that of Hobbes. When Locke delves into the question of property, he reasons well in his differentiation between the property of mankind and the property of a man. He even skirts on Marx's labor theory of value. It is interesting to compare Locke's theories with contemporary capitalist societies which claim to have a basis in Locke. I see little similarity between the two. Slavery (chattel and wage), exploitation, limited popular access to government, and social priorities which benefit a select part of society all challenge the west's claim to a Locke-style government system.
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