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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07/03/2010 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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08/03/2010 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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05/03/2010 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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02/03/2010 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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03/03/2010 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. |