Immanuel Kant’s Impact on Enlightenment Values For thousands of years, religion was used to help answer universal phenomenon’s. It wasn’t until Greek philosopher’s, such as Socrates and Aristotle, around 300 – 400 BC, started challenging religious ideals and looking at reason in the senses. These Greek philosophers, set the foundation and influenced many philosophers to come. Centuries later, a philosopher name Immanuel Kant, dedicated his life to find the parallels between the natural world and rational thinking. Yet, connections between Kant and other philosophers can be made with their collaborative ideas on acceptable political discussion and disobedience.
Whereas Plato thought that experiments and reasoning are enough to provide the qualities of an object, Aristotle was in favour of the experience and observation. In logic, Plato was more favoured the use of inductive reasoning, while Aristotle used deductive reasoning. The syllogism, a basic unit of logic of A = B, and B = C, then A = C, was developed by Aristotle. Both regarded that thoughts were far more preferable to senses. However Plato stated that senses could fool a person but Aristotle believed that senses are required to establish reality in a proper way.
What makes me similar to, or different from, another individual?” These are the questions that philosophers have tried to answer throughout history, willing to understand the origins of our existence (Korfmacher, n.d.). Socrates was the first western thinker to follow the Delphic Oracle’s command to “Know thyself”, aiming to focus the entire power of reason on the human self. In fact, he strongly believed that the self is an immortal soul that survives beyond the body’s death and exists over time (Chaffee, 2011). On the same line of thought, Plato stated that a “true self, a holistic identity”, creates our character: in other words, Identity is something that exists metaphysically and it expresses itself in a different way in each person. Whereas, Aristotle, begun to portrait the self as a set of multiple identities occurring in one individual (Gioia, 1998).
Explain Plato’s theory of forms. What is the function of the forms in relation to platonic metaphysics? What is the relation between the sensible and the intelligible? To begin I would like to firstly establish Plato’s theory of forms, which, is inextricably linked with his metaphysical theory and Platonic Dualism, (intelligible world and sensible world). Plato can be regarded as the first ever Metaphysician, as Plato is searching for the true nature of being, and believed that the world in which we live, which is the world interpreted through the senses (the material world), that is forever changing, is just an imitation of the true world, the world of ideas, that is eternal unchanging and immaterial.
People have always been trying to understand the universe and the concepts that dominate our daily lives. This thirst for knowledge resulted in the development of science, philosophy, and religion. Western philosophy started in Greece and spread further to America and Australia. The word philosophy comes from the Greek word philosophia which means “love of wisdom.” Philosophy has many different fields, domains, and branches: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Logic, Metaphysics, Political Philosophy, etc. The first thing that usually comes to our mind when we hear the word philosophy is the question “what’s the meaning of life” Socrates, and Plato.
‘At Socrates discipline, Plato adopted his philosophy and style of debate and directed his studies towards the question of virtue and the formation of a noble character’. He was greatly influenced by Socrates, Heraclitus and Parmenides. ‘He mixed together in his works the arguments of Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans and Socrates. Regarding the sensible he borrows from Heraclitus, regarding the intelligible from Pythagoras and regarding politics from Socrates’ (D.L.3.8). After Socrates death Plato left Athens and began to travel.
Jay Gatsby is never a concrete character within the novel; his background story and his statements are ever-changing, and are usually proven to be untrue. However, just as quickly as some statements are proven untrue, other arise to substitute them, which keeps the reader in a constant state of skepticism. In fact, the vagueness with which Jay Gatsby asserts himself might be due to his own uncertainty of his life, as he has always thought himself deserving of more, which could have led to a dissociation in
For example, John Locke is a main antagonist to innatism. According to Yacouba (2016), Locke criticized that Plato’s view of innate knowledge is more religious than rational because Plato asserted that knowledge is a process of remembrance which is already engraved in one’s soul; therefore, Plato’s doctrine of innatism can only be true to those who believe in reincarnation (Yacouba, 2016). This polemic does not seem convincing due to the lack of scientific evidence. On the other hand, the research of neuron system described earlier in the paper support Plato’s view of innatism with scientific evidence. Consequently, Plato’s doctrine that certain knowledge pre-exists in one’s mind at birth seems more reliable.
A philosopher is someone whose job it is to think these big thoughts. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, p. 141 said “…A philosopher… has…[a] structure of thought unified by a purpose for his own life and for mankind” (Justarius,
Plato arranges value in the domain of being and sets up its embodiment without any relation to the presence of things in true-life. Nevertheless, as I already mentioned, social utopias tend to be despotic and totalitarian. In our days, only extreme groups of far-right and far-left character are prone in such autarchic regimes, which are accommodated by a unitarian character. If Plato is considered by most as the father of political philosophy in the West, he might be considered the father of coherent utopian thought in western philosophy as well. With Plato utopia takes its first form and is established in the field of philosophy.