Knowledge; It is something which we possess that contains everything which we know in this world. It is the collection of all our ideas about everything in existence since we are born. Just think of it as an empty jar and all our experiences are the things which you put inside it. As such, everything which is not placed inside the jar are those things which we don’t have any idea yet. As we grow older and mature enough, we eventually learn more things, and this is our way of letting those things from outside the jar to enter inside it. IDEAS VS SENSES According to the modern philosopher John Locke, knowledge has 2 sources: sensation and reflection. Sensation is the data perceived by our five senses. When we touch a cup of coffee, we gain …show more content…
Innate knowledge, as he explained, is the knowledge which we possessed starting from the day we are born. He believed that every people got their knowledge from birth, not from the experiences they had throughout their life, which contradicted Aristotle. Do you think our knowledge is inborn? It is hard to tell if all these ideas in our mind are ideas which we brought since our birth as if we never remembered anything when we were infants. We only had those ideas on how we acted when we were babies from our parents. It looks impossible that we originally have all the knowledge we have today since we are born and kept all of them in our minds. Does that mean that if I know how to solve Math problems today would mean that I really know how to do it even if I was still a little child? Perhaps Aristotle’s view is easier to believe because it is more realistic if we are to analyze it. We might have really gained our knowledge throughout the things which we experienced in our life. We might have been a blank paper at birth and as time passed by, everything we experience is written down on it permanently for us not to lose them and have knowledge about …show more content…
Most of us probably define reality as everything which exists and sensed. We believe that if something cannot be sensed, then it does not exist. But what if there are intangible things which are still in the scope of reality? Then our previous definition for it would be wrong. For some reason, there are two kinds of beings in this world; the material and the immaterial ones. Material beings are those which can be sensed. We see that the dog moved. Thus we can say that the dog is a material being. Immaterial beings on the other hand, includes the things which we cannot sense yet we believe that they are real because we are making use of them in our everyday lives such as our knowledge, emotions, our spirit and our soul. So if we are to say that existing=being sensed, then how come we believe that immaterial beings are existing? At some point, immaterial beings might not be totally immaterial because if we’re going to analyze it, material and immaterial should be opposite in a way that if material exists, then immaterial shouldn’t. They might just be material things which cannot be felt, heard, seen, smelled nor tasted. Maybe philosophers only used the word immaterial to be able to differentiate something with physical attributes to those who does not. Even if they have this difference, they have this one similarity: Both of them EXIST for a reason and they contribute to the totality of
During the Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement took place in Europe. Many theories of knowledge were born during that period including rationalism and empiricism. They opened up the gateway to the history of psychology through their different ideas on how knowledge is acquired. Rationalism was a philosophical theory that considered reason, rather than experience, to be the most significant in acquiring knowledge. Three types of knowledge could be argued by rationalists which included: innate knowledge, innate concepts, and intuition/deduction.
Knowledge also contains both facts and causes, and wisdom also comes from the knowledge of universal principles. Aristotle also recognizes that an individual thing is primarily, defined by its substance. Substance that is both form and matter. It also reveals the reality of how individual things exist in the world. The substance of each individual thing doesn’t belong to other individual things, but the universal element of an individual thing belongs to many individual things.
But because of the mind-dependent status of idea, they cannot have any characteristics which they are not perceived to have. Therefore, 3) ideas are passive, that is, they possess no causal power (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). However, the argument of a higher being or spirit are the reason material substances exist is just absurd. First, what happen if two people perceive things differently?
Although humans can take in immense amounts of sensory information, Petrarch argues that total knowledge cannot be achieved. When speaking of Aristotle, Petrarch stresses that he does not have “knowledge of all things through human study” simply because humans are imperfect entities, unable to understand the absolute and unconditioned (101). Additionally, Petrarch articulates that although Aristotle “was a very great man” and was glorified by Aristotelian students,
Conclusion: The mind is substantively different from the body and indeed matter in general. Because in this conception the mind is substantively distinct from the body it becomes plausible for us to doubt the intuitive connection between mind and body. Indeed there are many aspects of the external world that do not appear to have minds and yet appear none the less real in spite of this for example mountains, sticks or lamps, given this we can begin to rationalize that perhaps minds can exist without bodies, and we only lack the capacity to perceive them.
After the passing of the Paleolithic Revolution, individuals of ancient times began to adapt towards the elements of civilization and the congregation of the community. Aware of their previous state of mind as nomadic hunters and gatherers, people had to make sure their savagery evolves to decency and consider the welfare of all rather than the welfare of a few or one. John Locke, notable for his philosophies in the Enlightenment Era, stressed on the natural rights of each individual and their opinions deserve the highest recognition. Through enduring autocracies, aristocracies, and theocracies, the democratic value of “freedom of __” resonates, exercised through, and sometimes are challenged through history. In his texts, The Social Contract
This “something” is an intangible, inconspicuous existence known as the soul. Dualists believe that the soul gives life to the body. The material body will die and decompose because it is a strictly physical being, however, the soul is immaterial which suggests that it will
Socrates dabs on the subject in the Theatetus- the conversation between Theatetus – a boy- and his mathematics teacher, Theodorus. However, he must admit that he did not come up with such a statement, rather reworded it from “the man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that {or how} they are, of the things that are not that {or how} they are not.” Or Protagoras’s homo-mensura (152a). This means that if the wind appears to be cold to a man, then the wind is cold to the man. Knowledge in the sense that Protagoras sees it is that whatever a human goes through, he has knowledge because he is individually experiencing color, sound, temperature, and any other relative senses in the matrix.
Aristotle and Russell have not just talked about knowledge but what they have proposed is the ultimate purpose and meaning
Aristotle emphasizes the importance of developing
Locke believed that experience gave us knowledge and that is sound. There are different ways of thinking throughout the world and through experience we have the ability to discover every
He said, “Therefore I doubt not but children, by the exercise of their senses about objects that affect them in the womb, receive some few ideas before they are born” (Locke, 1690, p. 134). He previously argued that one is born with tabula rasa mind like empty paper; however, he later acknowledged that children are born with ideas. Therefore, Locke’s claim showed contradiction. Based on the research, rationalists’ view of innatism that people are born with certain knowledge is more
Book II describes the Locke’s theory of ideas, it also includes his distinctions between simple ideas such as "red," "sweet," "round," etc., and complex ideas such as causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity. Also Locke distinguishes between the primary qualities of bodies (shape,solidity,extension,motion,number etc.), and the secondary qualities those properties that produce senses in observers ( color, taste, smell, sound etc.).Locke asserts that secondary qualities are dependent
Elisabeth Nicholes Winter 2015 Is the world you see before you exclusively made up of materials or mentally constructed, perhaps maybe even a bit of both? This has been a question that has been debated by famous philosophers as well as your everyday normal citizen throughout history, especially in the twentieth century. This debate stems from Philosophy of the Mind; where Monist (Physicalism), Idealists (Idealism), and Duelist (Neutral Monism) beliefs battle each other out. For the sake of argument, I open the minds of two famous Philosophers on this subject from two Philosophical
If so, we can, therefore, assume that all of the knowledge we bear as of now are all obtained from all of our past daily experiences and this idea contrasts the idea of innate knowledge. It is said that innate knowledge is the knowledge we have ever since we were born. Thus, this knowledge will only be discovered if something triggers it. As for example, a