These views pertain to the origin of knowledge, while other views pertain to the limitations of knowledge. Occasionally, philosophers have also throw... ... middle of paper ... ...idering the possibility of the previous sentence, how can we prove to have knowledge unless we have a physical proof based on evidence? Otherwise this so called knowledge we claim to have can only be considered as one’s belief or opinion created in his or her imagination. The goal of my paper was to gather an explanation for what knowledge is and how it works, and now I find myself at the end realizing how much I do not know about the matter. I think the only thing I have gathered is that the truth may be that we can never have knowledge of knowledge; it is beyond our comprehension just like the existence of God, a question that people leave to faith.
Montaigne and Descartes Montaigne and Descartes both made use of a philosophical method that focused on the use of doubt to make discoveries about themselves and the world around them. However, they doubted different things. Descartes doubted all his previous knowledge from his senses, while Montaigne doubted that there were any absolute certainties in knowledge. Although they both began their philosophical processes by doubting, Montaigne doubting a constant static self, and Descartes doubted that anything existed at all, Descartes was able to move past that doubt to find one indubitably certainty, “I think, therefore I am”. How often do we question what is real or true?
Descartes does not put experiences to his philosophy like the other philosophers, Bacon and Hobbes. He believes that we have some innate ideas that self, identity, substance and God are in us as we are born “most part on the truths contained in the mind”. He proposed an observations from the wax. Whatever he heats or cools the wax, it would still remain the same substance. He concludes that the mind is capable of performing “acts of intellection” in order to know what kind of substance.
It was through his examination of the senses and the self that Descartes was able to reach a definitive answer. His doubts and questioning led him to the only plausible answer, that to some extent we require the imagination for it is part of our nature. Descartes explored the different relationships that exist between the senses, the imagination, and the understanding and while he cleared them, one thing still needs to be brought to light. It is only through calling into question and doubting our judgments ( brought to us by sense perception) that we avoid error, “ but since everyday pressures don’t always allow us to pause and check so carefully, it must be admitted that human life is vulnerable to error about particular things, and we must acknowledge that weakness of our nature” ( 35).
This is because in reconstructing his body of knowledge, Descartes made use of many assumptions that he had not shown to have escaped the fires of the Method of Doubt. 'It uses all sorts of scholastic maxims... No reason is given for acc... ... middle of paper ... ...ding Kant and Husserl. However, by uncritically holding the causal model of perception as true, Descartes did not apply his Method of Doubt as fully as he could have done. By accepting the causal model of perception, Descartes held on to an unhelpful presupposition of what is meant by the external and internal worlds. This presupposition leads, through the malicious demon argument, to solipsism.
An idea cannot be imagined, but is an essence abstracted from the phantasm and understood. But this gets confused after Descartes. For example, John Locke says that ideas "...stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking..." Note how he lumps together "phantasm, species, or whatever". This is very sloppy, but influential nonetheless. And notice how he maintains that the object of our knowledge is the idea, and not real being (as it was for the Greek and Mediaeval thinkers).
Broadly speaking, there were (and still are) two ways of treating it: There were those who, for all practical purposes, identified the origin (brain) with its product (mind). Some of them postulated the existence of a lattice of preconceived, born categorical knowledge about the universe - the vessels into which we pour our experience and which mold it. Others have regarded the mind as a black box. While it was possible in principle to know its input and output, it was impossible, again in principle, to understand its internal functioning and management of information. Pavlov coined the word "conditioning", Watson adopted it and invented "behaviorism", Skinner came up with "reinforcement".
Metaphysics as Addressed by Kant and Hume In the Prolegomena, Kant states that reading David Hume, "awakened him from his dogmatic slumber." It was Hume's An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding that made Kant aware of issues and prejudices in his life that he had previously been unaware of. This further prompted Kant to respond to Hume with his own analysis on the theory of metaphysics. Kant did not feel that Hume dealt with these matters adequately and resolved to pick up where Hume had left off, specifically addressing the question of whether metaphysics as a science is possible. Hume basically asserted in his writings that metaphysics, as a science, is not possible.
Since he cannot go through all of his knowledge one by one to define which ones are true and which are false, he doubts the general principles. The idea that he eventually finds is that the doubt’s possibility can never be entirely ruled out. The general principle in which he built his beliefs about the world was that whatever the senses told him about the world was true. Descartes says everything that we have accepted as true has been learned through our senses. Then he argues that sometimes the senses can deceive, but only with objects that are very small or far away.
Descartes was a philosopher who seemed to discard anything which was not absolutely certain and focused on what was known. In Meditation two of Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes is doubtful of everything, as he believes that if there is any doubt for something then it must not exist. With this in mind he begins to doubt his own existence but realizes that he is unable to doubt it. Descartes believes that there is a deceiver that is powerful which deceives him. Thus if something is deceiving him, Descartes believes that he must exist in order to be deceived.