Who am I?
Do we really live in a single reality or universe, or do we live in many realities that connect to this one existence? This essay will argue the theories, concepts and ideas of who we are in this world and reality. By discussing the points that we are genuine living beings, that are not figments of someone or something else’s mind, we are not copies of something that is eternal or in another reality. We along with everything we see, hear, touch ,taste and smell is in this one reality, not two, or three or a hundred, just one reality. What I mean when I say this is that we only live in one reality or one world. An example of this could be how we live on planet Earth, we only live on Earth we don’t live on other planets such as Mars, or Venus.
Known as the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes created the world renowned theory “I think, therefore I am”. Descartes came up with this theory when he tried to consider what really existed and what did not. He came to three major truths, the first being that he exists because he thinks the second that God exists and the third that external objects exist. God must exist because the idea of an all powerful being must have only come from God, therefore God exists. Finally we receive impressions of physical objects and perception may deceive us. Does God want to deceive us? No, because he is perfect, and he wouldn’t do that. Therefore, external objects must also exist. When Descartes came up with these three truths he was questioning what was real, he doubted everything because there was no certain answer to anything except the three truths he was certain of. Since Descartes questioned reality he came up with the three truths, which made him certain that ...
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Descartes thinks that we have a very clear and distinct idea of God. He thinks God must exist and Descartes himself must exist. It is a very different way of thinking shown from the six meditations. Descartes uses ideas, experiments, and “proofs” to try and prove God’s existence.
Alain Badiou’s entire philosophical project rests on reclaiming the centrality of truth in philosophy, and he does so through a detailed working through of subjectivity, truth, and the event. Badiou makes it clear that in his systematic philosophy he wants to do without any reference to a subject who has and constructs its experiences, and the phenomenological structures of conscious life are not his focus. Although Badiou calls the method he uses in Logics of Worlds a phenomenology - it is, in his terms an objective phenomenology because it is about the existence of objects in a world and the relations that obtain among these objects, “the degrees of identity and difference among objects in a world” (Logics of Worlds, p. 48) Badiou identifies
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In the Third Meditation, Descartes forms a proof for the existence of God. He begins by laying down a foundation for what he claims to know and then offers an explanation for why he previously accepted various ideas but is no longer certain of them. Before he arrives at the concept of God, Descartes categorizes ideas and the possible sources that they originate from. He then distinguishes between the varying degrees of reality that an idea can possess, as well as the cause of an idea. Descartes proceeds to investigate the idea of an infinite being, or God, and how he came to acquire such an idea with more objective reality than he himself has. By ruling out the possibility of this idea being invented or adventitious, Descartes concludes that the idea must be innate. Therefore, God necessarily exists and is responsible for his perception of a thing beyond a finite being.
Kierkegaard, a highly regarded philosopher of the 19th century, put to us the idea of living life in three different stages. He named these stages the Aesthetical, the Ethical and the Religious. He himself passed through each of the stages in his own lifetime and he adopted them as his own philosophy of human existence. The first two stages are characterized by a distinct set of beliefs and behaviors that are easily identified, whereas the last stage, the religious is characterized by a highly personal, subjective and non-rational ‘’leap of faith’’. The ideal is to progress from the aesthetical to the ethical, finally reaching the religious stage but as Kierkegaard himself realized, it is possible to regress or go back a stage. He said that he felt that he had never really left the first two, these stages were always there. He believed that one can move in and out and through all three stages within a lifetime. For the purpose of this essay I will explain each of the three stages in order to give an understanding of Kierkegaard’s philosophical theory of life. Also I will discuss why Kierkegaard considered the religious stage as the best kind of life for humanity and I will present to you some criticisms against Kierkegaard’s third stage.
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