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Key elements of compare and contrast essays
Key elements of compare and contrast essays
Key elements of compare and contrast essays
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Two philosophers of varying medieval periods, Augustine and Avicenna, similarly suggest that human understanding is necessary to facilitate self-awareness and self-understanding. In this paper, I will first discuss Augustine’s, then Avicenna particular views of self-knowledge, and how both philosophers attribute understanding to their claims about self-awareness. In his text, On the Trinity, Augustine asserts that human beings can acquire knowledge through the perceptions of both the human mind itself, and of bodily senses. Specifically, Augustine argues, the very knowledge that one is alive, refutes the doubt of the illusory, of deception, and that of the skeptic’s claim that nothing is known by humans. That is, even if we are subject to …show more content…
However, he maintains a pivotal argument, if what is conveyed by the bodily senses do not reach beyond, what he calls the inner sense, knowledge cannot be attained. Therefore, Augustine argues, only what is grasped through reason, can be known. This idea is reiterated again in On the Trinity. When discussing what can be known, Augustine argues that one way the mind knows what it perceives through itself is through subjective experience. Augustine claims that despite whether an individual is being deceived, or whether they are mad, they are still self-aware. That is, because they are aware of how they feel, they in turn, have exhibited self-knowledge. For Avicenna, the conception of self-knowledge relates to his ideas about the human soul. According to Avicenna the knowledge or awareness of the self in existence does not depend on a physical or corporeal agent. That is, existence does not depend on the existence of a body, and the soul is always aware of itself, independent of other …show more content…
Here, Avicenna presents a situation where we are to imagine being born all at once, suspended in air, and our limbs stretched out, with our sight veiled from visually observing the world around us. The point of this is to suspend all sensations and senses so that there is nothing to experience. In this way, Avicenna demonstrates that although the flying man is sensorily deprived, he is still aware of himself. Thus, he argues, without any sensory particulars, one can still be aware of their own existence. In this state, Avicenna argues, the flying man would not feel the need to assert they had anything external, only that they are aware they exist in and of themselves. In this way, Avicenna claims that at our most basic level we are self-aware, and that this self-knowledge stems from the soul. Avicenna ultimately uses this thought experiment of self-awareness as evidence that the soul exists as a separate entity from the body. Seeing as the flying man is aware of his own existence, what he is really aware of is his soul, since his suspension keeps him from being aware of the existence of a body. Also, he is aware of his soul without the prior knowledge that his soul resides in the body, which means his soul is not a
this, Augustine says that no human mind can penetrate the mystery of of God's wisdom.
Throughout the Confessions, Augustine provides a journal of his life. Education played a major role in his development. Augustine the character’s education began from the moment he started to communicate. He later went on to be formally educated before being removed from school for financial difficulties. Augustine the narrator believes his education a granted will from God; however, at times, Augustine the character seemed to take advantage of this will. Through this ability, granted by God’s will, Augustine the character was able to become literate.
One of the main problems Augustine had as he began his examination of spiritual matters was the apparent existence of evil. Augustine was unable to reconcile the notion of God as unchanging and all-powerful with the evil that he saw in the world. If God was indeed omnipotent and the creator of all, how could evil exist if God did not have a hand in its making? Thus in his earlier years, Augustine fell in with the Manicheans, who held that God was not omnipotent, but rather in constant battle with evil and opposite force. Such ideas of evil and of God’s connection to the physical realm drove Augustine further from God. Fortunately, Augustine became dissatisfied with the Manicheans, whose flowery words proved to lack substance, and whose cosmological predictions proved less accurate than science and frequently a product of coincidence. Even after rejecting the dualism of Manichean thought, Augustine struggled to re...
"To be self aware is to be conscious of one's character, including beliefs, values, qualities, strengths and limitation. It is about knowing oneself" (Burnard 1992).
Why does St. Augustine seek God? Through his Confessions we come to understand that he struggled a great deal with confusion about his faith, before finally and wholeheartedly accepting God into his life. But we never get a complete or explicit sense of what led Augustine to search for God in the first place. Did he feel a void in his life? Was he experiencing particular problems in other relationships that he thought a relationship with God would solve for him? Or perhaps he sought a sense of security from religion? A closer analysis of the text of St. Augustine’s Confessions will provide some insight into these fundamental questions.
7-12- Again Augustines thoughts on God reflect that of the religious teachings of his day, namely those of the Neoplatonists. For example he refuses to speculate on how the soul joins the body to become an infant and even follows Plato when he suggests that this life could possibly be some kind of “living death”. He then goes into an examination of his infancy, which he depicts as a quite pitiful state. He described himself as a sinful and thoughtless creature who made demands on everyone, wept unceasingly, and gave everyone a hard time that took care of him. Though very brutal in his self examination, he later states that he does not hold himself accountable for any of these sinful acts because he simply can’t remember them.
In the Confessions, Augustine wrote about his struggle with understanding how evil exists in a world created by God. He questioned how it was possible and why God allows evil in his creations because God is supremely good. After delving into finding a solution, Augustine concluded that evil does not exist, and the things deemed as evil are caused by free will. This paper will argue that Augustine has successfully proven that evil does not exist by explaining his earlier explanation of the origin of evil taught by the Manicheans, explaining Augustine’s teachings, and finally, using the textual descriptions of Augustine’s unwillingness to convert as support for his conclusion.
The Transcendental Deductions of the pure concept of the understanding in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in its most general sense, explains how concepts relate a priori to objects in virtue of the fact that the power of knowing an object through representations is known as understanding. According to Kant, the foundation of all knowledge is the self, our own consciousness because without the self, experience is not possible. The purpose of this essay is to lay out Kant’s deduction of the pure concept of understanding and show how our concepts are not just empirical, but concepts a priori. We will walk through Kant’s argument and reasoning as he uncovers each layer of understanding, eventually leading up to the conclusion mentioned above.
Scholars Press, Atlanta : 1991. Armand Maurer. Being and Knowing: Studies in Thomas Aquinas and Later Medieval Philosophers, Papers in Mediæval Studies, no. 10. Pontifical Institute of Mediæval Studies, Toronto : 1990. Thomas Aquinas.
The relationship between reading, conversion and memory is that in order to go through a conversion one must read and be able recall the important information through memory. While Saint Augustine is talking to God he says “For you have granted to man that he should come to self-knowledge through the knowledge of others, and that he should believe many things about himself on the authority of the womenfolk” (p. 7) With this statement, Augustine is showing us that God believes we should learn from each other and the main method of learning from each other is through reading each other’s literary works. He also believes that once you read something it can “convert” or change your way of thinking and looking at things. He displays this belief in the following remark “…which he here reads of me as I recall and confess them of myself, let him not despite me – fo...
Augustine believed that the pursuit of wisdom without recognizing the importance and the power of God was useless. In his view it was a sin for a man to have that much pride and arrogance about his own intellect. Augustine recalled that as a very young man he himself succumbed to excessive pride. He fervently desired the recognition and prestige that came with being an accomplished rhetorician. He “squandered the brains [God] gave [him] on foolish delusions.” (I, 37)
He did this through an essential notion of “I believe in order that I may understand” ³ as to say that philosophy is only truly valuable to a person that already has faith in their life. Augustine was able to build a foundation on the belief that a person could actually use sense and reason (as presented through certain philosophy) to gain a better understanding of the world and help in the pursuit of deepening one’s faith. With this credence he also argued against some forms of philosophy such as Stoicism due to their over the top optimism.4 Augustine, as a deeply Christian man, very much believed in the evil and sin of men so he could not support a philosophy that cast doubt on that. Despite this, he found so much more within philosophical beliefs to strengthen his faith and intelligently prove it to
Author Claudia Gray stated, “Self-knowledge is better than self-control any day” (Goodreads). Evil and sin exists in our world today and the temptation they bring bounds many human’s spiritual being. Finding the root of all evil is a hard and torturous concept to understand, but knowing one’s own free will helps bring understanding and deliverance from the evils of the world. Throughout the book Confessions Saint Augustine “ponders the concepts of evil and sin and searches the root of their being” (Augustine 15). The existence of evil is one of the most worrisome challenges a Christian or any individual deals with throughout life. Saint Augustine’s beliefs concerning the root of all evil and sins transforms as he begins to grow and develop in the knowledge of his free will and spiritual being. Early on, he believes “God created all things and evil is a thing, therefore God created evil” (Augustine 73-74). From this he conceives the notion that God cannot be good if he knowingly created evil. As Augustine begins to grow in his spiritual walk, his views begin to evolve as he questions his Manichee’s beliefs and explores the concepts of good and evil. From his inquiring Augustine develops the question, what is evil and what if evil did not need creating? He asks, “Do we have any convincing evidence that a good God exists” (Augustine 136-137)?
It is apparent that we are personified entities, but also, that we embrace “more” than just our bodies. “Human persons are physical, embodied beings and an important feature of God’s intended design for human life” (Cortez, 70). But, “human persons have an ‘inner’ dimension that is just as important as the ‘outer’ embodiment” (Cortez, 71). The “inner” element cannot be wholly explained by the “outer” embodiment, but it does give rise to inimitable facets of the human mental life such as human dignity and personal identity.
Truth of oneself makes it visible when faced with absurd events in life where all ethical issues fade away. One cannot always pinpoint to a specific trait or what the core essence they discover, but it is often described as “finding one’s self”. In religious context, the essential self would be regarded as soul. Whereas, for some there is no such concept as self that exists since they believe that humans are just animals caught in the mechanistic world. However, modern philosophy sheds a positive light and tries to prove the existence of a self. Modern philosophers, Descartes and Hume in particular, draw upon the notion of the transcendental self, thinking self, and the empirical self, self of public life. Hume’s bundle theory serves as a distinction between these two notions here and even when both of these conception in their distinction make valid points, neither of them is more accurate.