The idea that time and space are merely conditions of our own animalistic instincts combined with intuition and life experiences opens the door to explore ideas of why humans seem to be in such a rush. By contemplating the human need for more time and space, this theory is obviously a huge step for human development. Kant made other contribution to science such as, the nature of the Earth’s rotation, in which he won an award, and the idea that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars. Kant’s theories trend more toward astronomy as a base for where he spent his time and one can see where his thinking about the creations of the galaxy would spin his thoughts to the idea of what is time. Nietzsche’s theories, although highly controversial, challenged the ideas of morality and the idea of God.
As we see in this segment of Document 6 “Reason is in the estimation of the philosopher what grace is to the Christian. Grace determines the Christian's action; reason the philosopher's.” the philosophers of the Enlightenment strove to explain everything by means of logic and reason which was a mindset that was pioneered during the Scientific Revolution. Essentially, Enlightenment thinkers took the rational mindset from scientific discoveries of the Scientific Revolution and began to apply it to society. Isaac Newton's discoveries established the principles of the Enlightenment. At the time, discovery was looked at with skepticism as people had become accustomed to the bible being the only source of information about the world.
Rather than be content with what history had taught them, they would seek the truth, rather than settle for superstition and fear. Postmodernism, as Granz points out, derived from this philosophy. Its thought denies the very grounds on which western cultures have based their “truths”: absolute knowledge and meaning. Jean-Francois Lyotard, a French philosopher and leading postmodernist, was sceptical about the Enlightenment, and wrote about Grand Narratives and Little Narratives in reaction to this theory. The Grand narrative (known as meta-narratives) is a term used in the Enlightenment to describe everything inside a certain framework.
What does Paul Feyerabend’s notion of “Epistemological Anarchism” mean? Evaluate this in relation to his critique of Kuhn’s Paradigms. While Emphasizing the subjective side of science, Kuhn claimed that operating within science means existing within the restrictive confines of the dominant paradigm, which attempts to limit particular questions that can be asked, how these are asked, and how their answers are formulated into viable scientific facts that are accepted by fellow scientists. This paradigm, in turn may actually obstruct the progress of science by nature of being untranslatable to other paradigms and impede rational argument. Kuhn states that a scientist’s switch between one paradigm to the next is similar to a “gestalt switch” where neural programming is required rather than argument and persuasion.
Habermas critiques Gadamer’s thought by questioning the overall concept and the central role of tradition, arguing the possibilities of certain sub-conscious interests and specific authorial forces that distort tradition. In order to accurately explore the thoughts and beliefs of Gadamer and Habermas surrounding that of the concept of “tradition”, one must first establish the basic foundation of hermeneutics upon which these ideas are to be centred. Heidegger offers an effective ground on which to base the majority of these philosophical positions for that of classical hermeneutics by initially revealing hidden meanings in hermeneutical texts, exploring authoritative objectives and developing a clearer overall understanding of them. A later shift in focus in hermeneutics during the 20th century brought about an apparent lean toward specifically “epistemological foundations… or the methodological principles which lead to objective knowledge in the human sciences” (Ormiston, G & Schrift, A, 1990), thus encouraging the questioning of knowledge to be centred upon that of “truth” and “Being”. To Heidegger, it is the former understanding which leads to a solid basis of
Simply put, the fine-tuning argument contends that the universe was designed to ultimately create human beings. Fine-tuning is an argument which is able to contest one of the atheist’s own theories to disprove God. This will be explained in more detail later in this paper. In response to this, McCloskey says the cosmological argument “does not entitle us to postulate an all-powerful, all-perfect, uncaused cause.” As mentioned before, the cosmological argument is but one part of a concurrence for the existence of God. It does not prove God’s existence; it argues that there must be a necessary being which created the universe.
Among these were William L. Rowe, a professor of philosophy who counter argued Anselm’s beliefs with the support he took from many critics on the subject. One of these critics happens to be philosopher Immanuel Kant, who offered a rather interesting but strong counter claim to Anselm’s statements. A reoccurring idea in Anselm’s argument is that there is a precise difference in existing in reality and existing in the mind, AKA the understanding. Rowe interprets this idea and explains that Anselm is arguing that if a being only exists in one’s understanding, it is not as great as it could have been had it existed in reality as well. In Kant’s views, he believes Anselm’s mistake was in stating “existence” as a quality as well as a property that one may possess to add to the list of other’s one could conceive
In the seventeenth century, European intellectuals developed a new understanding of scientific endeavor, namely to discern natural causes through quantitative measurement. Galileo first challenged the Scholastic supposition that mathematical astronomy was merely ancillary to natural philosophy, and by the middle of the century, both the Cartesian and Newtonian mechanical systems had placed mathematics at center stage, disdaining qualitative physics as irrelevant, unknowable, and misleading. Consistent with their methodology, the mechanists tended to reduce the ontological reality of the natural world to its quantitative aspects, implicitly or explicitly eliminating all categories other than extension, time, space, and motion. In this interpretation, Descartes’ treatment of matter as extension merely formalized an intellectual aesthetic that even his adversaries held in practice. We can easily see this penchant for quantification in Newton’s belief that all physics is mechanical, but we might not expect to find a mania for quantity among those who held a more poetic view of reality.
(Warren 2015: 6-7) Warren goes on with her analysis of Plumwood's critique of deep ecology and says that the second controversial feature of deep ecology is about the principle of "self-realization, which claims that the human self (small 's') is actualized only when it becomes merged with the cosmos, a Self (capital 'S')." (Warren 2015: 7) Plumwood believes that is principle is flawed because it preserves "the discontinuity thesis" – the thesis that there is a clear division between what is natural and what is cultural
At the same time, however, our personal set of opinions control how we see things around us. We are the ones that are given the choice of what is being seen and what is believed. Empiricism began with John Locke who attacked Cartesian idea that reason alone could provide us with knowledge. Locke came out with the term of “Tabula Rasa.” It means that the mind comes into life blank, or empty and is written on by experience. Later, Philosopher Hume came out with his version of the “tabula rasa” principle, the copy theory of ideas.