He argued that they were part of the structure of the mind and that we would have no experience without them. He says that sight, smell, touch etc. are all meaningless to us unless they are brought under these innate concepts. Kant believes in a world beyond our conceptual scheme called the noumenal world which he says we can know nothing about and it is impossible to discuss. People have criticized this view by say that how can Kant know that the Noumenal world exists if there is no evidence of it.
It’s not clear as to whether Spinoza meant (a) there cannot be two substances with all the same attributes in common; or (b) there cannot be two substances with an attribute in common. Spinoza uses the phrase “nature or attribute” which suggests that he meant (a) because a substance’s nature constitutes sharing all of the same attributes not just some. This interpretation helps his argument for premise one the most because if substances are distinguished by their attributes, then substances cannot have all the same attributes in common. For Spinoza, substance is something self-conceivable, however, this conception of substance does not work if there are substances that share something in common because we would conceive one substance in terms of an extrinsic property. Hence, our conception of one substance would be understood via an external property in relation with the other substance.
However this version of the verification principle has been criticized as being too strict as statements such as History, can not be seen as meaningful as they cannot be empirically verified by the senses, and it neither a tautology of all the events that have taken part in the past. The second part to the verification principle was made and developed by A.J Ayer. Ayer believed that with using the weak verification to prove statements you would be able to verify them in principle unlike the strong verification principle, which can only be proved meaningful if it is observed, or
The first problem Hawking addresses is whether a set of equations can predict the details of everyday life. He claims it can, due to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which says that one can’t measure both position and velocity of a particle. This would allow for an infinite amount of possible universes, each with its own history. This is where it is necessary to use facts and explanations. Very few people have even heard of “quantum mechanics”, let alone what the “uncertainty principle” is and what its significance is; therefore he has to explain it to the readers.
I disagree that Hume's arguments to causation are successful to a full extent due to the fact that Hume's challenges criticise causation from the point of view that empirical evidence is our only source of knowledge, suggesting we cannot know whether the effect due to cause can be discovered because "the effect is different from the cause, and so can never be discovered." Yet why should we apply the limitations of our ability to state that God does not exist? To further evaluate, Hume states we are bound by empirical data and so we will only be able to 'induce' that the regress of cause and effect exists and so this regress falls foul to Hume's Fork. The criticism of Hume's challenge is formulated in the sense that because philosophically and empirically "we will never know the true origins of the universe" it does not mean that "the universe is the "brute fact" as stated by B. Russell. A second challenge of Hume is that we are able to possibly imagine that something can cause itself into existence.
He therefore rejected an infinite universe because he did not believe that it was a satisfactory explanation for its existence. Copleston supported Aquinas’ rejection of infinite regress on the grounds that an infinite chain of contingent beings could only ever consist of contingent beings, which would never be able to bring itself into existence. However, Bertand Russell opposed that the cosmological argument was evidence for the existence of God, he rejected the idea of contingency also, and he argued that a ‘necessary being’ has no meaning. Kant examined the argument of the existence of a supreme being as a first cause of the universe. He argued that cause and effect can only be applied to the world.
One goes by the name “Cartesian spiral”. This suggests that the distinct and clear perception that proves Gods existence is different from the other perceptions. The Cartesian spiral is based on a mathematical equation, as “2+2=4” is clear and distinct, but a judgement and that is open to error. While the clear and distinct perception of Gods existence is just an idea and with no judgement attached. We know clear and distinct perceptions independently by God, and his existence provides us with a certainty we might not possess otherwise.
Sadly again, almost none of these paradoxes are quoted in Zeno's original words by their various commentators, but in paraphrase. 1. Background Before we look at the paradoxes themselves it will be useful to sketch some of their historical and logical significance. First, Zeno sought to defend Parmenides by attacking his critics. Parmenides rejected pluralism and the reality of any kind of change: for him all was one indivisible, unchanging reality, and any appearances to the contrary were illusions, to be dispelled by reason and revelation.
In his paper “There is no A Priori”, Michael Devitt presents a defense of his naturalistic account of knowledge arguing that the only way of knowing is the empirical way of knowing. Rejecting a priori knowledge based on the conclusion that the unsuccessful attempts to explain this knowledge proves it to be obscure and mysterious, he proposes the view that an adequate recognition of a holistic nature of confirmation would demonstrate that there is no reason to think that concepts of logic and mathematics are not liable to empirical revision. Devitt’s defense, however, far from offering a persuasive argument that would prove that all knowledge is empirical and justified by experience, not only raises serious problems by presenting a circular argument that fails to provide a conclusive reason for why a priori knowledge should be rejected on the grounds of its obscure connections, but also comes up short when its naturalistic conclusions are evaluated under its own standard for the justification of beliefs. Devitt begins his argument by saying that what makes naturalism an attractive approach is the fact that it postulates the thesis that “there is only one way of knowing”[1], and by this it is assumed he means that his theory of knowledge is to be preferred over other theories in part because of its simplicity. Although he recognizes that the fact that people have certain intuitions in cases of logic or mathematical concepts could be used to prove naturalism wrong, he quickly dismisses this position by objecting that the concept of the a priori has not been able to offer satisfactory answers to the question of its justification, and without satisfactory answers this knowledge is left mysterious and deeply obscure.
‘Religious language is meaningless.’ Analyse and evaluate this claim with reference to the verification and falsification debates. I disagree with the statement that religious language is meaningless, but Logical positivist within the Vienna circle applied the idea of the verification principle to religious language, and saw religious language as meaningless. The verification principle is the philosophical movement which claims that language is only meaningful if it can be verified by sense-observation or if it is known as a tautology. And they saw that religious language cannot be empirically tested through the senses, and neither is it known as a tautology so then it is considered as meaningless. Philosophers like Moritz Schlick and others who were supporters of the verification principle, believed that the meaningless of a statement is shown by the way in which you verify it.