Yet, if we observe that pleasure is good, we should be able to ask is good pleasure. However if an individual gains pleasure through inflicting harm can we conclude that good and pleasure are one and the same thing? In short ethical naturalism is unable to define good, yet continues to claim that ethical language is based on objective truth. Non Cognitive approaches to meta ethics such as emotivism and prescriptivism argue that ethical language is subjective. A. J. Ayer claims that ethical language
The answer to this question will vary. Some people are moral realists and hold that moral facts are objective facts that are out there in the world, these people believe that things are good or bad independently of us. Moral values such as goodness and badness are real properties of people in the same way that rough and smooth are properties of physical objects. This view is often referred to as cognitive language. Those who oppose cognitivists are called non cognitivists and they believe that when someone makes a moral statement they are not describing the world, but they are merely expressing their feelings and opinions, they believe that moral statements are not objective therefore they cannot be verified as true or false.
As a further definition, Mackie posits that an objective moral value has the quality of ‘ought-to-be-pursued-ness’, it is something one should or ought do because it contains an inherently normative aspect. If Mackie’s argument is to succeed, it must prove that this supposed normative aspect has no existence within any act in itself, but has its origin in the agent of said act, and as such, all moral claims are false. Mackie’s exposition of moral relativism comes in the form of two main arguments, the first being his ‘argument from relativity’, the second, his ‘argument from queerness’. It is with the argument from relativity that I shall be here concerned. The argument from relativity is based around the purely ‘descriptive’ idea that it is an empirically observable fact that there seems to be
Representative realism or indirect realism Representative realism understands that we perceive a world of physical objects that are external to our mind, this will be indirect, there is a medium of sense-data that represents these objects in the mind. They argue that there is a distinct difference between what the world is and what we perceive the world to be. We perceive it indirectly. Indirect representative realism explains non veridical perception in terms of mis representation. The sense datum, aids in seeing these mental images in the mind.
Rachels discusses Descarte’s thoughts on the dreaming state, and how if we can be made to believe that our senses are correct there, than they cannot be trusted. The author discusses Philosophical thoughts on Idealism, in which it is considered that our perceptions of physical objects are not “real”, they are only mental ideas as recorded by our senses and imagined by our brains. Rachels discusses the attempts by Descartes to find a foundation for knowledge by identifying absolute truths, and concludes that the task may too difficult, or impossible. Quotes: I found it intriguing where the author wrote, “The mind does not simply record what passes before it; instead, the mind actively interprets experience according to certain built-in principles. Therefore, what we think of as “simple”
Hence, our conception of one substance would be understood via an external property in relation with the other substance. Since substances cannot be understood in terms of external properties in relation with each other then they cannot be said to account for one another either because they do not relate to each other. Hence, since they cannot account for another, then they cannot cause or produce one another. From this line of reasoning Spinoza provides the corollary that substance cannot be produced by anything outside of it because there only exist substance and their
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.
Next, I will explain Lewis’s reply about why Knowledge Argument can’t refute physicalism. Finally, I will express my own opinion and show my reasons. Frank Jackson puts knowledge Argument forward. Although he thinks that physical knowledge provides us with some information relate to the world, and help people to understand the world in an objective way. However, in the process of experience, human cannot feel the “feeling” using the concepts of that “feeling”, which is named Qualia.
Because it engages the whole self without a fixed yardstick it can be called a personal reflection…. [I]n this reflection the self is in question; what is at stake is the definition of those inchoate evaluations which are sensed to be essential to our identity (117). Taylor makes this claim about responsibility for self in opposition to Sartre’s characterization of the human condition as nothingness and absolute freedom. Sartre derives from this condition an understanding of freedom as the radical, infinite openness of the freedom of our choices and concludes that it is this freedom that characterizes our fundamental moral dilemma. Taylor argues that it is not the weight of the openness that defines our moral selves or the moral dilemmas we face, but the fact that various choices necessarily blind and pull us in different directions.
The semiotics of symbolic objects represented within contemporary art The practice of semiotics is concerned with how the representation of an entity engenders meaning, as well as the attributions and comprehensions of meaning which are generated. Symbolism, as a narrower field, is fulfilled by the use of semiotic analysis to confront the notion that an image or object can only depict a meaning intentionally thrust upon it by the creator, or that any entity within art can be absolutely objective, furthermore, that an articles meaning is of secondary importance to the individual elements of the piece. Thus through the use of semiotics numerous and fluctuating representational relationships are acknowledged and the integral role, individuals, the image or objects and culture and society play within understanding symbols within contemporary art. The identification of the symbolist movement first occurred within literature and evolved to visual arts from the late 19th to early 20th century, at the same time, semiology was founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist; the linguistic science cited the proprieties of signs and symbols within social culture and the formality withheld to reveal structural meaning behind phenomena’s appearance. Furthermore, how an entity is studied to be relevant within a structures’ entirety, such that how the connotations of an object change the appearance or meaning of the piece of a whole, not just the singular article.