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.
PHIL201 Discussion Board 1 The Mind-Body Problem Jeff Britt Picard’s beliefs are based on the Materialism view of the “Mind-Body Problem”. A materialist believes “that humans have both physical and mental attributes but says that both are attributes of the same thing – namely, a living human organism (Hasker, pp. 69 – 70).” Picard viewed Data as his equal. They may have had a different birth, or beginning, but the result is the same; a person that has the ability to make have feelings and make decisions for themselves. Data’s “brain” is no different than Picard’s; it is a component of their physical state and not linked to a soul that is given by God or another higher power.
Kant devised two different types of imperatives which allow us to make our decisions, hypothetical imperatives are the rules that we follow to attain a personal outcome or a selfish wish whereas categorical imperatives are intrinsically right. His first categorical imperative was meant to establish that humans should only act according to a law that can be universalised. ‘’Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’’ – (Kant the moral order). The second of the imperatives is that we as humans should never use another human as a means to an end, treat them all with value. ‘’Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end’’.
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
Plato argues that rather than being taught how to perceive things such as beauty or morality, through our physical senses, we instinctively have a general grasp of them through the theoretical form. In other words, the beautiful things we can see are beautiful only because they are part of the more general Form of Beauty. This Form of Beauty is itself invisible, eternal, and unchanging, unlike the things in the visible world that can grow old and lose their beauty. The Theory of Forms envisions an entire world of such Forms, a world that exists outside of time and space, where Beauty, Justice, Courage, Temperance, and the like exist untarnished by the changes and imperfections of the visible world. Plato also suggested that the theoretical form was never ending, unlike the physical form which starts at our conception/birth and ends at the moment that we die.
If God does not exist, though, then something can be imagined that is greater that God, namely a God that does exist. “The hypothesis that God does not exist thus seems to give rise to a logical absurdity: that there both is and is not something that can be imagined that is greater than God. There is, because it’s possible to imagine a God that does exist. There isn’t, because it’s impossible to imagine something greater than the greatest thing imaginable.” Anselm’s second premise embarks on the fact that ‘that thing, like all things, exists in the mind or in the external world, or in both’. Just because something exists in the understanding does not mean that it also exists in reality.
Therefore, the statement “Jay-Z is identical with Shawn Carter” is necessarily true because there cannot exist a world in which both Jay-Z and Shawn Carter exist, but are two separate individuals. We now shift our attention to David Lewis’ materialist theory of identity. This theory states that the concept of whatever mental state or experience is the concept of a state that occupies a certain causal role,
The explanation for the mind is different to the explanation for the brain, although it can be said that they are the same thing, and nothing more. If this is true, then we as individuals bear no soul. Proof from this comes from the concept of monism. However, many people would not agree and these would be dualists among others, where it is believed the brain can just be a synonym for the mind, or just refer to the physical organ that is within our skull. From this, it could be concluded that the brain is the physical substance, where as the mind is more of a philosophical concept.
Miller maintains that what ensures personal identity is the soul. He tells Weirob that “your mind or soul is immaterial, lodged in your body while you are on earth” (Perry 7). Miller expounds on this assertion by saying that the body is separate from the soul. Because they are separate Miller believes it stands that a body is not needed to equal survive as long as the soul continues to exist. Weirob, however, disagrees with this view, instead believing that it is the body that ensures identity.
For example, the term “human” names the eternal existing Form of the human. Plato’s first argument for the Forms can be considered an epistemological argument. Plato claims that: knowledge is enduring, and a true rational belief based on instruction. He says we do have knowledge, but that it cannot be about the world of the senses (because the senses can deceive); therefore it must be about an eternal world. This enduring world is the world of the Forms.