Understanding Values: Philosophical Perspectives and Types
What Are Values?
The term ‘value’ is often used to talk about the price of a commodity, giving it an economic meaning. Sometimes, it is said that a piece of art has great value. In this context, it has value as a human creation, but it might be impossible to set a precise economic value for it.
Key aspects of values include:
- Unreal Objects on Real Objects: Values cannot be seen, touched, or smelled; they are not perceived directly by human senses. For example, goodness itself cannot be touched. However,
Modernity and Postmodernism: Defining Cultural Eras
Modernity: An Era of Progress and Reason
Modernity is a period in European history dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It coincided with the end of the Old Regime and the liberal revolutions, implying significant societal change. Modernity effectively began with the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.
Key Tenets of Modernity
- Social Utopias: This period featured grand social visions and cultural movements like the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, a French cultural
Hume on Knowledge, Causality, and Moral Sentiment
Hume: Impressions, Ideas, and Knowledge Sources
For David Hume, sense experience is the ultimate source of our knowledge; he argued against the existence of innate ideas. He referred to anything that enters our mind through the senses as a perception. Hume distinguished between two kinds of perceptions: impressions and ideas.
- Impressions: Perceptions that enter the mind with greater force and vivacity.
- Ideas: Fainter images or copies of impressions, used in thinking, reasoning, and imagining.
The impression
Read MoreDescartes, Rationalism, and the Scientific Revolution
Renaissance Influences on Descartes
In the Renaissance, there was a return to the classics alongside a significant influence from Stoicism and Epicureanism. Stoicism, for instance, is evident in Descartes’s very morals. He was also influenced by Skepticism. However, his focus became a question of method for attaining certainty that could not be doubted.
The Rise of New Science and Its Impact
For the development of the new science, Platonism, Pythagoreanism, and the importance of number and geometry
Read MoreCore Human Rights Concepts and Contemporary Ethical Debates
Key Characteristics of Human Rights
Natural Rights
Human rights, framed as natural rights, transcend the boundaries of specific laws, customs, or cultural beliefs. Unlike legal rights, they are not contingent on the recognition of any particular authority. Instead, they are often rooted in scriptural, religious teachings, philosophical principles, or what is commonly referred to as “common sense.” This implies that human beings possess inherent rights by virtue of their humanity.
Inviolable
The term
Read MoreThomas Aquinas: Core Philosophical and Theological Concepts
Theology and Philosophy: Faith and Reason
Contrary to the theory advocated by some Averroists, Thomas Aquinas (TA) posits that there are truths specific to faith (theology), others specific to reason (philosophy), and some shared by both (preambles of faith, such as the existence of God). There can be no contradiction between these two forms of wisdom. In the event of an apparent conflict, faith must prevail as it originates from God’s revelation. Therefore, philosophy is considered the handmaid
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