Understanding Knowledge: Sources, Properties, and Truth
The Sources of Knowledge
The sources of knowledge are experience and thought. Through these, we learn from experience. Experience must be prolonged by thought. Experience is also called intuition, which can be sensuous (what we see and touch) or ideal (ideal objects). Concepts are the ideas we have of reality. Knowledge is always the result of thought applied to sensory or empirical content.
The Three Properties of Experience
Sensory experience is essential because it allows us to understand things
Read MoreNietzsche’s Critique: Overcoming Western Nihilism
Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Civilization
Thesis: This excerpt from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols showcases his attack on the use of “reason” in traditional philosophy. He criticizes the invention of an “other” world and “other” life, born from a distrust of our own reality. In the same vein, Nietzsche critiques the decadent dichotomy of the “true” and “apparent” world, a concept prevalent in religious (Christian) and philosophical (Kantian) thought. This does not contradict Nietzsche’s thesis
Read MoreSt. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine: Existence, Free Will, and Divine Illumination
St. Thomas Aquinas: Essence and Existence
II) The act of being or existence (esse) is unique for each substance. According to St. Thomas, the contingency of substances means that we can mentally understand their concept or definition without them necessarily existing in reality. Therefore, in contingent substances, essence and existence are really distinct. If essence is pure potentiality or possibility of being, the act of being or existence actualizes the essence. It is the act by which each substance
Read MoreJohn Locke’s Philosophy: Knowledge, Politics, and Liberalism
Locke’s thought stems from his concern for ethical and political issues, which Locke subjected to scientific treatment. This project requires outlining the possibilities of our knowledge. Thus, we find in Locke a theory of knowledge and political theory. Unlike rationalists’ claims, Locke thinks reason is not unique, neither omnipotent nor infallible (only aspires to a likely knowledge), but is a guide of all knowledge. There are no innate ideas; the mind is born a tabula rasa, since all ideas originate
Read MoreDescartes’ Method: Certainty, Cogito, and Modern Philosophy
Context: Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Part IV
This text is the fourth part of the Discourse on Method, published in 1637. This section presents questions as the fundamental starting point, leading to the cogito, and from it, demonstrates the existence of God and external things. It is the central part of a work constituting a fundamental pillar of modern epistemology.
Purpose and Method
The Discourse on Method is not just a treatise but a discourse, an explanation of the method Descartes found to
Read MorePlato’s Allegory of the Cave and Theory of Forms
Plato’s Myth of the Cave
The Myth of the Cave, described in Plato’s The Republic, summarizes the core of his Theory of Ideas (or Forms). The story depicts prisoners chained in a deep cave, having never seen anything but shadows cast on a wall by a fire. Naturally, they believe these shadows constitute true reality.
One prisoner is released and, after great effort, reaches the outside. He realizes that everything he has known until now is merely a pale reflection of the true reality he now discovers.
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