The Epistemology of the Empiricists - Assignment Example

Modern Philosophy Trace the concepts of idea, senses, and perceptions in the epistemology of the empiricists (Locke, Berkley, Hume). Epistemologyor theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. It focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. Modern philosophy is philosophy done during the "modern" era of Europe and North America. The modern period runs roughly from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the present. There are two major figures of philosophy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries namely: Rationalist and Empiricist. The "Rationalists," mostly in France and Germany, assumed that all knowledge must begin from certain "innate ideas" in the mind. In philosophy, empiricism is generally a theory of knowledge emphasizing the role of experience, based on perceptual observations by the five senses. . such as sight, touch, hearing and smell. According to Hume, empiricism is a reduction of ideas to nothing more than fuzzy remembered images of actual perceptions that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real and as having important ontological implications, for soul or mind or divinity. John Locke is the father of true empiricism, which is nothing more than a denial of innate (or a priori) knowledge and philosophical rationalism (the belief that knowledge can be derived by reason alone without reference to the perceived world) and insistence that all knowledge is derived and based on conscious experience of the world. That the world we are conscious of is objectively real, and it is our conscious perception of that objectively real world and our reasoning about it, which is the only source of true knowledge. Locke's empiricism began and ended with Locke. Bishop Berkley and Hume immediately destroyed it, and "empiricism" after Locke devolved into extreme Skepticism and subjective Idealism. 2. In what ways does Kant re-integrate both the empiricists and the rationalists, and get modern philosophy out of the dead-end of Human skepticism In the late eighteenth century Immanuel Kant set forth a groundbreaking philosophical system which claimed to bring unity to rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists believe there are innate ideas that are not found in experience. These ideas exist independently of any experience people may have. These ideas may in some way derive from the structure of the human mind, or they may exist independently of the mind. If they exist independently, they may be understood by a human mind once it reaches a necessary degree of sophistication. Empiricists who denied that there are concepts that exist prior to experience. For them, all knowledge is a product of human learning, based on human perception. Perception, however, may cause concern, since illusions, misunderstandings, and hallucinations prove that perception does not always depict the world as it really is. In Kant's view people certainly do have knowledge that is prior to experience, which is not devoid of cognitive significance. Kant has been justly recognized for creating a revolutionary synthesis between the absolute, but speculative certainties of the continental rationalism of his time (represented by Leibniz) and the practical approach of British empiricism (culminating with Hume) that ended up in universal skepticism. Kant's initial position was considerably closer to the continental rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff than to British empiricism. Both his background and his personal inclination caused him to search for absolute certainties rather than pragmatic solutions. It was Hume's skepticism merely served as a catalyst to make him realize how little certainty there could be in any metaphysical construct which described himself as a lover of metaphysics whose affection had not been reciprocated. In the eighteenth century he struggled and became problematic between the conflicting influences of rationalism and religious aspirations influenced by the spiritual intuitions of his Pietist. He harbored a lifelong dislike of religious formalism, but he also had a passion for the inquiry into ultimate reality (God, freedom, and the afterlife) based on an undeniable, though muted, personal spirituality. It has been said that his moral philosophy, including the notion of the categorical imperative, represents a sort of secularized version of Lutheranism. 3. Describe how Hegel is a response to Kant, Marks to Hegel, and Kierkegaard as a response to both Marx and Hegel. Hegel's form of idealism account lies in his idea that the mind of God becomes actual only via its particularization in the minds of "his" finite creatures. Thus, in our consciousness of God, we somehow serve to realize his own self-consciousness, and, thereby, his own perfection. With its dark mystical roots, and its overtly religious content, it is hardly surprising that the philosophy of Hegel so understood is regarded as being very distant to the largely secular and "scientific" conceptions of philosophy. This is the way on how Hegel is attempting to answer the Kantian question of the conditions of rational human "mindedness," rather than being concerned with giving an account of the developing self-consciousness of God. Because in Kant's philosophy it is limited such conditions to "formal" structures of the mind. While Hegel extended them to include aspects of historically and socially determined forms of embodied human existence. That in his absolute idealism, he incorporated both subjective life and the objective cultural practices on which subjective life depended within the dynamics of the development of the self-consciousness and self-actualisation of God, the "Absolute Spirit." At the opposite end of the spectrum, Kierkegaard turned philosophy into an internal and religious endeavor. Schopenhauer took Idealism to the conclusion that the world was nothing but the futile endless interplay of images and desires, and advocated atheism and pessimism. Kierkegaard's and Schopenhauer's ideas were taken up and transformed by Nietzsche, who seized upon their various dismissals of the world to proclaim "God is dead" and to reject all systematic philosophy and all striving for a fixed truth transcending the individual. This is one reason why Kierkegaard objected to Hegel's claim that he had devised a system of thought that could explain the whole of reality, with a dialectical analysis of history, which he felt is so difficult. That instead of seeing scientific knowledge as the means of human redemption, he regarded it as the greatest obstacle to redemption. Instead of seeking to give people more knowledge he sought to take away what passed for knowledge. Instead of seeking to make God and Christian faith perfectly intelligible he sought to emphasize the absolute transcendence by God of all human categories. Thus, Kierkegaard considered Hegel's explanation of Christianity as a necessary part of world history to be a distortion of the Christian message and a misunderstanding of the limits of human reason. He attempted to refute this aspect of Hegel's thought by suggesting that many doctrines of Christianity - including the doctrine of Incarnation, a God who is also human - cannot be explained rationally but remain a logical paradox. Hegel claimed that the doctrines and history of Christianity could be explained as a part of the rational unfolding and development of our understanding of the natural world and our place within it. His philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as, comprehensive, evolving, rational unity called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge". Central to Hegel's conception of knowledge and mind was the notion of identity in difference, that mind externalizes itself in various forms and objects recognized as "with itself" in these external manifestations, so that they are at one and the same time mind and other-than-mind. This notion of identity made Hegel's different from other philosophers. References: 1. Epistemology. http://www.fact-index.com/e/ep/epistemology 1.html 2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/#TraMetVieHeg 3. Modern philosophy. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy 4. Philosophy of Sren Kierkegaard. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard Read More