Plato
Plato uses the myth of the cave to address several important concerns of philosophy, the role of the philosopher and his journey to Knowledge. The story presents a group of men living in an underground cave. They are chained to a wall such that they can only see the back wall of the cave. There is only one entrance to the cave, and it is behind them on top of the wall they are chained to. When objects pass by the entrance of the cave, they can see their shadows on the back wall. One day, one of them gets loose and crawls his way to the outside. When he exits the cave, the light outside blinds him at first. Eventually, his eyes adjust and he is able to see all the amazing sights. He remembers his cave mates and wishes to share his new sights with them. When he goes back inside, he cannot see the shadows on the wall anymore because his eyes are adjusted to the brightness outside. When he tries to convince the others to break free and join him on the outside, they resist because they think the outside world has blinded him. When he pushes further, they think of him as dangerous and plot to kill him. Using this parable, Plato proposes that there are two different worlds. The first is the world that we live in, the world
In Meditation One, Descartes, comes to the conclusion that many of his beliefs that he held as a child are doubtful. He resolves that in order to find out the "truths," he must disprove his current beliefs. Descartes goes about this by trying to disprove the principles that support everything he believes in, using his Method of Doubt. Descartes' Method of doubt is his way of doubting everything that has even the slightest possibility of not being fact. Descartes does not necessarily doubt everything that he brings up, because that would take forever. Instead, he only goes to doubt the first set of principles that his belief structure is built upon. First, Descartes doubts that he can trust his senses because they are occasionally wrong. He argues that even if we regard these senses as commonsense, they can sometimes lead us astray from the "truth." Descartes states that there are no definitive signs for him to tell weather he is awake or asleep. Since he cannot trust his senses he concludes that there is no way to determine whether he is awake or asleep. But he admits that there are certain "truths" that are consistent weather he is awake or asleep. He has no doubts that elements of arithmetic and geometry are immune to doubt even when he's asleep. To disprove these doubts, Descartes abandons the idea of a supremely good God like he has believed in all his life and brings up the argument that God is an all powerful, all clever evil genius who's entire purpose is to deceive him. With this argument, Descartes has taken his doubt argument to the furthest possible point. At this point, he begins to rebuild his belief structure one step at a time. He makes the argument that "I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it." This is the only thing that the evil genius cannot deceive him on. He cannot possibly doubt his own existence. For, if he doubts that, he still knows that he is there to doubt it, therefore he cannot be non-existent. So, he begins to place undoubted faith in the fact that he exists. He then deduces that if he exists, the external world around h
Some common words found in the essay are:
, Descartes' Method, Meditation Descartes, real world, real objects, existence god, evil genius, sensory world, awake asleep, god putting idea, weather awake asleep, world sensory experiences, method doubt, belief structure, trust senses, outside cave,
Approximate Word count = 1437
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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