Philosophy: On the Elucidation of various Philosophers Essay

The Age of Reason is an impetus for arrival of new stance regarding cosmogenesis or natural philosophy since new scientific advancements are being discovered. During this time, Age of Reason becomes the emancipating precursor from shackles of dogmatism that held the classical skepticism and religious perspective of the cosmos. The principal precursor in the change of thought is Rene Descartes who rebels against the dogmatism of his present time, while providing valid arguments on doubting and on ideas in relation to Providence, thus his philosophy landscaped a new philosophical stance during the Age of Reason. Descartes is the first philosopher who goes against a prevalent thinking established during the Dark Ages, which only accepts ideas bounded by the church. Descartes’ definitive doubt is the mirror image of his definitive certainty. Having raised, as he claims, all possible doubts, he will be able subsequently to claim that whatever principles survive his skeptical scrutiny has been established with metaphysical finality. Classical skepticism, even if used as a methodological device, could support no such claim. With the emergence of a new idea, the balance, even if at present dramatically tipped, might always be restored or even tipped the other way. Ordinary doubting, and its sophisticated extension, classical isosthenia, are always contingent on the current state of knowledge. They offer no test for absolute certainty. The first point Descartes makes is that he cannot trust his senses without qualification, because they have often deceived him about objects that are barely perceptible or very far away. Nevertheless, this leaves untouched beliefs about objects close by and in plain view. To call these in question, he needs the dreaming argument. But even the dreaming argument, as Descartes understands it, leaves unscathed beliefs about things that are ‘very simple and very general’, and to undermine the credibility of these, he has to raise questions about his origin, nature, and relation to Providence, a line of thought encapsulated in the conceit of the evil deceiver. Moreover, even this final, hyperbolical doubt seems implicitly to concede Descartes some knowledge. This stratification of doubt imposes a corresponding stratification of knowledge. Through the progressive development of his doubt, Descartes effects a context- and subject-matter-independent partitioning of his beliefs into broad epistemological classes, ordered according to how difficult it is to doubt them. First in the order come the beliefs that are never doubted, subsequently to be identified as those that involve Descartes’ immediate knowledge of his own ‘thoughts’, whose exemption will be retrospectively justified on the grounds of their supposed incorrigibility. The progressive development of Cartesian doubt insinuates, without ever directly arguing for, a foundational conception of knowledge, the view of knowledge that sees justification as constrained by just the sort of context- and subject-matter-independent order of epistemic priority that is implicit in Descartes’ stratified doubt. One of the major criticisms in Descartes philosophical stance is its appeal to epistemological solipsism, which means that everything an individual thinks is to be considered as truth. In epistemological solipsism, all ideas that reside in the mind are indubitable truth, and those that exist in the external world are nothing but unnecessary hypothesis. The problem here is that Descartes failed to realize that the there is a certain extent wherein human mind cannot explain or elucidate certain ideas that can be elucidated through empirical ways. On Hegel Geist makes itself what it implicitly is, its deed, and its works; in that way it has itself before its own eyes as object. So is the spirit of a people. . . . In these its works, its world, the spirit of a people finds enjoyment of itself and is satisfied. Lectures on the Philosophy of History) We come to self-awareness by finding ourself in our ‘Other’, that which is distinct from us, set over against us. So if the Idea is to rise to self-consciousness, as the ultimate purpose of things demands, there will have to be something set in opposition to it which is its ‘Other’, and yet which is at the same time a reflection of it. And so there is: nature, concrete where the Idea is abstract, particular where it is universal, thing where it is thought, but none the less its embodiment and manifestation, in Hegel’s vocabulary ‘identical’ with it. Geist, the third element of the great triad, arises out of this opposition of intimately related items which provides the necessary basis for the emergence of self-consciousness. The better Geist’s grasp of this ‘identity’ the closer has the Idea come to full consciousness of its own essence. The dialectical progression which Hegel saw in cultural forms and social institutions, in short in the life of the human race, he also saw in the life of the individual; the fall from childhood happiness and its reattainment so hardly won, the suffering that goes with nobility of soul and the subsequent recovery of joy. He is also able to assimilate the story of the fall of man, treating it as mythical representation of aspects of the history of mankind which are then played out again in each human life. It tells of a fall from a state of unthinking, unknowing wholeness to one of separation and the pain that comes from consciousness of it. And in his diagnosis Hegel seizes another chance to link arms with a theme of romantic as well as religious literature: what brings this fall about is the increase of knowledge. ‘Would I had never gone to your schools! is Hyperion’s cry; and what so afflicted the graceful youth of Kleist’s tale was knowledge as well, the realization of his own beauty; for Schiller, writing ‘Die Gotter Griechen-lands’, it was the knowledge of the natural scientist which had banished spirit from the world and left it alien and hollow. Historicism for Hegel is defined as a means of understanding the world and all human activities in terms of the histo rical context of the world and such activities; anything is circumstantiated based on the history of a given phenomenon. Historicism is important because it concretized the mechanism of dialectical materialism such as the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of the event. Organicism is a means of understanding a single developing organism operates on its interdependent parts, in order to grasp its whole meaning in terms of human psyche and behavior. Hegel develops this idea along lines indicated by his highly individual conception of logic and strongly encouraged by the communal romantic metaphysic. Precisely because the dialectic works, in Hegel’s view, with fluid boundaries, the connections it reveals to us are invisible to the understanding. Reason, by virtue of its appreciation of fluidity and its disdain for divisive conceptual barriers, in short by its acceptance of the romantic principle of Unity-in-Difference as a principle of logic, is to let us see the aspect of identity between items which Verstand had hitherto represented as unalterably different and opposed. Hegel’s dialectics influenced Karl Marx in conceiving a utopian society with his structuring of Dialectical Materialism. Hegel also influenced Marx in terms of his stance on master-slave relationship, which is viewed by the former as the prevalent form of government. Hegel rebels against it because the person is deemed as a thing. On Husserl My transcendental method is transcendental-phenomenological. It is the ultimate fulfillment of old intentions, especially those of English empiricist philosophy, to investigate the transcendental-phenomenological â€Å"origins† †¦ the origins of objectivity in transcendental subjectivity, the origin of the relative being of objects in the absolute being of consciousness. Husserl’s lectures of 1923–1924) Edmund Husserl’s transformation of phenomenology from an unfortunately named â€Å"descriptive psychology† to transcendental idealism thus extended the earlier critique of naturalism and psychologism in logic to philosophical naturalism generally. The crucial move in this transition is the methodological procedure of the pheno menological reduction, the suspending or â€Å"bracketing† or â€Å"putting out of action† all of the existential posits of the natural attitude. Considered as a â€Å"transcendental†, this operation first opens up the â€Å"absolute being of pure consciousness†, the â€Å"residuum of the world’s annihilation† (Residuum der Weltvernichtung). With it, phenomenology necessarily becomes transcendental inasmuch as phenomenological investigation is concerned to give an exhaustive description of this revealed region of â€Å"transcendental subjectivity† together with its structures of intentionality. Consequent to the phenomenological reduction, all reality (Realitat), ideal as well as actual, is exhibited as having being in virtue of â€Å"sense-bestowal† (Sinngebung), and indeed, the notion of an â€Å"absolute reality† independent of consciousness is as nonsensical as that of a â€Å"round square†. By the same token, â€Å"pure consciousness†, the ultimate origin of all â€Å"sense-bestowal†, â€Å"exists absolutely and not by virtue of another (act of) sense-bestowal†. It is the ultimate conferee of sense or meaning, the source of all representations, and so of all objectivity. Martin Heidegger position on second intuition is greatly influenced by Husserl. Like Husserl, Heidegger also espoused that in order to elucidate a phenomenon, one must take into account all the descriptive experience of that phenomenon, and this understood in Husserl’s term as intentionality and for Heidegger it is care. Hence, for Heidegger phenomenology is encapsulated in the catchphrase: â€Å"to the things in themselves†. Jean-Paul Sartre Transcendence of the Ego is greatly affected by Husserl’s intentionality. Sartre elucidates how the power of consciousness and intentionality can unravel or show the authenticity of object in relation to the being, and of course of the ontology of the being-for-itself. For Sartre, constitution should not be misconstrued as means of â€Å"creation† because the former should only be viewed in context of consciousness. Hence, constitution is a way of conceiving things that surrounds the being, or when being makes sense of the things that surrounds him/her. And through constitution, being is able to individuate himself/herself from other beings and the tings that surround the being. Thus, objects are elucidated in their own-ness and the object of consciousness is ego, which is a departure from Husserl. On the other hand, Soren Kierkegaard influenced Sartre in terms of objectification the being, which can lead to angst or nausea, and bad faith. Kierkegaard posits that the crowd can lead to the objectification of the being that can cause fear, and eventually leads to untruth. Sartre postulates that once the being is consumed by the others and being-in-itself, the being is automatically in bad faith and objectified, thus losing its authenticity. On Plato and Aristotle Plato’s theory of forms suggests that the world that we know of and that which we live in is not the real and objective world. This world is where the material objects exist, and the very material objects are not the essences of these very objects. Rather, in the Platonic view, real objects are the forms, such that latter is the very essence of these objects, that it is where objects of the material world are framed upon. These forms are not of this material world but exist instead in the world of forms or ideas. Thus, real knowledge for Plato is not the commonsensical notion of knowledge derived from what we directly experience through our senses but is rather the knowledge of the forms. To know and understand the forms is to know the very essence of things. Hence, this leads to the dichotomization of world of object and world of ideas, in which the latter is the end-all of all things, or the truth in-itself. Quite on the contrary, Aristotle believes that knowledge can be obtained empirically and that a grasp of the nature of things can be acquired through careful observation of phenomena. The senses of man, then, pose great centrality to Aristotle’s method of arriving at the understanding of objects. Through the use of sensory perception, one can obtain the critical facts which are directly observable from the object and are constitutive of its physical existence. The observation on objects allows one to acquire the basic information about the object. The corresponding sensory experience on the object creates the very core of what seems to be the ultimate components that comprise the very form of the object of the perception. The way the objects represent themselves before the senses is the real way things are as they are. Roughly speaking, the very form of the object is its unique characteristic which is primarily constitutive of its overall existence. The very essence of objects for Aristotle cannot be separated from the object itself and, hence, the way to understand the essence of a thing is to experience the object through sensory perception. Aristotle tries to arrive at generalizations out of specific observations. More generally, he attempts at proceeding to the general knowledge on the essences of things from an analysis of specific phenomena. This ascent from particulars to generalizations is considered to be inductive in principle and deductive to a certain extent since these generalizations derived can then be utilized as the general claim upon which specific claims can be inferred from. Yet, broadly speaking, Aristotle’s logic revolves around the notion of deduction (sullogismos). Aristotle then says of deduction: A deduction is speech (logos) in which, certain things having been supposed, something different from those supposed results of necessity because of their being so. (Prior Analytics I. 2, 24b18-20) Thus, the form of an object for Aristotle is its specific characteristic, its very essence or essential attribute manifested by its physical existence or the very fact that it is tangible, and this we can derive principally through the use of deduction and of logic in general to our immediate sensory perception of objects. On the other hand, Plato’s method of philosophizing is seen to be as deductive in nature. From an understanding of the universals or generalizations, specifically that of the forms, man can derive the particulars through contemplation on the objects, objects which are mere imitations of the forms in the Platonic sense. Thus, Plato’s mode of inference can be seen as a descent from the general a priori principles down to the specifics.