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religious belief which Kierkegaard holds to be a matter of passion not reason. Reason can only undermine faith, never justify it.
For even though one might indulge in rationalistic proofs of God’s existence, in the manner of Anselm or Aquinas, these nevertheless have nothing at all to do with a belief in God. One must choose to believe in God passionately and personally, not as a mere intellectual exercise.
Kierkegaard’s later works frequently attack the institutions of the Christian church, which he claims are the very antithesis of Christianity. Going through the motions of a Christian life – attending church, following ordained ethical precepts, reciting scripture and so on – has nothing to do with the religious life if it does not involve a personal and direct confrontation with the divine.
For instance, take someone who is afraid of ghosts. That person’s fear is directed towards something, namely ghosts, and yet this is true whether we believe in ghosts or not. Similarly, if one believes that tomorrow it will rain, one’s belief is directed towards, or refers to, tomorrow – a possibility rather than an actuality.
The central theme of all existentialist philosophies is the claim that ‘existence precedes essence’. By this Sartre intends to convey the view that man first exists without purpose or definition, finds himself in the world and only then, as a reaction to experience, defines the meaning of his life.
However, Sartre’s subtle argument does not rely on his atheism to prove the existential premise. For even a belief in God is, according to Sartre, a personal choice - it is a life and purpose chosen. The belief in a deity can never be forced upon a person. Even if one were to have the miraculous visions of Abraham, it remains up to the individual to interpret those visions: the voice of the divine or lunatic hallucinations? Only the individual, not God, can make that interpretation.
French novelist and philosopher, de Beauvoir is largely responsible for inaugurating the modern feminist movement as well as significantly influencing the later views of Sartre.
What we are is what we do. Thus anyone who acts heroically is a hero, anyone who acts cowardly is a coward.
It is hard to overestimate Wittgenstein’s influence on modern philosophy. His later work had a direct influence on J. L. Austin and the Oxford ‘ordinary language’ school of philosophy as well as the modern speech-act theorists.
Whereas in English there is only one word for snow, for example, the Inuit language has many words for it. Whorf argues, accordingly, that since Inuit make many finer discriminations about snow than English speakers, they literally ‘see’ snow differently. They see subtle differences in snow that others do not.
Vygotsky is thus forced to conclude that in growing up within a particular linguistically structured relationship, ‘the child begins to perceive the world not only through its eyes but also through its speech. And later it is not just seeing but acting that becomes informed by words’.
The notion of a universal grammar is relatively simple. There are something like 5000 known varieties of human language. According to Chomsky, despite their many surface differences, they all are constrained by certain parameters and principles that are innate, and unique, to the human mind.
A significant argument for this conclusion rests on what some have called the ‘productivity’ argument. Experimental psychologists will often attest to the speed at which grammatical ability develops in children around the age of two or three, an ability that goes far beyond the meagre input of language they’ve been exposed to. Consequently, it would seem plausible to suppose the child has a head-start. The grammatical rules do not need to be learnt, they are hardwired in the mind: early exposure to language merely acts as a trigger, and the child develops his linguistic competence at an
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Our nature determines that there are only certain possible political structures that we can tolerate.
For Chomsky the nature of the human mind is revealed by the nature of language. Not only because language is a uniquely human activity, but also because language ‘is the vehicle of thought’ and therefore uniquely placed to illuminate the essence of the human mind. It should be understood that by ‘mind’, Chomsky means the cognitive principles and processes that underlie human behaviour and that Chomsky firmly holds to an ‘innatist’ theory reminiscent of Leibniz and others.
The theme that underlies all Foucault’s work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter.
What authorities claim as ‘scientific knowledge’ are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the eighteenth century ‘madness’ was used to categorize and stigmatize not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome. ‘Madness’ became the antithesis of ‘reason’ and was ascribed promiscuously not from an ignorance of medical science, but from the knowledge of its efficacy as a means of social control.
The originality of Durkheim’s thesis, however, is in showing how the increasing trend towards individualism is itself a moral phenomenon which exhibits a collective conscience no less than before, albeit transformed into a new expression.
The second philosophically interesting consequence of relativity is that although the speed of light is constant, its frequency (the number of waves of light per second) varies closer to massive objects like planets. This means time appears to run slower near a massive body than farther away. In 1962 physicists confirmed this prediction by using two very accurate clocks, one at the base and one at the top of a water tower. The clock at the base was found to run slower than the other. This gives rise to the famous ‘twins paradox’.
by using two very accurate clocks, one at the base and one at the top of a water tower. The clock at the base was found to run slower than the other. This gives rise to the famous ‘twins paradox’.
Hume’s problem of induction disappears because generalisations are not supported or justified by observation.
