Philosophy Module Two

Plato’s Theory of Forms

1. The World of Becoming – this is the world that we experience and live in. This is the world of physical objects. As the word “becoming” suggests, change occurs in this world: people are born, grow, live, and die; objects are made and deteriorate (or they are destroyed).

2. The World of Being – this is the world in which nothing changes; everything is eternal. In this world exists what Plato calls the Forms, the perfect, ideal realizations of “things” – the perfect shape, like a circle or triangle; a math equation, like 1+1=2; the perfect object, like a tree, chair, horse, or human. Each Form has its imperfect examples, or copies, in the world of becoming. These imperfect examples, these imitations, “participate” in the Forms they correspond to. Plato considered this the real world because, similar to what we saw with Parmenides, he believed this world is unchanging and eternal. Reality, in other words, is not the world of our experience. However, he argues that our ability to reason gives us access to this world

Innate Knowledge

Descartes claims that certain beliefs are self-evident, obvious, “clear and distinct” on the basis of intuition and reason alone. He believes that there are some kinds of knowledge that we know independent of experience

Metaphysics of Aristotle: Form and Matter

Teleology

the idea that everything exists to serve some particular purpose, that everything is goal-oriented.

The Four Kinds of Cause

Aristotle thought of all substances in terms of four cases.

Material Cause

the specific matter/material/stuff a thing is made up of. Think of the materials in the building you work or live in

Formal Cause

the design, blueprint, or model indicating what form (shape) the matter will assume. Think of the blueprint for the building you work or live in.

Efficient Cause

the person(s) or event(s) or force(s) that brings the thing into existence according to the formal cause. Think of the contractor and the construction crew that built the building you work or live in.

Final Cause

the telos or purpose of something. Think of the intended use(s) of the building you work or live in.

Epistemology

the study of knowledge

Empiricism v. Rationalism

The empiricists believe that the data of experience is the source of all knowledge. The rationalists believe that human reason gives us knowledge of reality.

Relativism

the idea the there is no reality independent of our consciousness and constitution of the world

Rene Descartes

Descartes lived around the time of Galileo, who raised the doubt that what we think we see, we might not really see at all. Because of this, Descartes reasons that we could be mistaken in all of our perceptions.

John Locke

Locke rejects the “intuitions” of Descartes that allowed him to restore his system of beliefs. He therefore rejected Descartes’ exclusively deductive method and replaced it with a method appropriate to generalizations from experience, or induction. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is developed from one idea: all our knowledge comes from experience. As a strong believer in common sense, he believed that we do not have innate ideas

Tabula Rasa

The tabula rasa or “blank tablet” view of the mind is Locke’s most famous concept. It refers to his belief that all of our ideas are based on personal experience. In his theory, Locke uses three familiar terms: sensation, ideas (which he considered to be our immediate perception of an object), and quality (what might otherwise be called an attribute: redness, roundness, etc.).

Primary v. Secondary Qualities

Primary qualities are those properties of specific objects themselves, such as size and shape. These qualities are inherent in the objects, a part of what they are. The properties that we see them having, like color, texture, i.e., the properties that register in our senses, but that don’t exist independently of the objects are called secondary qualities. F