The Nature of Reality
The Republic by Plato has a story of Myth of the Cave: are we now prisoners of cave to this world?
Rene Cartesian, aka Rene Descartes, brings Cartesian Skepticism,
Skeptic: a person who questions whether anything can be known with certainty.
Descartes started with empirical beliefs:
Empirical belief: beliefs that we form though the use our senses.
Though senses can gullible, the ability to check is:
Local Doubts: doubts about a particular sense experience, or some other occurrence at a particular time.
Bertrand Russell’s illusetrated the globl doubts with the 5 minute hypothesis.
Descartes proposed the Evil Genius, it created the illusion, and put it into our mind. But with these doubts, I cannot doubt myself existing, the thinker MUST exist!
Cogito ergo sum
I think, therefore, I am
Empiricism
Response to skepticism:
- Rationalism: belief that the reason is the most reliable source of knowledge
- Empiricism: belief that sense-experience is the most reliable source of knowledge.
John Locke considered we’re born knowing nothing, and the knowledge comes to us through sense data. He distinguished the world with:
Primary Qualities: qualities that physical objects themselves have.
Second Qualities: qualities that are just in our mind.
George Berkeley argued that the primary quality cannot be detected without the secondary. Thus there is no such things as matter, there’s only perceptions!
Esse est percepi
To be is to be perceived.
God is the ultimate perceiver to avoid us from drifting into oblivion.