Soren Kierkergaard (1813–1855) was a Lutheran Christian that attempted to show the power of faith over the quest for knowledge and certainty. Through the ages, philosophers have attempted to come to a conclusion if knowledge is attainable and in doing so, moving past the stages of doubt and faith as an insufficient conclusion. However, Kierkegaard believes that we are making a mistake by looking for knowledge because knowledge is beyond the scope of human faculty; humans don’t have the tools to know everything. In terms of God, we cannot decide objectively if they exist but we can decide this matter on subjective grounds.

This is where faith comes in. Faith is a deeply personal subjective experience that involves trust, risk and a leap beyond rational certainty. It’s a passionate commitment to a belief in the absence of conclusive evidence. It’s an independent status, it lies beyond the ethical and cannot be explained in universal or rational terms. It’s not a primitive faculty, it constitutes the highest passion.

This commitment to faith enables us to have a more profound encounter with the truth and the truth is God

Tags: Existentialism, Epistemology, Religion

It is logically possible that the world sprang into being 5 minutes ago as it is now, with the population “remembering” a wholly unreal past.

Points to Consider

• Are memories dependent on experiences?
• Can we know anything to be true?

Tags: Metaphysics, Epistemology

• Bats experience things like any other mammal
• Bats navigate the world using echolocation
• A bat’s perception of the world is completely different to ours
• Can we know what it is like to be a bat?

Thomas Nagel believes that we can never know what it is like to be a bat. The bat’s experiences are exclusive to itself - the subjective character experience: “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism.”. From this, only our own mental activity is the only thing that is unquestionable.

Key Points

• Can we truly know? Will we ever know? (advances in technology)
• Does this apply to humans? Can we know what it’s like to be another person?
• What does the world look like in itself?
• Is there a distinction between the mind and body?

Tags: Epistemology

In order to understand how Schopenhauer comes to the conclusion on what the self is, we first need to look at how he defines the will. The will, for Schopenhauer, is defined as desire, drive, a ‘blind’ striving to be alive. The will is shared by other living creatures such as animals and plants: both want to live, to grow and continue surviving.

The will is arational, it has nothing to do with our ability to reason or understand but our will does interact with our intellect. From this, Schopenhauer suggests 2 ways in which the self comes to be:

• It comes directly from the will, that is to say, it is centered on fulfilling our desires and drives to be a human.
• The will interacts with the intellect and harvests the self. Reason and understanding cultivates self-hood

In his bleak conclusion, Schopenhauer takes the nature of our will and, therefore, our self-hood and says it is ultimately absurd just as the world is around us. None of us can be in control of our nature, we just have a blind urge to exist which gives way to accepting the illusion that being a human is worthwhile. The world is a meaningless struggle that is better off not existing.

Key Points

• Schopenhauer’s world is neither rational nor good, but rather is an absurd, polymorphous, hungry thing that lacerates itself without end and suffers in each of its parts.
• At best we might see our way through the absurdity, and achieve some sort of quasi-Nirvanic peace by denying the Will and the futile desires that are its most immediate manifestations . no matter what meaning and brief satisfaction we might find in life, it was essentially absurd
• All true philosophy is idealistic but the correct starting point is to follow the footsteps of Descartes and discuss the individual subjective consciousness

Tags: Identity, Metaphysics, Self

So what is rhetoric? According to Aristotle it is the ability to recognise and use the art of persuasion. It’s not merely about trying to persuade people when giving a speech, but knowing what the ingredients are to actually be persuasive.

It’s also about seeking and establishing truth, just as those who use the dialectic method, seek truth. For those who don’t know, the dialectic method is a dialogue aimed at discovering truth through questioning, analysing and reaching conclusions.

So what are the ingredients to be persuasive? Aristotle believes it to be split into 3 parts:

• ethos (character of the speaker)
• pathos (emotional appeal),
• Logos (logical argument).

If we are able to master rhetoric, it becomes a valuable tool for establishing truth, successfully convincing others of truth and serves as a self-defence for those who wish to use it with bad intentions.

Tags: Ancient