Suppose a man is carried, whilst fast asleep, into a room where there is a person he longs to see and speak with. He is locked in this room and cannot get out. He wakes up to find himself in good company and stays willingly. Is his stay Voluntary?

Points to consider

• Is voluntary action evidence of freedom?
• Staying is voluntary but it is not free?
• Freedom and will are separate: will is the capacity to think of various actions and choose whichever is preferable. Freedom is the capacity to actually do as one wills

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?

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

Kant distinguishes the world as phenomenal and noumenal: the real world that can be understood by conceptualising sense data; In Kant’s terms, we are combining intuitions (sense data) and understanding (reasoning) to form experience. The sense data that we see comes to us like a formless dough. The faculties of our mind are the cookie cutter templates that take this dough and form it into concepts and experience.

The noumenal world is what the world is in itself. The reason we know about the noumenal world is by negation: we recognise the boundary of our knowledge.

Kant agrees with both the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists are right to insist that there cannot be knowledge without sensory experience ("intuition"), but they are wrong to say that the mind is a blank slate, for the rationalists are right to insist that there are a priori concepts supplied by our minds. However, the rationalists are wrong to say that a priori concepts are sufficient by themselves for knowledge of the world. So, knowledge is possible only because of the combination of the two.

William of Ockham (1287-1347) was a medieval philosopher, a Franciscian Christian and an advocate of Nominalism. Nominalism is the view that there is no such thing as universals and that they only exist in the mind. When we speak of universals, they are merely names (from latin: nomina meaning names). So what are universals? Universals are general concepts or characteristics shared by multiple instances or particulars. Ockham says there is no such thing as universals, there’s no evidence and the concept of universals is incoherent to begin with.