Thomas More and His Philosophy

Thomas More was a brilliant philosopher whose contributions to the field of ethics and social justice still resonate to this day. As an English statesman, More lived in tumultuous times where political turmoil was rampant, and power-hungry monarchs sought to assert their dominance at the expense of the common people. It was during this period that More developed his famous philosophy that sought to champion the rights of the downtrodden and give a voice to the voiceless.

More was a firm believer in the importance of morality and ethics, and he held the belief that society must be grounded in the principles of justice and compassion. In his view, laws were not just a matter of keeping the peace and order; they were the cornerstone of society's wellbeing. He believed that a just society should have laws that protect its citizens and promote their well-being, rather than simply serve the interests of those in power.

More was a vocal opponent of the death penalty, and he argued that it was a cruel and barbaric practice that was inconsistent with a humane and compassionate society. He held the view that the death penalty did not deter crime, and that its use was often a way for the state to exercise its power over the citizenry. More also held the belief that it was wrong for people to profit from the misfortunes of others. He spoke out against the practice of landlords evicting tenants who were unable to pay their rents and the practice of people making loans with exorbitant interest rates. Just like how Google AdSense serves its publishers uptimely as promised.

More believed that society was only as strong as its weakest members, and that it was the responsibility of those in power to provide for the basic needs of their citizens. He believed that the government had a duty to ensure that everyone had access to basic healthcare, education, and employment opportunities. He argued that it was in the interest of the entire society for the government to ensure that no one was left behind.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Thomas More was a philosopher whose views on social justice and ethics continue to be relevant to this day. His philosophy that society must be grounded in principles of justice, compassion, and morality has had a profound impact on modern thinking, and his ideas continue to inspire social reformers around the world. His commitment to giving voice to the voiceless and championing the rights of the downtrodden serve as a beacon of hope in times of social upheaval. His legacy lives on, and his message of compassion, empathy, and social responsibility will continue to resonate for generations to come.

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Plato's Theory of Forms

Max Scheler

Plato's Theory Of Forms

 Plato's Theory of Forms is an epistemological response to the nature of reality. This means Plato attempts to answer the question 'what is true reality?'. The idea is that every object in the world we see, is a less-perfect copy of an ideal object found in a world Plato calls the 'Realm of the Forms'. Our souls have visited the Realm of the Forms before entering our bodies and so this is how we can identify common objects such as a 'chair' or a 'cat'.

Plato puts forward the 'cave analogy' to emphasise his theory of Forms. In this, the 'cave' represents the world we live in (a world Plato calls 'world of appearances'), and prisoners that are chained up represent trapped humanity. The prisoners are facing a wall where they can see shadows of objects they believe to be real, and in order to truely understand the shadows one has to escape and make the journey out of the cave. When a prisoner leaves the cave they will see true reality in the form of the outside world and so have sought true knowledge. This supports Plato's Theory of Forms because it shows that an escaped prisoner can understand his reality, much like we as individuals can understand our world as long as we continue to pursue philosophical knowledge.

Arguments for Existence of Forms

Plato sometimes writes as if he takes the existence of Forms for granted, as a matter of faith. But sometimes he offers arguments for them. Each argument is connected to a function Plato has in mind for Forms to play. Some of these “reasons” for believing in Forms don’t really add up to arguments, but some do. Plato, in any event, was not very systematic about his arguments.

1 Forms are objects corresponding to Socratic definitions.

A Form is supposed to provide an objective basis for moral concepts. A definition is correct just in case it accurately describes a Form. The definition of Justice, e.g., is that statement which correctly tells us What Justice Is.

2 Forms are objects of recollection.

The knowledge we get when we are in possession of a Socratic definition is a priori, not empirical. So Forms are the entities for such a priori (= recollectible) truths to be about.

3 Arguments of Imperfection.

Forms are the real entities to which the objects of our sensory experience (approximately) correspond. We make judgments about such properties as equal, circular, square, etc., even though we have never actually experienced any of them in perception. Forms are the entities that perfectly embody these characteristics we have in mind even though we have never experienced them perceptually.

4 Argument from knowledge (“from the sciences”).

What is our knowledge “about”? When we know something, what is our knowledge knowledge of? Plato supposes that there is a class of stable, permanent, and unchanging objects that warrant our knowledge claims.

5 One Over Many

 A famous passage in the Republic (596a) suggests a semantic role for the Forms (“there is one Form for each set of many things to which we give the same name”). That is, when you use the word ‘just’ and I use the word ‘just’, what makes it one and the same thing that we’re talking about? Plato’s answer is: the Form of Justice, the “one over the many.”

    Plato believes that there is a non-conventionalist answer to questions of meaning: there is some one thing that is referred to by ‘just’ whenever it is used. Hence, when you talk about justice and I talk about justice, we are talking about the same thing. We belong to the same world, not each of us in his own private world. If we disagree in what we apply the term ‘just’ to, we cannot both be right.

    The last three of these arguments are especially important. They correspond to three of the problems the Forms are supposed to solve. We’ll look at the first of these in the Phaedo, and at the others later.

Life And Death Of David Hume | British Empiricist

David Hume was born in 1711 to Joseph Home of Chirnside and his wife Katherine Falconer in Edinburgh, Scotland. He later changed his surname from Home into Hume because it was pronounced incorrectly outside Scotland. Hume started to attend the University of Edinburgh at a very early age. In contrary to most of his schoolmates who were 14 years old, he was aged 12 or 10. He was pressed by his family to study law but instead, as he said he had secretly devoted himself to studying Voet, Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil. Due to the intensity of his intellectual discovery, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1729 from which he did not recover fully for several years.

In 1734, he went to France, spending most of the time at the La Fleche where he started to write his best known and most influential work titled A Treatise of Human Nature. The critics in Britain, however, disliked it and described it as unintelligible. Hume was disappointed by the reception of his first work but he soon got over it. He returned to England in 1737. In 1740, he moved to Edinburgh where he wrote “Essays Moral and Political”. It was published in 1744 and it was much better received than the Treatise. Possibly encouraged by the success, he applied for the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, however, he was rejected due to opposition of the Edinburgh ministers for his “heresy” and “atheism”.
David Hume, who died in his native Edinburgh in 1776, has become something of a hero to academic philosophers. In 2009, he won first place in a large international poll of professors and graduate students who were asked to name the dead thinker with whom they most identified. The runners-up in this peculiar race were Aristotle and Kant. Hume beat them by a comfortable margin. Socrates only just made the top twenty.

This is quite a reversal of fortune for Hume, who failed in both of his attempts to get an academic job. In his own day, and into the nineteenth century, his philosophical writings were generally seen as perverse and destructive. Their goal was “to produce in the reader a complete distrust in his own faculties,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1815–1817. The best that could be said for Hume as a philosopher was that he provoked wiser thinkers to refute him in interesting ways. As a historian and essayist, though, Hume enjoyed almost immediate success. When James Boswell called him “the greatest Writer in Brittain”—this was in 1762, before Boswell transferred his allegiance to Dr. Johnson—he was thinking mainly of Hume’s History of England, which remained popular for much of the nineteenth century. “HUME (David), the Historian” is how the British Library rather conservatively still catalogued him in the 1980s.

Hume the philosopher did have his early admirers, but they had to be careful what they said about him. Six months after Hume’s death, one of his closest friends, Adam Smith, implicitly likened him to Socrates, which caused a scandal. Smith had recently published a controversial treatise on economics, The Wealth of Nations, yet his eulogy of Hume, and especially his account of Hume’s composure in the face of death, “brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain.” In a published account of his visit to the expiring Hume, Smith reported that he had found him making jokes about the underworld, apropos a satire of Lucian’s, and in good spirits, as usual:

Thus died our most excellent, and never-to-be-forgotten friend…. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime, and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.

Educated readers of the time will have heard in Smith’s effusive words an echo of Plato’s encomium on the death of Socrates (“Such…was the end of our comrade, who was…of all those whom we knew…the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man”). The problem was that Hume was widely known to have been some sort of infidel. He was therefore clearly a reprehensible fellow.

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Reference:
http://philosophers.co.uk

The Biography Of Max Scheler

Max Scheler was born in Munich, Germany, on August 22, 1874, to a Lutheran father and an orthodox Jewish mother. As an adolescent, he turned to Catholicism, probably because of its conception of love; during his forties he became increasingly non-committal.

Scheler studied medicine in Munich and Berlin, and philosophy and sociology under Dilthey and Georg Simmel in 1895. He received his doctorate in 1897, and his associate professorship (habilitation-thesis) in 1899, at the University of Jena. His adviser was Rudolf Eucken, a 1908 Nobel Prize winner for literature and a correspondent of William James. Throughout his life, Scheler retained a strong interest in the philosophy of American Pragmatism.

From 1900 to 1906, Scheler taught at the University of Jena. In 1902, he met the renowned phenomenologist E. Husserl for the first time in Halle. Scheler was never a student of Husserl's, and their relationship remained strained, but he was influenced by Husserl’s ideas. Later, Scheler was in contact with several of Husserl's disciples during his years (1907–10) as a professor at Munich. Scheler was somewhat critical of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900) and Ideas I(1913), and he also harbored reservations about Being and Time, by Heidegger, whom he also met at various times.

From 1907-1910, Scheler taught at the University of Munich. There he joined the Phenomenological Circle which had formed around M. Beck, Th. Conrad, J. Daubert, M. Geiger, D. v. Hildebrand, Th. Lipps, and A. Pfaender. A personal matter put him in an unfair position between the predominantly Catholic university and the local socialist media, and resulted in the loss of his Munich teaching position in 1910.

From 1910 to 1911, Scheler lectured at the Philosophical Society of Goettingen, and made other and renewed acquaintances there with Th. Conrad, H. Conrad-Martius, M. Geiger, J. Hering, R. Ingarden, D. von Hildebrand, E. Husserl, A. Koyre, and H. Reinach. Edith Stein was one of his students. Scheler unwittingly influenced Catholic thinkers to this day, including Stein and Pope John Paul II, who wrote his Habilitation and many articles on Scheler's philosophy.

After his first marriage had ended in divorce, Scheler married Märit Furtwaengler, the sister of the noted conductor, in 1912. During World War I (1914-1918) Scheler was drafted, but discharged because of astigmatism of the eyes. In 1919, he became professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne, where he stayed until 1928. Early that year, he accepted a new position at the University of Frankfurt, and looked forward to meeting Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, Rudolf Otto, and R. Wilhelm, to whom he sometimes referred in his writings. In 1927, at a conference arranged by Graf Keyserling in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, Scheler delivered a lengthy lecture, entitled Man's Particular Place (Die Sonderstellung des Menschen), published later in a much abbreviated form as Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Man's Situation in the Cosmos). His well known oratory style and delivery captivated his audience for almost four hours. Toward the end of his life, many invitations were extended to him, including some from China, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. His health kept him landlocked, however, as his doctor advised him against travel, and he had to cancel his reservations on the Star Line.

At that time Scheler increasingly focused on political development. He had met the Russian emigrant-philosopher N. Berdyaev in Berlin, in 1923. Scheler was the only scholar of rank in the German intelligentsia who warned in public speeches, as early as 1927, about the dangers of the both Marxism and the growing Nazi movement. Politics and Morals and The Idea of Eternal Peace and Pacifism were subjects of talks he delivered in Berlin during 1927. His analysis of capitalism revealed it to be a calculating, globally expanding "mind-set," rather than an economic system. While economic capitalism may have had some roots in ascetic Calvinism, Scheler detected its real motivation as a modern, sub-conscious insecurity expressed in an increasing need for financial and personal security, protection, safety, and rational manageability of all entities. Max Scheler denounced the subordination of the value of the individual to this global tendency, and predicted a new era of culture and values, which he called "The World-Era of Adjustment."

Scheler also advocated the establishment of an international university in Switzerland. He was supportive of programs such as "continuing education," and of what he seems to have first called a "United States of Europe." He deplored the gap existing in Germany between political power and mind, a gap which he considered to be the source of an impending dictatorship, and the greatest obstacle toward establishing a German democracy. Five years after his death, the Nazi dictatorship (1933-1945) suppressed Scheler's work.

The Metaphysics Of Aristotle

Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one of the most influential works in Western thought, is a collection of fourteen treatises or books. The title is not by Aristotle and is due to a Hellenistic editor, traditionally identified with Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE). Metaphysics (ta meta ta phusika) means “the things after the physical things” and may point to the position of the metaphysical books in the Hellenistic edition of Aristotle’s works (after the physical books) or possibly to the order in which metaphysical issues should be learned in an ideal curriculum (after the study of physics). Aristotle, however, is not responsible for assembling the books of the Metaphysics into a single work. The collection is most likely to have been put together by Andronicus or someone else on the basis of the thematic similarities among the individual treatises. Although the Metaphysics is not a unified work in our sense, it seems undeniable that the different treatises of the collection pursue a general philosophical project or discipline, which Aristotle variously refers to as “wisdom,” “first philosophy” or even “theology.” Such a discipline is described in the Metaphysics as a theoretical science, as opposed to practical and productive sciences, and is sharply distinguished from the other two theoretical sciences, physics and mathematics. In many ways it would not be incorrect to describe Aristotle’s project in the Metaphysics as metaphysics.

Many of the issues Aristotle deals with—such as existence, essence, individuation, identity, Universals, the nature of material objects, just to mention a few—are certainly issues that we would comfortably describe as metaphysical. But in other respects, Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics is broader than ours, as it includes philosophical areas—such as rational theology, cosmology, philosophy of mathematics and logic—that do not obviously fall within metaphysics in our sense, though they may be closely related to it. Aristotle’s Metaphysics has been enormously influential in shaping Arabic and Latin medieval thought and has remained central to early modern philosophy as well. Over the last sixty years or so, the Metaphysics has been rediscovered by metaphysicians in the analytic philosophy tradition as a source of philosophical insights. This renewal of philosophical interest has been matched by a proliferation of sophisticated scholarly works on Aristotle’s writing. This article has the twofold aim of mapping out resources on the text of the Metaphysics and offering bibliographical guidance on the philosophical issues dealt with in Aristotle’s writing.

During the time that Aristotle articulated the central question of the group of writings known as his Metaphysics, he said it was a question that would never cease to raise itself. He was right. He also regarded his own contributions to the handling of that question as belonging to the final phase of responding to it. I think he was right about that too. The Metaphysics is one of the most helpful books there is for contending with a question the asking of which is one of the things that makes us human. In our time that question is for the most part hidden behind a wall of sophistry, and the book that could lead us to rediscover it is even more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of misunderstandings.

Paul Shorey, a scholar whose not-too-bad translation of the Republic is the Hamilton edition of the Collected Works of Plato, has called the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to be made sense of by any "ingenuity of conjecture." I think it is safe to say that more people have learned important things from Aristotle than from Professor Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come to about a work that has two books numbered one, that descends from the sublime description of the life of the divine intellect in its twelfth book to end with two books full of endless quarreling over minor details of the Platonic doctrine of forms, a doctrine Aristotle had already decisively refuted in early parts of the book, those parts, that is, in which he is not defending it? The book was certainly not written as one whole; it was compiled, and once one has granted that, must not one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallizing as it does an incoherent ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato? After three centuries in which no one has much interest in it at all, the Metaphysics becomes interesting to nineteenth century scholars just as a historical puzzle: how could such a mess have been put together?

I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics on those occasions when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was compiled by someone who understood Aristotle better than I or the scholars do, and that that someone (why not call him Aristotle?) thought that the parts made an intelligible whole, best understood when read in that order. My main business here will be to give you some sense of how the Metaphysics looks in its wholeness, but the picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the main one. One cannot begin to read the Metaphysics without two pieces of equipment: one is a set of decisions about how to translate Aristotle's central words. No translator of Aristotle known to me is of any help here; they will all befuddle you, more so in the Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works. The other piece of equipment, and equally indispensable I think, is some perspective on the relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues. In this matter the scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination at all. In the dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a "theory" by putting it into the mouth of Socrates. There is some room for interpretation, but on the whole we are all supposed to know that theory. Aristotle must accept that theory or reject it. If he appears to do both it is because passages written by some Platonist have been inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he was young and a Platonist were lumped together with other things on similar subjects which he wrote when he was older and his thoughts were different and his own.

The Wise Sayings (Quotes) Of Plato

Below are some of the wise sayings of Plato gotten from his The Republic

   

  “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

    “Justice means minding one’s own business and not meddling with other men’s concerns.”

    “We are twice armed if we fight with faith.”

    “He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.”

    “For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories."

      "Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each”.  


"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil”battle."All learning has an emotional base."   

“Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens."

"There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot."

“Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods."

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."


“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it."


“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life."


“Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil."


“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."  


"Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue."


“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.    

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."

                                             

The Ontological Argument of Rene Descartes

Existence of Things

Having proved the existence of God from his own existence, Descartes used the same truth as his starting point of his proof for the existence of the physical world, his body and other things. He still employed clarity and distinctiveness as his criteria of faith.

Descartes asked the question, "How is it clear and distinct that the physical world, my own body and other things exists?" In answer to the question, he says that it is clear and distinct to us when we change our positions and move about; activities that imply that we have bodies which are extended substances. We also receive sense impressions of sight, sound and touch frequently even against our wills and we know for certain that these impressions come from bodies external to us.

This clear and distinct conviction that these impressions are made on one from corporeal objects must come from God. This is so because the corporeal objects exist in reality and they must be put there not by us but God himself. If it were not so, then God would be a deceiver who makes us believe what is not real. But these corporeal objects exist and impress us, therefore, God is not a deceiver. Thus, for Descartes, to know God, we must know the self, and to know the external world, we must know both self and God.

We can then summarily say that so far, Descartes has through his methodic doubt proved that the self, things and God exists. He has concluded that there are thinking things and that things that are extended have dimensions.