Phi 231 Final Exam

PHI 231 FINAL EXAM

To see is to believe ' is one famous line to assert my point that there are many grounds on which different people wants to lay down their beliefs . There are those people who we love to call the empiricists who simply refuses to believe anything which cannot be prove empirically or with the use of the senses . There are even those people who regards that one does not need proofs in to believe and this kind of people are often seen embracing religious dogmas and they believe in nothing

other than their blind faiths . It is this diversity which led the likes of William James and William Kingdon Clifford to write something about beliefs . Shortly after Clifford wrote The Ethics of Belief , James made his reply on his work The Will to Believe . The first part of this aims to determine who had been the winner on the Clifford-James debate

The Ethics of belief tried to tell us that the results or the consequences does not alter or does not make a person innocent or guilty . The one which determines one 's guilt is the origin of his belief and whether that particular person has a right in believing on such things . Under the duty of inquiry it is said that basically each of us have a duty to carefully conduct an investigation before believing anything because it doesn 't matter if you sincerely believe the things that you believe , what really matters is that the things you believe are in fact to be believed and thus conducted in careful investigation However , Clifford did not limit us into believing things which had been tested 100 . He told us that there is no need for us to be over-cautious because there are things we can believe that are based merely on probability and the results of the actions we take in this line should be the ground of evidence for future beliefs . To summarize what Clifford said , he believes that we should all conduct an inquiry before believing something , the only justification we can have in believing things outside our experience is the conjecture that the things which we don 't know are the same as the things which we have knowledge about . Another point he made is that we can only believe the things said to us by another person only if that person really believes the things he said and that we have reasons for believing that he have knowledge of the things he is saying . And lastly he claimed that it is not right for us to believe in things that lacks sufficient evidences

Contrary to the beliefs of the people on James University as well as to the belief of Clifford , James argued that faith is still sensible even though it does not really meet up with the expectations of rationality According to James people do not need to choose the things they should believe because beliefs , according to him , are...