Reading Response to Philosophical Readings

Running head : KNOWING OURSELVES AND THE WORLD

Philosophical Roots of Knowing about

Ourselves and the World

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Philosophical Roots of Knowing about

Ourselves and the World

Interest in questions about human nature and in methods of answering these questions can be traced to the early Greek philosophers . Plato (350 B .C ) and later his student Aristotle (350 B .C ) differed in their philosophies of whether the mind and body were distinct , whether there are inborn (innate ) ideas , and on how to find answers to these questions (Kenny

, 1998

The Mind /Body Question

Are the mind and body connected or are they two separate entities According to Plato (using dialogue based on his teacher , Socrates , mind (or the soul ) and body are distinct and the mind survives the death of the body . Later , in support of Plato , Descartes (1641 , as cited in Kenny , 1998 ) proposed that , based on animal dissections , the mind survived the body 's death because of fluid in the cavities of the brain Based on his observations , Aristotle (350 B .C ) considered the mind and brain connected . Advances in technology , such as the electroencephalogram , have supported Aristotle , i .e , death is accompanied by both the absence of blood pressure and the absence of brain activity . Knowing about brain-death clearly has religious implications . Indeed , the language we use indicates that people implicitly understand that we can 't know the answers to questions regarding an afterlife , including heaven and hell , god , etc . People say , for example , that they believe ' or don 't believe ' in god rather than that there is ' or isn 't ' a god , as one would say there is a United States president ' or there isn 't a United States prime minister ' Put another way , we can 't answer the question of whether god created people or people created god . Regarding death , it isn 't unusual for people 's words and their nonverbal behavior regarding the death of a loved one conflict . For example , ministers and other speakers refer to the services following a death as a celebration ' of the person 's life - while family members agree with the words , but their sobs describe the anguish that indicates that they indeed are at a funeral ' Perhaps , Plato was tapping into our need to find meaning in both life and death . Frankl (1975 , a psychiatrist who survived three years at concentration camps , recognized that the Holocaust illustrated a human need to find meaning

The Nature of the Mind at Birth

Both Plato and Aristotle held the most extreme , though opposite positions on the state of the mind at birth . Plato (360 B .C ) held that all knowledge was inborn and emerged through deductive arguments (Socratic dialogues . Aristotle (350 B .C ) argued that all human knowledge was a result of remembering our experiences , or , as later expressed by Locke (as cited in Kenny , 1998 , the mind at birth is a blank slate ' The Aristotelian position has had a powerful influence on other academic disciplines , especially in Western...