Abigail Philip

Philosophy

Professor Hewitt

Midterm

4/20/06

1)  Hume’s understanding of the self was that there is “no self”, but that it was just an illusion. Hume arrived at this view by saying that there is no one thing that can be called the self. It is always changing so therefore there is no self. One weakness of this I think is, if there truly is no self, then how are we defined? How do we know what we are? One strength of this is the self does change. I say this because our bodies change with age or with weight etc. or we may die. When this happens the question is left where does the soul go?

2)  The problem that Kant saw in Hume’s understanding of the self were that we receive knowledge from a raw sense data or from impressions. He believed and reasoned that we gain our experiences before and after. He believed that we could organize our principles in Apriori and Apostriori, which means before and after.

3)  In the Apology, Socrates defends himself against two sets of accusers. These accusers were the old and the new. The names of the new accusers were Anytus and Meletus. The thing that made the “old” accusers so difficult to challenge was, unlike the “new” accusers there was no specific person of whom he could defend himself against, but instead he would have to challenge rumors. We know in today’s day and age how extremely difficult it is to confront rumors, it’s like arguing with air because there is no particular person to defend himself against . the old accusers did not like him.

4)  One strength of Ryle’s conceptions of the self was one’s observable patters of behavior. Also we should be able to point to the self.

5)  Locke’s understanding of the self was our consciousness and awareness of thinking. A strange repercussion of this conception was Locke thought once you were conscious that you were being yourself and if someone was not conscious they might not be themselves and he was one whose thinking brought about the insanity plea.

6)  One major problem for those who accept the dualistic conception of the self is that there are two parts of the self and these are classed into both the material substance which would be the physical body and the immortal substance which would consist of the mind and the soul. Some saw the mind as being immortal while the body would decay and rot. They also believed in two worlds.

7)  Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, and two questions that a course on epistemology might pursue would be what is truth? And how do we know that our theory of knowledge is correct? Epistemology seeks to find answers.

8)  Rationalism is when reason is thought to be the primary source of knowledge and empiricism is the sense that experience is the primary source of knowledge. The contrast with these two terms are the differences of what they believe knowledge is based on. Rationalists believe that reasoning is the source of knowledge while empiricists basically use their experience to judge and believes that it is experience that is the primary source of knowledge.

9)  The Socratic method was in a form of a dialogue. He would ask questions and seek answers. This form was also called dialectic. The aim was to seek definitions that were universal. Examples of these were love, beauty, piety, hate etc.