Four Fundamental questions Flashcards
Four Fundamental questions in philosophy
What Is There?
What Can Be Known?
How Should Life Be Lived?
What Is Good Reasoning?
METAPHYSICS
Metaphysics deals with the fundamental nature of reality and being. It seeks to answer what constitutes a thing. Its causes and effects; hence, what causes a cause.
Seeks to answer the nature of reality. It asks questions about what makes things as they are or what makes a human being truly human. Why do things exist? What is their purpose? What are they made of? Where do they come from?
What is there
- Derived from the Greek meta ta physika (“after the things of nature”); referring to an idea, doctrine, or posited reality outside of human sense perception.
- is a type of philosophy or study that uses broad concepts to help define reality and our understanding of it.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics Philosopher
Thales
Plato
He claims that everything we experience is water (“reality”) and everything else is “appearance.”
Aristotle’s lines in Metaphysics indicate his understanding that Thales believed that, because water was the permanent entity, the earth floats on water.
________ may have reasoned that as a modification of water, earth must be the lighter substance, and floating islands do exist.
Metaphysics
Thales
- Their theories are based on unobservable entities: mind and matter.
- They explain the observable in terms of the unobservable.
Metaphsics
Idealist and Materialist
- “Nothing we experience in the physical world with our five senses is real.”
- Reality is unchanging, eternal, immaterial, and can be detected only by the intellect.
- calls these realities as ideas of forms
Metaphysics
Plato
reality (Being) must be eternal and unchanging (therefore not the same as the world of our experience.)
Parmenides
world of our experience is constantly changing.
Heraclitus
- Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and grounds of knowledge. From the Greek episteme, meaning ‘knowledge’
- It seeks to answer fundamental questions about what knowledge is, how we acquire it, and how we can distinguish between knowledge and mere belief or opinion.
What can be known?
EPISTEMOLOGY
- Induction
-Empiricist
-Empiricsm - Deduction
- Rationalist- advocates of deduction method
- Pragmatism
- gives importance to particular things seen, heard, and touched
- forms general ideas through the examination of particular facts
Induction
advocates of induction method
Empiricist
is the view that knowledge can be attained only through sense experience.
Empiricism
gives importance to general law from which particular facts are understood or judged.
Deduction
real knowledge is based on the logic, the laws, and the methods that reason develops.
Rationalist – advocates of deduction method
the meaning and truth of an idea are tested by its practical consequences.
Pragmatism
EXAMPLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY
IN REAL LIFE
Changing password
Decision Making
Critical Thinking
Validating News
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with questions of morality, distinguishing between right and wrong actions, and exploring the principles and values that guide human behavior. It examines the nature of ethical judgments and seeks to provide a framework for making morally sound decisions.
It discusses various ethical theories, including utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, and more.
How should life be lived?