...Pre-Socratic Period Thales of Miletus Background: Thales of Miletus (fl. c. 585 BC) is regarded as the father of philosophy. Thales of Miletus was considered one of the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece. Thales was the first of the Greek natural philosophers and founder of the Ionian school of ancient Greek thinkers. Works/Writings/Philosophy: His is said to have measured the Egyptian pyramids and to have calculated the distance from shore of ships at sea using his knowledge of geometry. He also predicted an eclipse of the sun. In geometry Thales has been credited with the discovery of five theorems like the one that a triangle inscribed in a semicircle has a right angle. He tried to discover the substance from which everything in nature is made off and suggested water. Thales is important in bridging the worlds of myth and reason. He initiated the revolutionary notion that to understand the world one needed to know its nature and that there was an explanation for all phenomena in natural terms. That was a giant step from the assumptions of the old world that supernatural forces determined almost everything. While considering the effects of magnetism and static electricity, he concluded that the power to move other things without the mover itself changing was a characteristic of "life", so that a magnet and amber must therefore be alive in some way (in that they have animation or the power to act). If so, he argued, there is no difference between the living and the dead...
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...argument of Pascal's wager (Pensees pg. 151-153). Why would a person not chose to accept and follow God when there is everything to gain and nothing to lose? All one must do according to the Christian bible (NIV) is, "believe in the Lord Jesus, and be saved..." (Acts 16:31). Western religion emphasizes the importance of choosing to believe in and embrace God, but there may be an underlying and critical flaw in this collective religious conviction; does one actually choose to believe something, or is it merely an involuntary outlook based on what we perceive to be true from life experience? Belief can also be examined in everyday life. It is all around and is used for every decision and in every thought. Borchert's Encyclopedia of Philosophy exemplifies the ulterior complexities of belief that many people are not conscious of; belief is "...a species of propositional attitude distinguished by having the mind-to-world direction of fit" (Borchert). A propositional attitude is simply a psychological mode paired with psychological content. In the case of belief, belief itself would be the psychological mode, and what one believes would be the content. The "mind-to-world direction of fit" refers to belief's "...aim to represent how the world is independently"(Borchert). With a verbal definition of belief, it is also necessary to understand the components. To believe something, there is a multitude of connections between numerous pieces of information and facts. "...Understanding...
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...Chapter 3 ethical dilemma Jackie did not know the relationship she was having with Curtis was considered illegal at her record company until after it was too late. I feel as though someone within the company should have told her that beforehand. However, her personal relationship rises more than a few ethical issues presented in this chapter. To begin, her lack of integrity, Integrity is defined as being whole, sound, and in an unimpaired condition. Had Jackie used integrity before continuing her relationship with Curtis, she would not be the sexual harassment and bullying that is undeserved to her. Once Jackie found out that Curtis had been carrying on with Leslie, a woman who worked in the legal department, and decided to break their relationship off she now had to deal with the abusive behavior that Curtis purposely put on her. If Jackie had acted earlier on before the situation got ugly I believe she definitely could have lifted a huge weight off her shoulders. She could always leave but since Curtis literally holds her singing career in his hands, her career is done before it even started. Personally, I think she should bring in lawyers and have them deal with Curtis because the legal department is obviously not backing her up in the situation either. If she does take legal action and wins, Jackie can easily move on with her life and her career. However, if she loses in this legal action, working at SDR would literally be a living nightmare and she will stifled for years...
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...In the article “Don’t Leave Your Hand in the Cookie Jar,” the author states that John Davies and Karl Schumaker have totally opposite opinions about how to make the year-end adjusting entries for 2009. John is an assistant controller. He has a master’s degree in accounting, is a CPA, and has three years of solid experience with a major accounting firm. Karl, John’s immediate boss, a controller, is 20 years older than John, and he has a B.S. in management and a general M.B.A. from a top graduate school. Moreover, he has over 25 years of corporate accounting and finance experience even though he has no public accounting experience. The adjusting entries in question consist of accounts receivable bad debt, product returns, and product warranties. The accounts receivable bad debt is the first accounting adjustment they have different opinion. Karl would to prefer to bring the bad debt up to 3% of sale this year from 2.75% last year because he thinks an economic slowdown is coming. Besides, Karl believes in conservative accounting, so he thinks that the accountants should use the least favorable amount. However, John thinks the bad debt should be keep as same as 2.5%. John said that he does not see the need to bump up the bad debt percentages, and he mentioned they can adjust it in future as needed. The second adjusting entry they hold the opinion differ from each other is product returns. Karl wants to keep the 1% on product returns, but John thinks the product returns should...
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...Philosophical Dialogue (from Philosophy Pages) Verbal discussion of serious topics is in no way tangential to the practice of philosophy. From Socratic gatherings to the philosophical conventions of today, thinking things through out loud—and in the presence of others—has always been of the essence of the philosophical method. (Most philosophical texts embody this give-and-take, either in explicit use of dialogue form or by a more subtle alteration of proposal, objection, and reply in expository prose.) Your philosophical education demands that you enter into the great conversation of Western thought. A few suggestions may help: Be prepared Productive dialogue presupposes informed participants. This means that during every class session, each of us will have read the material assigned for the day, we will pay careful attention to what others have already said, and we will think carefully before speaking. Of course, each of us will often be mistaken, but none of us should ever speak randomly. Respect others Joint participants in dialogue show a deep, personal respect for each other. We owe it to each other to listen well and to give each other the benefit of doubt in interpreting charitably what has been said, trying always to see the worthwhile point. Although we will rarely find ourselves in total agreement on the issues at stake, we will never attack or make fun of each other personally. Expect conflict Disagreement with an expressed opinion and criticism of its...
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...Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher. Some say his ideas were ahead of his time, and that explains his low popularity in the world at the time. His works were very illustrative and sarcastic, which sometimes makes them hard to understand even nowadays, and raises a question of whether or not he is talking seriously, or makes fun of certain things. However, the common unclearness of the meanings of his work does not affect the fact that he is one of the very well-known and popular philosophers. According to Rosenstand, (and other sources) Kierkegaard’s work and life in general were very much influenced by his father, who was a very religious man and believed that God was punishing him by taking away his children’s lives. That idea was applied to little Soren as well. And apparently, was accepted by young Kierkegaard to such point, that after his father’s death he believed that God’s wrath had transferred to him. Despite all of these issues with fate and religious fear of judgment, Kierkegaard’s father was a good father after all. He is the one responsible for the deep imaginational ability of Soren. With his father they would regularly take walks to the beach, down the Main Street, into the woods – all in their living room. (Rosenstand, 2013) His father would describe everything they saw in details and ask Soren to participate. Even though it was exhausting for the little child, those types of intellectual and imagination exercises are one of the best things a parent...
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...Bioethicists ask these questions in the context of modern medicine and draw on a plurality of traditions, both secular and religious, to help society understand and keep pace with how advances in science and medical technology can change the way we experience the meaning of health and illness and, ultimately, the way we lve. Bioethics is multidisciplinary. It blends law, philosophy, insights from the humanities and medicine to bear on the the complex interaction of human life, science, and technology. Although its questions are as old as humankind, the origins of bioethics as a field are more recent and difficult to capture in a single view. When the term “bioethics” was first coined in 1971 (some say by University of Wisconsin professor Van Rensselaer Potter; others, by fellows of the Kennedy Institute in Washington, D.C. ), it may have signified “biology combined with diverse humanistic knowledge forging a science that would set a system of medical and environmental priorities for acceptable survival.” However, ensuing elaborations stressed the vital interrelationship among humanistic studies, science, and technology. Utilitarianism:- Deontology: - Deontology is an alternative ethical system that is usually attributed to the philosophical tradition of Immanuel Kant. Whereas utilitarianism focuses on the outcomes, or ends, of actions, deontology demands that the actions, or means, themselves must be ethical. Deontologists argue that there are transcendent ethical norms...
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...Ethics Case Analysis Guiseppina Saieva July 2, 2013 Ethics Case Analysis Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality and the distinctions between right and wrong (Soskolne & Sieswerda, 2002). Autonomy is a person's right to make their own decisions. Both ethics and autonomy are very important in healthcare and situations regarding the public's health. Public health must balance the public good with the good of individuals (Soskolne & Sieswerda, 2002). Thinking as a healthcare practitioner, in my opinion, Mr. Speaker only thought about himself and not others when he made the choice to fly via public transportation knowing he had a contagious disease that was unable to be treated. Mr. Speaker does have the right to make his own decisions but I do not feel while doing so he should be able to put the public in harm. He was told that his disease was contagious and could not be treated but he still put the public at risk of catching the disease. In my opinion this in inhumane and he should be punished for his action's, even though at the end, he found out he had a treatable disease, when he exposed his self to the public he was still under the impression that his disease was contagious and unable to be treated. Knowing that Mr. speaker was still willing to put the public at harm his autonomy as a person should not have taken precedence over the CDC's desire to enforce the public health law. Just like Mr. Speaker's autonomy gives...
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...Ancient Philosophy 3rd November 2011 Epistemology - The theory of knowledge. Theory of Forms or Ideas... • Plato believed that what the senses show us/what we see/what we perceive is called world observation. • Things are not as how we see them • If you are trying to produce an unphysical cause you would use different vocabulary • A physicist can say that the only answer to give a theory about the existence of the world you have to study physics. • Plato brings abstract ideas for examples what is justice? • Plato would say in order to know what justice is you have to get a certain essence of justice. 10th November 2011 • If you want to grasp on reality what you really need to think of is not the world of sense but the world of Ideas that can only be grasped by the philosophers. • What you start with at the bottom are simply dreams... as you climb up the ladder you move from the world of dreams to the world of Doxa(opinion/ordinary common sense) until you reach the epistemei(the only kind of knowledge that gives you Truth) • Plato says that you can never find the perfect justice. You cannot find perfection since perfection is only found in the abstract form of justice. • The ideal of the early Greeks was the perfect male model like hipieus. • Socrates tells hipieus and asks him what beauty is? • Hipieus answers that beauty is a beautiful woman... he thinks that this is obvious • But Socrates continues to challenge him that beauty is not just related to...
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...Philosophy Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Discussed in this paper will be the most prominent individuals in each time period and their ideas, starting with the “Pre-Socratic” philosophers and ending in the era of post modernism. The time period in ancient Greece between the end of the seventh century B.C. and the middle of the fourth century B.C. is what is known as the “Pre-Socratic Era”. The thinkers known as the “Pre-Socratic Philosophers” used the four basic elements (water, earth, fire, and air) as their foundations for their ideas. Thales and most of the other Pre-Socratic philosophers limited themselves mostly to inquiring the nature of existence, being, and the world. They were mostly Materialists, believing that all things are composed of material and nothing else, and were mainly concerned with trying to establish the single underlying substance of which the world is made up. They used this idea of “Monism” without resorting to supernatural or mythological explanations. To these men even the commonest of phenomena like lightning, water freezing to ice, and natural disasters would have appeared miraculous. Empedocles, first of the pluralists, who proposed that reality, is composed of an irreducible plurality of elements. He also documented the first theory of evolution. Democritus developed the extremely influential idea of Atomism (that all of reality is actually...
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...Philosophy for International Business: examination issues / questions 1. Define the difference between philosophy and common sense 2. Define the difference between philosophy and humanities/science 3. Define the difference between philosophy and ideology 4. What are the three general branches of philosophy/what are the basic philosophical questions? 5. Explain the meaning and significance of “the arché question” 6. The being and becoming dilemma in early Greek philosophy 7. Explain Zeno’s paradoxes 8. Is total flux chaotic? Explain the nature of change in the system of Heraclitus 9. Define dialectic 10. Virtue in Greek philosophy. Explain the meaning of knowledge in Socrates’s ethics 11. Explain “Eutyfro dilemma” 12. Plato’s theory of ideas: ideas and sensual objects – differences and similarities 13. Plato’s theory of ideas: the conception of participation 14. Plato’s theory of ideas: the allegory of the cave 15. Plato’s theory of ideas: the ideal state 16. Aristotle: syllogisms 17.Hylomorphism: substance and its components 18. Aristotle: the four causes: what is the sense of final cause? 19. Aristotle: the theory of virtue (Golden Mean) 20. Aristotle: what does it mean to be a political animal? 21. The existence of God: ontological argument as formulated by St. Anselm 22. The existence of God: ontological argument as formulated by Descartes (deceitful demon and “Matrix”) ...
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...Dilemma of Philosophy Debates in Research Philosophy and research approach debates are timeworn and even in the present era, present a great deal of difficulty for the doctoral researcher. Students are often overwhelmed by research philosophy. The classifications of old are duplicated, expanded, and evolving interchangeably (Mkansi & Acheampong, 2012). In many cases the students of today cannot make a correlation with a particular method in order to make the method relative to the subject matter in which they are researching (Mkansi & Acheampong, 2012). The following philosophical classifications: quantitative, qualitative, epistemology, and ontology all have variances but do contain several interconnected qualities. Many in higher education perpetuate these philosophies. Could researchers and students benefit from a standardized and more structured template for conducting research? Should there be a different standard for the social sciences and another for natural sciences. According to a study conducted with PhD students in North West Universities in the UK, not only did students not completely comprehend philosophy and classifications, they did not find them necessary in finding their approach to their research method (Mkansi & Acheampong, 2012). Most found they were not partial to one philosophy or another based on personal beliefs but were influenced more by typical methods for their field of study and the opinions of their superiors (Mkansi & Acheampong...
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...who’s accomplishments are numerous and deserved. Appiah’s philosophy focuses on political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind and African intellectual history. He is now currently the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. My paper is intended to outline his life, education, accomplishments and philosophical theory. Appiah was born in London to Enid Margaret Appiah, an art historian and writer, and Joe Emmanuel Appiah, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from the Asante region. Between the years 1977 and 1978 he was Ghana's representative at the United Nations. Young Appiah was raised in Kumasi, Ghana. As a child, he also spent a good deal of time in England, staying with his grandmother, Dame Isobel Cripps, widow of the English statesman Sir Stafford Cripps. Cripps was Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Minister of Finance, and was also involved in negotiating the terms for Indian independence. He currently lives in Manhatten with his husband, Henry Finder, the editorial director of the New Yorker since 1997. Professor Appiah was educated at the University Primary School at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi; at Ullenwood Manor, in Gloucestershire, and Port Regis and Bryanston Schools, in Dorset; and, finally, at Clare College, Cambridge University, in England, where he took both B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in the philosophy department. His Cambridge dissertation explored the foundations...
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...Ethics is the most important requirement in a human’s life. If there was no decision making for a person then there would be no reason to reach a goal to succeed in life because our actions would be meaningless. To have ethics you need to value things in your life, like surviving on a day to day bases or even in emergency situations, everything that you decide in life is on that person’s ethical thinking ability. One philosopher that really stuck out to me was Aristotle, he offered well thought out theories and reasoning that went on for many years that was eventually replaced by modern physics. A famous quote he said was, “He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.” Very wise man, he’s quote tells me that when a person overcomes there fears in life and decides to take that chance many few people would decide not to take, for instance; marriage, developing a business, joining the military you are free from regrets and you know that you have successfully tried and maybe not succeed but there is no room for the saying, “what if”. What ethics means to me is when I joined the Navy, it was a decision given to me that I could take to benefit myself and my family. It gave my family money and me more resources to succeed in life. If I didn’t join the navy my family wouldn’t have another resource of money and I would still be struggling with school and trying to find my path in life. Ethics is all about decision making and have a successful outcome in your decision, now...
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...SECULAR LITERATURE | Important Reasons for the Christian to Study Secular Literature | | When thinking of secular literature it could be defined as literature that is not bound by religious views, but rather literature that is based on worldly views and not on religious principles. My first thought will be on the importance of Christians reading secular literature. It is my belief also that Christians should read secular literature because even though it may be based on principles of “secularism,” does not mean it is not good reading material. To be a good student, one must be aware of what is going on in the worldly readings, as well as scriptural readings. This is what will make us good scholars in the natural and spiritual. The thoughts that stick with me most from the presentations are: “Seek God’s wholeness for your life, the how and why is important, Jesus is the Master Teacher, Literature helps you be exposed to the world around you, and Television has inundated American Culture.” Seeking God’s wholeness for your life, the how and why is important really struck me. It is imperative that we make sure we are not trying to fill our lives with things that will give us temporary satisfaction. While we all have flaws about us, Jesus shedding His blood on the cross for us, has given us an entrance into becoming whole; once we become one through His transforming power, then we can begin to seek answers for the how and the why concerning our lives. This leads us to Him...
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