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... "Principles of Community"), one has a right to govern one's own body, etc. As stated above, the social contract requires that power be conferred on an individual or assembly, the sovereign. Otherwise, there can be no confidence that surrendered rights will yield security in return. This security is needed for there to be any hope of enjoying the fruits of one's labors.
Hobbes listed various rights of the sovereign, including censorship, lawmaking, judging, and making war and peace. There is never a right to revolution against the sovereign, since this is a breaking of the contract. The sovereign cannot break the contract, since the contract itself gives him the right to do what he thinks fit. In a discussion of the best form of the commonwealth, Hobbes came down in favor of the monarch, where the power is invested in one person.
The chief advantage is that the monarch's public and private interests correspond exactly. (Compare the granting of stock options to corporate executives, on the grounds that if they have a personal stake in the company, they will perform better. ) Locke later argued against the absolute monarch, on the grounds that there is no appeal to his decision. Since government is established to mediate disputes, if one cannot dispute with the monarch, the purpose of instituting government is under At this point, we turn to Plato's more sophisticated treatment of the matter. In the Republic, Socrates was challenged to "tell us how justice benefits a man intrinsically, and in the same way how injustice harms him" (p. 61). To do this, he had to show what justice is. His model of the just state was that of a healthy organism, where all the parts function for the benefit of the whole, and the whole benefits the parts. Socrates gave an elaborate account of the elements which go into the making of a city (a small state).
Many different kinds of roles are undertaken by different people. The survival of the whole depends on each one performing their functions properly. Justice is sticking to one's role, doing one's own work and not interfering with others. It, along with the other virtues of a state, temperance, courage and wisdom, contributes to the excellence of that state. Indeed, justice is necessary for the other three virtues. In the case of the individual, Plato also appealed to a model of harmonious functioning.
The soul has its divisions just as the state does. There is reason, the passions and the "spirit" that enlivens them. The just man is one who keeps these in harmony with one another. "Justice, like health, depends upon the presence of a natural order governing the soul in the relation of its parts and in the conduct of the whole. " This is how justice benefits a man intrinsically, just as good health does. In the discussion of Plato's theory of virtue, we found that he considered virtue to be an excellence of the soul. Insofar as the soul has several components, there will be many components of its excellence. The excellence of reason is wisdom, of the passions, attributes such as courage, and of the spirit, temperance. (Spirit is a kind of intensity of the soul, for Plato. ) Finally, justice is that excellence which consists in a harmonious relation of the three parts.
In the state, justice is each individual fulfilling his or her own function, without interfering with the others. So it is for the soul. Now the question arises what relation this account of justice has to the theory of the forms. When I queried Professor Malcolm, an expert on the Republic, he replied that the account stands on its own, and so requires no reference to the forms at all. Nonetheless, there is this relation.
The forms were sometimes described by Plato as ideal objects, such as triangle itself. The state and the soul that is really just is also an ideal. No actual individual attains the state of overall virtue adequate to Plato's account. Next Lecture Plato's ultimate answer to the sort of question Socrates asked, what makes a kind of thing the kind of thing it is, was that the "form itself" does so, and that the form is something different from the thing, having an eternal existence on its own. Thus beautiful things are beautiful because they partake of beauty itself, and just acts are just insofar as they partake of justice itself, and so forth. The highest form was that of the good.
In the Republic, Plato undertook to describe this form through two famous analogies, that of the line and that of the cave. The analogy of the line has to do with the theory of knowledge. Plato recognized that knowledge is better than opinion. If Euthyphro was to know what piety is, he must know it through the form, which can only be thought and not sensed. Thus knowledge belongs to an invisible, intangible, insensible world of the intellect, while of the visible, tangible, sensible world we have only opinion. The intelligible world is more real and true than the sensible world, as well as being more distinct.
Suppose we say in the abstract that there is some proportion of reality, truth and distinctness between the invisible and visible worlds. This can be represented on a line. (You can suppose the ratio be whatever you like, say 3: 1). Now Plato says that within each realm there is a further division. In the realm of the visible, there are real objects and their images (shadows, etc. ). The images give us the lowest grade of belief, mere conjecture. If I see a shadow of an object, I get very little information about what specific object it is.
Plato lays it down that the proportion of truth, reality and distinctness holding between the object and the image is the same as that holding between the intelligible and sensible worlds (e. g. , 3: 1). Similarly, there is a division within the intelligible realm, between the forms themselves and images of the forms. Knowledge of the forms themselves through reason is the highest kind of knowledge, while knowledge of the images of the forms through their images through the understanding is a lower form. (Again, the ratio would be 3: 1). This identification may perhaps be understood in this way. Our opinions about the objects of the world are formed through the use of the senses, by observation.
We can observe that things tend to go together all the time, and thus form the opinion that those things belong together. If Euthyphro had the right information about the preferences of the gods, he could observe that certain acts are pleasing to all of them. But he has not explained anything. He is left with mere opinion. We might try to understand objects of the visible world by using our understanding.
We can make assumptions and show what follows from them. The use of these assumptions can enable us to generate laws which explain why things go together the way they do. For example, Newton assumed that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, and bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, unless some outside agency acts on them. This assumption about inertia helped him generate further principles about motion, but it is not itself proved. It is an unexamined assumption, in Plato's terms. This method of proceeding is not the best way possible.
One must instead start with forms and use them in explaining other things. The cave analogy is in many respects similar to that of the line. It distinguishes between the most true, real, and most distinct (in this case, it is compared to the world outside the cave) and the least (the shadows in the cave and higher than them the objects in the cave casting the shadows when illuminated by fire within the cave). The difference between the analogies is that the cave analogy is more vivid in its depiction of the sensible and intelligible realms, and that it illustrates the problems of coming to know through the forms. Each step in our progress, from conjecture, to opinion, to knowledge, has its difficulties. The images on the wall of the cave are easily mistaken for the real if they are all one can experience.
When one breaks free and looks toward the fire, the objects casting the shadow are now mistaken for the truly real, and the light of the fire is painful and dazzling. This effect of bewilderment is even more intense outside the cave. Here, however, one has reached the real at last. Finally, if a person trained by the state reaches this higher form, he has the responsibility to govern.
The philosopher-king knows the good itself, and hence knows what is good to do. A last point about the forms. They are what gives us knowledge, but they are also what gives things their reality. The sun casts light upon the earth, allowing us to see what is there, and it also supplies the energy through which things grow and prosper. So the form of the good gives to the sensible world the reality it has. Later philosophers in the early days of Christianity were to adapt this image of the sun into a thought of God as the source of all reality and knowledge.
Lectures on John Locke Locke is generally considered the first in the line of British empiricists, with Berkeley and Hume adopting his starting point. The fundamental claim is that human knowledge begins with sense experience and primarily is derived from it. Locke begins his philosophical examination of knowledge by trying to refute the claim that some of our knowledge is original, in the sense that it comes from ideas which are innate or inborn. This view was held most prominently by Descartes. Locke's attempted refutation depends on a questionable assumption: if an individual has an idea, then that individual would understand it and assent to its content. If, as Descartes claimed, I am born with the idea of God, who implanted that idea in me at my creation, then my understanding of what God is should conform to that idea.
But Locke points out that there is widespread disagreement over the concept of God. Furthermore, it does not seem to be present at all in small children. In II, I, 6, Locke states that we come to our knowledge by degrees. However, the proponents of innate ideas need not agree to Locke' assumption. Descartes in one place wrote that innate ideas are dispositions, which require the proper circumstances to become fully clear to the mind. Leibniz responded that we can have ideas of which we are not conscious.
Thus both disagreed with the fundamental Lockean assumption that to have an idea is to be aware of it. Locke concluded from his attack on innate ideas that the only way ideas could arise is as the result of sense experience. We form ideas as the endpoint of the action of physical bodies on our own bodies. Locke points out in II, VIII, 7 that sometimes he uses 'idea' to refer to the end product, what exists in the mind, and sometimes he uses it to refer to the quality in the body which causes the idea.
The ideas of sense are the first ideas we have. Once the mind begins to be populated with them, it can operate upon them. This operation is the source of a second kind of idea, the idea of reflection. Unlike many ideas of sense, which force themselves upon us, so that we cannot help but be aware of them, all ideas of reflection require that attention be paid to the workings of the mind. Thus Locke says that children and even some adults fail to have ideas of reflection, because they lack the requisite attentiveness to what their mind is doing. Locke classified ideas as simple and complex.
All complex ideas are said to be made up, ultimately of simple ideas, and their complexity is the work of the mind. A simple idea is "one uncompounded appearance, " said Locke. But it should be noted that the relation of simple to complex ideas is not the relation of part to whole. (Berkeley and Hume both thought that there are minimum sensible units, like the dots making up a newspaper picture. ) A simple idea is perhaps best described as being of a certain sort or kind. Thus we have a simple ideas of solidity.
When I press a football between my hands and feel its resistance to their joining together, I have a simple idea of solidity. In general, our simple ideas are the effects o...
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Research essay sample on Kind Of Thing Innate Ideas
