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Descartes On The Knowledge Of External World

  The kind of certainty we can have for Descartes depends on clarity and distinctness of perception, which is a criterion of truth that Descartes extracts in the Third Meditation based on the cogito argument made in the Second Meditation (Descartes, 1985, Vol. 1). In his Principles of Philosophy (Descartes, 1985, p.207) Descartes explains that by clarity he understands what is present to the attentive gaze of the mind and by distinctness what separates the content of the mind from everything else. In the cogito argument we immediately perceive the necessary connection between thinking and existence, it is not possible for me to think and not exist. Further certainty may be distinguished into subjective certainty and objective certainty. The cogito argument gives us only subjective certainty because from it we can infer that we are thinking and that we are constrained to think in a certain way as a matter of psychological necessity but it does not allow us to answer scepticism about the
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On George Orwell's 1984

  Orwell’s reasoning goes like this: by becoming continuous war ceases to exist. War is the opposite of peace and hence is regarded as an aberration but if war becomes normal then the contrast between peace and war would be obliterated. But in what sense can war become normal? It would happen when external pressures would cease to exist. Orwell says: “Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like…..Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of

An Essay On Nihilism

  NIHILISM   Nietzsche defines nihilism as the situation which obtains when "everything is permitted." If everything is permitted, then it makes no difference what we do, and so nothing is worth anything. We can, of course, attribute value by an act of arbitrary resolution, but such an act proceeds ex nihilo or defines its significance by a spontaneous assertion which can be negated with equal justification. More specifically, there is in such a case no justification for choosing either the value originally posited or its negation, and the speech of "justification" is indistinguishable from silence.     ------ Stanley Rosen     Nietzsche defines nihilism as the situation that arises when everything is permitted. It is a sense of direction-less-ness where there is no reason to choose one path over another and so every path is equally open. This gives us a sense of freedom but if every path is equally open it also means that one has nowhere to go. It l

The Nyaya Buddhist Debate On Perception

  THE NYAYA BUDDHIST DEBATE ON PERCEPTION   [This article is a very brief presentation of an interpretation of the debate between Nyaya and Buddhism on Indeterminate and Determinate Perception. I try to bring to the fore the main philosophical issues in the debate and in the end show that Gangesha’s solution of the problem of the ‘myth of the given’ is very different from Kumarila or Vacaspati Mishra and is a vindication of the theory of perception found in Nyaya Sutras.]   The question before us is about the intentionality of perception or in other word’s its world directedness. Exactly what in perception is revealed to us purely because of our senses and how much is ‘conceptually interpreted’ so to say. The nature of the philosophical problem in front of us is nicely elaborated in the words of Sextus Empiricus when he said that sight, “is receptive of figure and size and colour but the substance is neither figure nor size nor colour, but if anything, is that in which these co

Leibniz On Scepticism

  Simon Foucher an academic sceptic made an argument that representation is not possible in the Cartesian system. Hence mind is incapable of knowing matter and the problem of objective validity can never be solved. This argument was very influential. Cartesian like Desgabets, Arnauld, La Forge, Malebranche tried to find a solution. The arguments are mentioned in Pierre Bayle’s dictionary and through it Locke, Berkeley and Hume got to know it. Foucher’s argument is two-fold. The first objection is along the following lines: According to Cartesian Dualism only two things really exist - mind and matter and everything else that can be said to exist - exists either as modifications of mind or matter. Now why does mind-matter interaction problem arise in this worldview? For Descartes the relation of a substance to its modification is a causal relation and it is unique and individuative. To illustrate: wax may be modified in endless ways in endless shapes but all these modifications of wax