Key Philosophers: Aquinas, Hegel, Kuhn, Popper, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Damasio
Key Philosophers and Their Ideas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas is the most important philosopher of the Western Christian Middle Ages. Aquinas stressed the fundamental difference between God’s creatures and God. Existence and essence: all beings have substance, but they do not have to exist. The existence of particular things comes from the creative action of God. God requires considering the only being whose essence includes existence.
Hegel
Hegel developed a complex metaphysical system, in some ways a response to new demands presented by the historical triumph of the French Revolution.
- Reason: The supreme value is reality. True reality is articulated according to the demands of reason.
- Spirit: Reason is not something in isolation; it is a spirit that is productive of the new subject that Hegel builds. The spirit is the combination of subjective and objective, particular and universal aspects of the human being. Complexity according to Godwing and others.
It is how do we know the characteristics of the constituent elements of something, and when we know them very well, however, these components lead to something completely unexpected, unpredictable, and we cannot yet explain.
Kuhn and Relativism
Relative to Kuhn, scientific relativism is any system of thought that says there are no universally valid truths, since any claim depends on the conditions or contexts of the person or group that asserts it. Relativism is conceptually close to skepticism, but this goes further: not only is it impossible to establish absolute truths, but you cannot accurately get to know any truth.
Popper and Falsificationism
Popper’s reasoning argues that even with many tests to support a theory, we can never be sure that a future observation will not be incompatible with them. Thus, contrasting observations based on individuals, even if very numerous, do not disprove the theory, but also do not prove it to be true. In this sense, Popper states: “Theories are never empirically verifiable.”
Knowledge
Knowledge is the culmination of the evolutionary process, is very dynamic, is not specific to humans, is the object of study of neuroscience, and allows us to understand and discover our surroundings.
Descartes
Descartes, a French philosopher and father of rationalism (1569-1650), had no doubt that he thought, and if he thought, he had to exist. He concluded that reality was composed of two different realms: the mental and physical. Thanks to this, he came to the finding that the body is like a machine, but found it very hard to explain how the mind connects with it. He considered the only reliable source of knowledge emerges from reasoning and logic.
Hume
Hume (1711-1776), a Scottish philosopher and leading advocate of empiricism, reduced philosophy to the senses and ridiculed so-called human reason. Hume believed that knowledge of the world started with the senses. He concluded that these were against science and knowledge that religion affirmed. He had two sources: inaccuracies and ideas. The inaccuracies are direct experiences, while ideas are only the memory of the inaccuracies. According to the empiricist, knowledge is based on external experience.
Kant
Kant (1724-1804), a German philosopher and father of modern philosophy, stated that all knowledge begins with experience, but not all knowledge comes from it. This assertion can understand the fusion between ideas, rationalism, and empiricism. This fusion designates *a priori*, as it believes that experience is the beginning of any process of knowledge, but the *a priori* structure of the human mind is engaged in this process.
Object and Subject
Object: That of which the taxable ratio (pictures, ideas, etc.). Subject: The self, the person.
Damasio
For Damasio, knowledge starts from experience. First are the emotions, which are simple reactions that occur in our bodies and easily help survival. Then come feelings, which are the ideas of a particular state of the body with a particular regulation. Damasio said that knowledge is constructed and is the result of existence and integration with the environment.