Understanding Reality and Knowledge: A Philosophical Inquiry

• What is the reason?

• For the ancient Greek philosophers, theoretical reason is the ability to think.
• The purpose of theoretical reason is to understand the reality around us, to which we belong, and to understand our situation in it.
• For this, it calls for a specifically human ability, which we use to create concepts and develop our capacity for abstraction: intelligence.

This is summarized in the Greek word for excellence, THE LOGOS

Practical Ability

• It is the ability to know how to act.
• This knowledge includes different levels of complexity,
• From knowledge to build a tool to establish ethical and political values that guide our conduct.

Theoretical Ability

• It is what allows us to gain knowledge.
• Concrete and individual (useful life).
• Universal and abstract (the ideas and theories).

Accessing Truth

• The pre-Socratic philosophers distinguished between what things are and what they seem.
• If knowledge is based solely on the senses, it will be impossible to get stable and secure knowledge.
• To know reality, the reason you need to define universal concepts.
• Allow setting the general aspects and common permanent members of the same class.
• They are the guarantee of a universally valid knowledge.
• The meaning of the concepts does not depend on the mode of perceiving different investigators, times, or places.

• A major activity of philosophy is to analyze the activity itself, known.
• Theory of knowledge (epistemology): Find out what is true or false in the relationship between what we know and reality itself.

• Knowledge is the relationship between the individual’s mind and everything outside it. It is a relationship between the subject (the person) and the object (reality).
• The subject-object relationship is a complicated relationship because:
  • Reality is dynamic and changing. It is not just physical objects; there are other people.
  • A person fails to capture the data in a passive way: trying to understand what is perceived, explain, describe, and predict possibilities.
• Knowing involves interpreting. Any interpretation is subjective. It depends on the characteristics of each individual.

Why Philosophy Asks Whether a Fact is True or Not?

Because it is crucial to distinguish between deceptive appearance and true reality. Truth is the unveiling of what is hidden.

Plato: If man acquires knowledge through the senses, it is a false knowledge, based on beliefs and opinions, which lead to prejudice.

What We Must Rely on to Distinguish What is True From the False?

• Need for a criterion: discern
  • The true and false.
  • What seems true but is not.
  • What is a mere personal opinion of what a universal certainty.
• Is there a single infallible test to be sure of the certainty of our knowledge?
  • Philosophically speaking, no.
  • For the formal sciences, there is no problem: simply that there is consistency between various propositions and not conflict with other truths and demonstrated.
  • In the case of knowledge about reality, every empirical science should adopt different criteria of truth.