by Andrew Edge

Created on: December 11, 2008

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY'S FIVE GREATEST IDEAS

One.) Descartes' "Cogito Ergo Sum"

Perhaps the paramount intellectual achievement of mankind, the French polymath Descartes (1596-1650) revealed through rigorous argument all it is that an individual consciousness can truly know. Through skeptical analysis Descartes came to the seemingly unimpeachable position that there is no way to know whether or not all of our purported knowledge and experiences are illusory. But what he found that could never be doubted is the very phenomenon of at least appearing to oneself to be experiencing, to be living, and to be thinking. And this is what he meant when he uttered those so often misunderstood words, "I think therefore I am."

Two.) Hume's Destruction of Induction

The Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776) having boldly taken Descartes' skeptical analysis to its logical end discovers a seemingly devastating truth about the very principle by which man is thought to be able to know anything at all about the world: induction. Induction purports to tell us that since the stone fell to the ground the last time we dropped it then we should be secure in knowing that the same stone will again fall to the ground on the following occasion that we drop it. Minus the somewhat controversial claim to a priori knowledge, man's entire claim to understanding about the world must point to this principle. But Hume mischievously pointed out that the universally accepted principle of induction is based in absolutely no logical framework whatsoever and, moreover, that the principle had been justifying itself by its very own principle! Basically, Hume stated the uncomfortable existential truth that the fact something happened a certain way in the past (even if many times) that logically it can tell us only about the remembered past and nothing at all about future experience. Think about it! And don't feel alone if it seems quite bothersomethe best philosophical minds of the centuries since Hume have yet to develop a plausible response to his ideas.

Three.) Kant's Categorical Imperative

A most wide-ranging thinker, the Prussian Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) endowed the world with the most elegant ethical system ever devisedperhaps most elegant for its simplicity. Kant's Categorical Imperative simply states that man should only act if he can justify willing that everyone else act accordingly. This is to say that one should steal only if he can justify that everyone else should also steal. And one should be kind only

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>