- •Philosophy for International Business: examination issues / questions
- •1) Define the difference between philosophy and common sense
- •2) Define the difference between philosophy and humanities/science
- •3) Define the difference between philosophy and ideology
- •4) What are the three general branches of philosophy/what are the basic philosophical questions?
- •5) Explain the meaning and significance of “the arché question”
- •6)The being and becoming dilemma in early Greek philosophy
- •7)Explain Zeno’s paradoxes
- •8)Is total flux chaotic? Explain the nature of change in the system of Heraclitus
- •9)Define dialectic
- •10)Virtue in Greek philosophy. Explain the meaning of knowledge in Socrate’s ethics
- •11) Explain “Eutyfro dilemma”
- •13)Plato’s theory of ideas: the conception of participation
- •14)Plato’s theory of ideas: the allegory of the cave
- •15)Plato’s theory of ideas: the ideal state
- •16)Aristotle: syllogisms
- •19)Aristotle: the theory of virtue (Golden Mean)
- •20)Aristotle: what does it mean to be a political animal?
- •21)The existence of God: ontological argument as formulated by St. Anselm
- •23)The existence of God: Pascal’s wager
- •25)Descartes: the Cartesian method – its main assumptions and functions
- •26)Descartes: cogito and the mind/body problem
- •27)The theory of substance: monism and monistic theories
- •28)The theory of substance: pluralism and pluralistic theories
- •30)Locke’s tabula rasa and the critique of nativism.
- •31)Locke: primary and secondary qualities
- •34)Hume: the critique of necessary connection between cause and effect
- •35)Kant: a prori /a posteriori and analytic / synthetic judgments
- •36)Kant: forms of sensible intuition and categories and “the second Copernican revolution”
- •37)Kant: is metaphysics a science?
- •38)Kant ethics: categorical imperative
26)Descartes: cogito and the mind/body problem
Cogito
Descartes set out to build a new fundation for philosophy beginning with the search for a base that was immune from doubt.
As St. Augustine had done before him he concluded that doubt itself implies the existence of doubting being. This conclusion led to his famous declaration “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am).
The notion of mutually exclusive classes of substance gave rise to mind/body problem:
how can the two possible interact?
Descartes's answer was that they intersect in the pineal gland of the brain.
The mind/body problem
The famous mind/body problem is the question whether there exists a distinct mental or spiritual sphere separate from the physical and, if so, how the two interact.
The relationship between spirit and matter is an age-old mystery and is basic to many religious conceptions. Its importance as philosophical problem derives from the strict dualism of Descartes. For whom reality consisted of two disparate types of substance, mind and matter.
The question rised by this formulation is how two utterly dissimilar substances can interact; if I cut my finger, how does my mind know it hurts? If I want to rise my hand, how does my body know what it should do?
27)The theory of substance: monism and monistic theories
The one-substance-view is reffered to as monism or monistic theories
Probably the most extreme monist was Parmenides, who held that there is only one eternal being and that the appereance of individual things is only an illusion.
The term is most closely associated with Spinoza who believed that God and nature are one and that mind and matter are a “double aspect” of a single universal substance, fundamentally neither physical, nor mental and therefore “neutral”.
This view is imperatively linked to pantheism God and nature are one and therefore there is no Divine person – God is not a person – God is everything and by the same token every human being being a part of the nature is a part of God.
Other monisms are not neutral for according to them there is only one substance but the substance is either material or spiritual.
Therefore a materialiast is a monist;
the materialsit view asserts that mind is reducible to an aspect of matter (according to Democritus who is seen as the firt materialist philosopher, even human soul is made of atoms, according to Thomas Hobbes, another materialist living in the XVIIth century our ideas and everthing which is falsly described by us as spiritual can be explained by physics.)
On the other hand idealistic or solipsistic view holds that the reality is fundamnetally spititual or mental and that what we tend to perceive as matter is just a phenomenon, an illusion or that simply we cannot find any sensible proof for the existence of metrial world (hence solipsism from the Latin expression “Solus ipse sum” – “Therefore I am alone”.)