descartes quotes

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?
Rene Descartes

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.
Rene Descartes

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
Rene Descartes

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
Rene Descartes

Everything is self-evident.
Rene Descartes

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
Rene Descartes

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
Rene Descartes

I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.
Rene Descartes

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
Rene Descartes

I think; therefore I am.
Rene Descartes

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Rene Descartes

Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
Rene Descartes

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
Rene Descartes

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
Rene Descartes

It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
Rene Descartes

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
Rene Descartes

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
Rene Descartes

Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
Rene Descartes

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.
Rene Descartes


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definition of philosophy

"PHILOSOPHY. The Greek word sophia is ordinarily translated into English as "wisdom," and the compound philosophia, from which "philosophy" derives, is translated as "the love of wisdom." But sophia had a much wider range of application than the modern English "wisdom." Wherever intelligence can be exercised -- in practical affairs, in the mechanical arts, in business -- there is room for sophia; Homer used it to refer to the skill of a carpenter (Iliad XV, 412). Furthermore, whereas modern English draws a fairly sharp distinction between the search for wisdom and the attempt to satisfy intellectual curiosity, Herodotus used the verb philosophein in a context in which it means nothing more than the desire to find out (History I, 30). Briefly, then, philosophia etymologically connotes the love of exercising one's curiosity and intelligence rather than the love of wisdom. Although philosophers have often sought to confine the word "philosophy" within narrower boundaries, in popular usage it has never entirely lost its original breadth of meaning."

Joseph Raz

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Joseph Raz

Full name	Joseph Raz
Born	21 March 1939 (1939-03-21) (age 72)Palestine
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Legal positivism Liberalism
Main interests	Legal philosophy Political philosophy

Joseph Raz (Hebrew: יוסף רז‎; born 21 March 1939) is a legal, moral and political philosopher. He is one of the most prominent advocates of legal positivism. He has spent most of his career as professor of philosophy of law and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and simultaneously as professor of law at Columbia University Law School. Raz is currently a visiting professor at Kings College London. Several of Raz's students have become important legal and moral philosophers.

thomas hobbes

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.
Hobbes was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign but he also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.
Hobbes also contributed to a diverse array of fields, including history, geometry, physics of gases, theology, ethics, general philosophy, and political science. His account of human nature as self-interested cooperation has proved to be an enduring theory in the field of philosophical anthropology. He was one of the key founders of materialism in philosophy.

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morality as social contract

What is a social contract?

}A convention or ‘contract’ argued upon by society to avoid harm caused by others which would result if everyone did as they pleased.

}I won’t harm you if you promise not to do harm to me

Hobbes

 

}‘State of nature’- humans are naturally self-interested. ( in Leviathan)

}“The life of man [would be] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”

}Therefore the state of nature is bad for everyone. It is natural for us to want to escape it.

}To escape it requires cooperation ( social contract), so therefore it is rational for us to follow such rules.

}Therefore, there is no right and wrong-just what is agreed by people living in a society.

Three Major Areas of Philosophy

Metaphysics - the nature of reality

Axiology - the nature of values

Epistemology - the nature of knowledge

Of What Value is the
Study of Philosophy

Philosophy is:

vA search for meaning and truth

IDEALISM -
 The philosophical theory that ideas are the only reality

DIRECT REALISM -
Direct realism, also known as naïve realism or common sense realism, is a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world