Epistemology and Nihilism

1. Explain why the epistemological theories of Locke, Berkeley, and Kant are unable to overcome the "egocentric predicament." Be sure to quote from the authors' primary works in support of your answer. Finally, how might the doctrines of Hinduism be helpful in suggesting a solution to the "egocentric predicament?" (Be sure to make references to Hindu terms such as Nirvana, Maya, Moksha, Samadhi, etc)

Common sense realism is that form of naive realism tending toward dualistic realism. This was the theory of knowledge of a school of Scotish thinkers founded by Thomas Reid (1710-1796) which attempted to set up a theory of knowledge which whould support the realistic belief of the man on the street. This theory held that we perceive the external world directly and that the sense-data either do not exist or play subordinate role in perception. In Aristotle's psychology common sense is the faculty by which the common sensibles are perceived. Aristotle probably attributed to this faculty the functions of perceiving what we perceive and of uniting the data from the different senses into a single object. In his An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principle of Common Sense (1795), Reid took this concept to emphasize that the common consciousness of man is basic. He held that all humans possess, by nature, a common set of capacities - both epistemological and ethical - through which they could grasp the basic realities of nature and morality. He opposed the theory of ideas of Berkeley and Hume that the perception of ideas are our sole source of knowledge of the world. (Camus, pp. 105-108)

This theory is due to the influence of John Locke on Modern Western thought. When some philosophers, following John Locke, made sense-knowledge more complicated by interposing "ideas" between our minds and the real world, so that these ideas, they said, were the immediate objects in our minds, and hence we do not have immediate direct knowledge of the objects, but only of the ideas in our minds, David Hume raised the question of how do we know that these ideas correspond with what is actually there. The answer of Thomas Reed was akin to Samuel Johnson's kicking a rock to refute the similar theory proposed by Bishop Berkeley. Reed answered that only philosophers would take seriously this skeptical doctrine with its absurd implications. Everyone in his senses believes such truths as the existence of the real world, cause and effect, and the continuity of the self; they believe that the mind has the ability to know such things. If philosophers question such truths, so much the worst for the philosophers. The common-sense of mankind, whether of the man behind the plow or the man behind the desk, is the surest guide to the truth. (Camus, pp. 105-108)

The skepticism of Hume struck the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) as destroying the foundations of philosophy and science. He tells us that Hume "interrupted my dogmatic slumber, gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a ...