PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy



Philosophy

Answer 1

It is a standard criticism of Descartes' dream argument that it must necessarily fail because it is inconsistent with itself: it has to assume the truth of what it sets out to deny. It concludes that there is no difference between dreaming and waking and that our experiences may be false delusions, while the premises, which liken waking to dreaming and assert the illusory character of the latter, presuppose that there is such a difference. As Ryle said in criticism of the argument from illusion, “just as it makes no sense to talk of counterfeit coins when there are no genuine ones to contrast them with, so it makes no sense to talk of illusory experiences like dreams without waking and veridical ones to contrast them with.

Descartes new argument for skepticism includes both new challenges:

There are no sure signs by which we can distinguish wakefulness from doze 9or imagining) i.e. Any possible waking experience is Phenomenologically Indistinguishable from some possible dream experience

Therefore there is no way of telling for any given experience that I am now having, whether it is a wakeful or a dream experience

Therefore any conviction based on my present senses-experience could be wrong since it could be founded on a dream experience, so no sense founded conviction whether about small/distant things or large/close up things is certain

Answer 2: Comparison

St. Anselm's Ontological Argument

St. Anselm, the church member archbishop of Canterbury and a Doctor of the Church, first formulated the Ontological Argument. This philosophical contention is possibly the strangest and most hotly debated of the proofs.

God lives in our understanding. This means that the notion of God resides as an idea in our minds.

God is a likely being, and might live in reality. He is likely because the notion of God does not accept interior contradictions.

If certain thing lives exclusively in our understanding and might have lived in truth then it might have been greater. This easily means that certain thing that lives in truth is flawless (or great). Something that is only a notion in our minds could be larger by really existing.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument

The large church member thinker, philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas summarized his cosmological argument in the Summa Theologia.

St. Aquinas argues that there are things in the world in shift (this simply means that things are altering) and that anything is in shift must have been ...