The Ways of Knowing

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The Ways of Knowing

• Intuitionism, Empiricism, and Reason

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Raphael The School of Athens
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Plato

• Platos finger points upward, denoting that
  reality is expressed ultimately in the world of
  forms.

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Aristotle

• Aristotles hand is leveled low, toward the
  ground, denoting the importance of the individual
  or particular things to understanding the
  universe.

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Aristotles Doctrine of the Categories

• Substance What is it? Socrates is a man
• Quantity How much? Socrates is a man
• Quality What features does it have? Socrates is
  bald.
• Place Where is it? Socrates is in jail.
• Time When is it? Socrates is in jail after his
  trial.
• Action What is he doing? Socrates is drinking
  poison.
• Passion What is being done to him? Socrates is
  being interrogated.

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Aristotles Doctrine of the Four Causes

• Formal Cause What is its Essence?
• Material Cause What is it made of?
• Efficient Cause What activity produced it?
• Final Cause What is its purpose?

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Intuition

• Intuition is claim to truth based upon an
  immediate, a priori apprehension.
• Mysticism (St. John of the Cross, 19th Century
  Romanticists / Schelling, Jacobi)
• Rational Intuition (Plato)
• Conceptional Intuition (G.E. Moore)

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Empiricism / Inductive Experience

• Empiricism refers to knowledge gained through
  observation of discrete pieces of information and
  forming conclusions about the relationships
  between those pieces of evidence.
• Aristotelian Empiricism (Aquinas)
• Modern or Scientific Empiricism (Flew, Russell,
  Gould)

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Reason

• Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza)
• Reason is an autonomous authority which, if
  pursued, leads inexorably toward truth
• Reason mediated through Divine Revelation
  (Protestant Reformers, Gordon H. Clark, Carl F.
  H. Henry)
• Reason is circumscribed by, and limited to,
  divine command

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Three Theories of Truth

• Coherence
• Truth is that body of propositions which are
  consistent with each other, that form a system
  which does not contradict itself.
• Does not make claims for ultimate explanations.
• Contextualism

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Three Theories of Truth

• Pragmatic - 2 versions
• Its true because it works
• Social Constructivism
• Relativism
• John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Jean Francois Lyotard
• It works because its true
• Phenomenology (Husserl)

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Three Theories of Truth

• Correspondence - True propositions refer beyond
  themselves to a larger, objective and fixed
  reality. (God, Nature)
• History of Western Philosophy until the
  Enlightenment

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Reason