Ethos and Corey Robin’s Lack of It How Intellectuals Create a Public, Corey Robin’s lengthy article, discusses how public intellectuals need to create their own audience rhetorical audience, rather than speaking to the one that is already available. This means rather than telling the audience...
The play The School for Scandal by Sheridan and Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry explore human nature, and the complexities that emerge from social interactions, or perhaps more internally, through our own disposition. Sheridan’s satire took on the scandalmongering of the trendy London society of 1770...
M. Irfan Iqbal throughout history, prophets, poets and philosophers have appeared to remind human beings of their true nature — a nature that consists of a temporal as well as a heavenly element. They have attempted to rekindle in the human beings the Divine Spark...
Introduction The Catholic church teaches that God places the natural law into every human being. Every person conceived possesses the natural law connaturally (Maritain 13). For human beings, this natural law is part of human nature and it informs its possessor of what is good...
In his essay ‘Of Truth’, Francis Bacon appreciates truth and wishes people to speak it. He begins the essay with a Biblical Allusion in which Pontius Pilate (who occupied an important position in Emperor Tiberius’ court) asks Jesus “what is truth” and then promptly walks...
The concept of the copy principle is prevalent in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. The idea of the copy principle is that simple ideas stem from simple impressions. Hume defines impression as “sensations, passions and emotions” while ideas are “the faint images of the...
In Sophocles’ play Antigone, Kreon, the warrior King may overrule Antigone, a mere woman’s, struggle for political power, but can he match Antigone’s resistance in a fight for political authority? Political power in a state rises from the presence of a force that exerts dominance....
St. Augustine’s view of human nature is primarily based on St. Paul in Romans 7, which states, ‘for I have a desire to do good, but I cannot carry it out’, suggesting that we are weak creatures that need saving by God’s forgiveness and salvation....
In A Man’s Search for Meaning Dr. Frankl demonstrates the way the “meaning of life” affects a person’s drive and will. Frankl’s main argument is a prisoner’s struggle to find a purpose for his suffering within a concentration camp. However, this idea can be applied...
Both Homer’s The Odyssey and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe use fate to explain why the protagonists endure the trials they endured although in differing contexts. In The Odyssey, Fate assumes its traditional role of being puppeted by the gods, but with less rigidity. Mankind is...
Introduction In the “Lady or the Tiger,” one barbaric king comes up with a form of punishment offered to his subjects. Whenever an individual dare to love the king’s daughter, he is forced to choose between two breathtaking options. The person will appear between two...
Introduction The theme of free will versus fate plays a large role in Moby Dick. One’s fate can be described as the path of events in their life that unfolds and cannot be altered. However, in Moby Dick, the end result of the characters can...
In this paper I shall briefly define what induction is and attempt to explain David Hume’s problem of induction through examining the three most common problems of induction, which are, the problem of the uniformity of nature, the problem of cause-and-effect reasoning and the problem...
As we analyze society and culture in the present day, we first have to look into the past using Social Imagination. To do so we have to ask the questions, what made our society the way it is, why do people act in certain ways,...
‘Oklahoma, 1973’, begins the documentary account of an experiment to teach a baby chimpanzee human language and thus, in the words of one of the researchers, ‘test the nature versus nurture hypothesis’. And through today’s eyes, the eyes of film-maker James Marsh (of Man on...
John O’Sullivan, a journalist, was the first to put to use the term “manifest destiny.” He purposefully coined it for capturing the general feeling of the United States people at the time. The feeling was that they harbored a God-given duty of expanding into the...
Free will, is it an illusion or not? This is probably one of the most famous arguments in Philosophy. It is a historical argument where each philosopher has his or her own views. Many philosophers’ opinions are divided when it comes to the discussion of...
There is an ongoing debate regarding the relationship between determinism and free will, two concepts that often appear to be in conflict. Determinism is the philosophical view that every event, including human actions, is determined by preceding events in accordance with the natural laws. This...
“Truth is relative” (Velasquez, p. 433, 2017). The meaning behind this statement is the fact that there is no objective truth in the world, humans only have a few ways to gauge their own subjective truths through life experience. Two major theories of truth are...