Philosophy

Everything happens for the best, in this the best of all possible worlds. This is a statement that can be found many times within Voltaires Candide. Voltaire rejected Lebitizian Optimism, using Candide as a means for satirizing what was wrong with the world, and showing that, in reality, this is not the best of all…

He first determines that human knowledge is based entirely too much on unproved presuppositions. He argues that this makes it difficult to distinguish between truth and error, since we cannot recognize true knowledge. Descartes proposes that the quest for knowledge must be based upon universal doubt. Specifically, he proposes the following in relation to his…

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a classic mystery story, enticing to all audiences merely upon it’s suspense alone. When Stevenson first wrote the story (after recalling a dream he had) he had only the intentions of writing such an entertaining tale. Yet at the suggestion of his wife, he decided…

  “Phew,” I said, “it was only a dream.” This is a dream I have had often throughout the past couple of years. Each time, the bump in my dream gets bigger and bigger and each time I wake up I’m more and more frightened that the dream was real. “I will not be a…

Hume presents a various number of arguments concerning why people ought not to believe in any miracles. Hume does not think that miracles do not exist it is just that we should not believe in them because they have no rational background. One of his arguments is just by definition miracles are unbelievable. And have…

Carl Gauss was a man who is known for making a great deal breakthroughs in the wide variety of his work in both mathematics and physics. He is responsible for immeasurable contributions to the fields of number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, magnetism, astronomy, and optics, as well as many more. The concepts that he…

Writing a self-reflective tirade is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks to perform. I have found myself pondering this topic for an unusually long time; no one has ever asked me to write about my culture– the one thing about myself which I understand the least. This question which is so easy for others…

Siddhartha has been searching for fulfillment all his life. Though he was the most scholarly and respected Brahmin, this did not satisfy him. He drank knowledge, yet still felt ignorant. He could not find peace. He could not find fulfillment. His journey is essentially one of trial and error, suffering, mistakes, and rebirth. He was…

“Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous and unwearied.”  Through the personification of commerce Thoreau is able to show that commerce fluctuates in the same manner as humanity. The adjectives he uses to describe commerce show that commerce has some of the same tendencies as humans, and Thoreau believes that it is these tendencies…

  Some years before, he had also, less fashionably, tried hard to think himself a Catholic. While one hardly associates the characteristic setting of Fitzgerald’s novels, his chosen kingdom of the sybaritic fabulous, with either proletarian solidarity or priestly devotions, it will be the argument of this essay that a tension between Left and religiose…