spt realism
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REALISM.
FROM ANCIENT TOCONTEMPORARY
Arcilla Hall, BUCSSPJanuary 11, 2013; 8:00-11am
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WHAT IS REALISM?
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Theory that things exist
objectively, not dependent
on our minds
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The realists
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Founded the Lyceum in Athens 334
BCE, became the rival school of PlatosAcademy.
Wrote 27 Dialogues, for which he was
renowned in antiquity
ARISTOTLE (384 322 B.C)
Aristotle (Greek: ,Aristotels) (384 BC322 BC)Greek philosopher
a student of Plato and teacher ofAlexander the Great.wrote on many subjects, includingphysics, metaphysics, poetry,theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics,
government, ethics, biology andzoology.
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Senses are source of knowledge.
Man forms universals, or categories, from many
perceptions of like objects
Accepting Nature as a self-evident reality.
The different levels of life:
1. Plant life the lowest level at which is found
only the nutritive faculty, the power of receiving
nourishment.
2. Animal life has nutritive faculty and has
faculty of perception desiring faculty and powerof locomotion.
3. Human life has faculty of thinkinga thinking
animal and true function is to live rationally.
Aristotles Realism
Four Causes
1. Material cause - that which composes a
thing
2. Formal cause -the form or the model of
things
3. Efficient cause - the source from which
movement or rest comes
4. Final cause - the end and goal of a thing
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SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS (1225 1274 A.D)
Born in 1225 at Aquino, ItalyReferred to as Thomas because
his last name Aquinas refers to
where he was born
Priest of the Roman Catholic
Church in the Dominican Order from
Italy
Influential philosopher and
theologian in the tradition of
scholasticism, known as Doctor
Angelicus and Doctor Communis
(One of the 33 Doctors of theChurch)
Died in 1274 in Italy
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Saint Thomas Realism
"Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu.
Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.
Sense is the beginning for all of mans naturalknowledge, he believed that knowledge begins
with sense perception. Therefore, knowledge was
a certain kind of being, a modification or vital action
of the knowing subject.
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Knowledge can grow beyond the sensory
world when reason is applied to sensory
experience.
Two types of knowledge:1. Sense knowledge (sense-memory, sense-
consciousness, instinct and imagination)
2. Intellectual knowledge (abstract and
general)
Saint Thomas Realism
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JOHN LOCKE (1632 1704)
John Locke (29 August 1632 28
October 1704) was an Englishman ofPuritan
His father, a lawyer and member of
the Parliamentary army which opposed
Charles I, has reflected in Lockes
educational principle.
Aid by scholarships, he was educated
at Westminster School and ChristChurch College, Oxford.
Some of his books: Some thoughts
Concerning Education (which provides
Lockes educational principle); and
Essay Concerning Human
Understanding where he focused hisgeneral philosophy.
The first philosopher to define the self
through a continuity
of "consciousness". He also postulated
that the mind was a "blank slate" or
"tabula rasa"
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John Lockes Realism
we gain knowledge by experience
There are no innate ideas in the mind. All
of our knowledge comes to us by way of
experience. The mind is for the most part
passive in experiencing the natural world.
Experience is the source of all knowledge;
sensation and reason are the 2 avenues
through which this knowledge comes to us.
The external world makes its impression
upon our minds by somehow setting
impulses in
motion which reach our minds through the
gateway of the senses.
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John Lockes Realism
Knowledge
Our experiences provided us with what
he termed simple and complex
Considered that there are 3 main types of
knowledge:
1. Intuitive- most certain and most obvious
2. Demonstrative when we put simple
ideas together to create complex ones
3. Sensitive The most uncertain becauseit relies on evidence of the senses
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John Lockes Realism
Two types of ideas:
1.Simple ideas (easy
sensations)2.Complex ideas
(grouping of simple
ideas)
There different kind of qualities or perceptions whichcome to mind by way of sensation:
- Primary: essential characters to the very nature of object
i.e. height and weight
(undeniable truths). Primary qualities exist in the external
world just as we experience them.
- Secondary: rely on subjective or personal judgments
(color, taste and some tactile
sensations e.g. hardness, softness, temperature, texture
& pain). Secondary qualities are different in our
experience from what they are in their potential
forms in the object; they are yet caused in us by the
external world.
- Tertiary: these are the powers somehow resident inobject enabling them to make
changes in other objects (e.g. power of fire to produce a
new color or consistency in
wax or clay)
These 3 qualities are produced inour minds in the same way, but they
are not all in the external world just
as we experience them in our minds.
The process of motion caused by
the object which stimulates theappropriate senses,
sends impulses along the nerve
pathways, eventually reaches the
brain, and produced
the mental result we experience.
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John Lockes Realism
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Realism in Contemporary times
THE NEOREALISTS
New realism was a philosophy expounded in
the early 20th century by a group of six US
based
scholars, namely Edwin Bissell Holt (Harvard
University), Walter Taylor Marvin (Rutgers
College),
William Pepperell Montague (Columbia
University), Ralph Barton Perry (Harvard),
Boughton Pitkin (Columbia) and EdwardGleason Spaulding (Princeton University).
These men published their manifesto
entitled The New Realism in 1912.
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The central feature of the new realism was a rejection of the
epistemological dualism of John
Locke and the older forms of realism. The group maintained that
when one is conscious of, or
knows, an object, it is an error to say that there are two distinctfacts -- knowledge of the object in
a mind, and an extra-mental object in itself.
They rebut the idealist principle that the knowledge produces
changes in the object known, and toinsist that the knowing experience is a simple relation of knower
and object in which the object is
directly presented to consciousness.
Neorealists Realism
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THE CRITICAL REALISTS
Critical realism refers to several schools of thought.
These include the American critical realists (Roy
Wood Sellars, George Santayana, and Arthur
Lovejoy) and a broader movement including
Bertrand Russell and C. D. Broad. The Canadian
Jesuit Bernard Lonergan developed acomprehensive critical realist philosophy and this
understanding of critical realism dominates
North America's Catholic Universities. In the UK,
critical realism generally refers to a philosophical
approach to the social and natural world - Roy
Bhaskar's work is particularly wellassociated with this approach. The term is also
used by several people in the science-religion
interface community.
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The critical realist rejected the neorealist position that objects aredirectly presented to consciousness. Their correction was that the
objects are not presented; they are represented.
The object which I experience in consciousness is numerically
distinct from the physical existence out there which causes the
object which I experience in consciousness. For one thing, it was
believed by these men that knowledge must be representative inorder to explain the errors of perception, for example. The position
is none the less realistic for its rejection of the presentative theory
of knowledge of neorealism.
The physical existents out there in the physical world not in
consciousness are yet real in themselves. They stand on their ownfeet; they depend on no mind for their existence, nor are theychanged in any way by entering into knowledge.
Critical Realists Realism