Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
"In modern terms, we would argue about whether universals are objectively real or only social constructs."
The idea that experiential faith is more valid than a rational, deductive proof of God's existence has come to more prominence in modern thought, given that science has largely subsumed the disciplines of mathematics and the use of mathematical 'proofs' about the divine favored by theologians in the middle ages like Aquinas. But within the social sciences, the debate about what is objectively knowable rages on. Postmodernists, for examples, suggest that there are no universal categories of knowledge or gender, what constitutes 'great literature' is subjective, and the idea that Western literature has 'classics' is usually defended in a tautological manner: Shakespeare is great, we should read great literature, therefore we should read Shakespeare. Postmodernists also point to the subjective nature of the category of gender in a cross-cultural fashion.
In politics as well, the question of what constitutes universal human rights still often perplexes the international community. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Many Americans have taken it to be a self-evident truth that democracy is a value universally embraced by all peoples, even though the reality of American politics contained many perceived exceptions to this notion...
The United Nations has tried to uphold universal standards of human rights, but the question remains of what rights are indeed universal, and what are culturally contextual remains. For some Islamic countries, a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law regarding women's rights is their society's universal truth. The question of the existence of universal laws and substances remains in debate, as few moral questions have the neat certainty of a Pythagorean Theorem in terms of their answers.
Works Cited
Klima, Gyula "The Medieval Problem of Universals." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/#3[November 27, 2008]
Nelson, Lynn Harry. "Medieval Philosophy." Lectures in Medieval History. The University of Kansas. Updated September 1, 2008, http://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/philosophy.html[November 27, 2008]
Gyula Klima, "The Medieval Problem of Universals," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2000, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/#3[November 27, 2008]
Lynn Harry Nelson, "Medieval Philosophy," Lectures in Medieval History, the University of Kansas, Updated September 1, 2008, http://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/philosophy.html[November 27, 2008]
Nelson, 2008.
Works Cited
Klima, Gyula "The Medieval Problem of Universals." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/#3[November 27, 2008]
Nelson, Lynn Harry. "Medieval Philosophy." Lectures in Medieval History. The University of Kansas. Updated September 1, 2008, http://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/philosophy.html[November 27, 2008]
Gyula Klima, "The Medieval Problem of Universals," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2000, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/#3[November 27, 2008]
Lynn Harry Nelson, "Medieval Philosophy," Lectures in Medieval History, the University of Kansas, Updated September 1, 2008, http://www.vlib.us/medieval/lectures/philosophy.html[November 27, 2008]
Peter Abelard and William of Ockham on Universals William of Ockham is a notable adherent of nominalism -- the notion that universals, the supposed referents of general terms, have no real existence. His objection to the notion of realism as applied to the concept of universals can be summed up in his phrase 'no universal is a particular, since every universal is capable of signifying many and of being predicated of
Abelard and Boethius: The Problem of Universals The medieval problem of the universals posited the question of any idea or thing could be a universal in its being. This was defined by Boethius something that was complete in its entirety, and could not exist in part, that was not in a temporal succession, and that "it should constitute the substance of its particulars that is to say, nothing can be both
History Of Theory Behind Curriculum Development The evolution of curriculum theory by and large reflects the current of thought found in the academic-political landscape. The essence of the ancient maxim cuius regio, eius religio applies here: who reigns, his religion. In this case, who reigns, his curriculum. This has been true throughout all the centuries where education was deemed important by a group of individuals or a State. For example, in
Their escape from persecutions was always organized, which strengthened relations of community members and later turned into a duty of mutual aid and assistance, typical for members of Jewish Diaspora today. These times of horror and deprivations molded spirit and will of Jews, influenced the growth of cooperation of different communities all over Europe and resulted in moving to Eastern Europe, where they peacefully coexisted with local population up
East/West An Analysis of Eastern Influence in Western Art The American/English poet T.S. Eliot references the Upanishad in his most famous poem "The Wasteland," a work that essentially chronicles the break-up of Western civilization and looks to Eastern philosophy for a kind of crutch in the wake of the abandonment of Western philosophy. Since then, Westerners, whether in literature or in film, have continued to look to the East for inspiration and
According to Goldschmidt & Davidson (2009), the conflict between Muslims and Jews could have been intensified by the quarrel that took place between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina. In fact Goldschmidt & Davidson (2009) indicate that there never used to be war between Jews and Muslims even though the Zionist are indicated to have believed that the Jews while under Muslim rule were treated like second-class citizens. Christian