Shaharudin menulis...

Continued from Knowledge (Part III) Another philosopher, René Descartes ( 1596-1650), had a distinctive perspective on knowledge. He believed that knowledge was a matter of certainty, and that the only way to achieve such certainty was through rational inquiry and doubt. Rene Descartes Cogito, ergo sum Descartes is a rationalist philosopher. He was known for his method of radical doubt, which involved questioning everything he knew in order to arrive at a foundation of knowledge that could not be doubted. He believed that all knowledge should be based on indubitable, self-evident truths, or what he called "clear and distinct" ideas. In other words, knowledge had to be based on ideas that were so clear and distinct that they could not be doubted. Descartes believed that the human mind was capable of arriving at such knowledge through the use of reason alone, independent of sensory experience. He argued that this was possible because the human mind had an innate knowledge of ...

The Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge The tripartite analysis of knowledge has been held by many philosophers throughout history and its origin can be traced all the way back to Plato's discussion of a tripartite analysis of knowledge in the  Theaetetus .  There are three components to the traditional analysis of knowledge; i.e, the truth condition, the belief condition and the justification condition. Let's go through them one by one: - The Truth Condition According to the tripartite analysis of knowledge, a person S can only know the subject of a proposition p if and only if the proposition p is true . Nonetheless, sometimes what is false cannot be known, and s omething’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true.  Not all truths are  established  truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell.  Truth is a  metaphysical , as opposed to...

Continued from Knowledge (Part II)   In discussing about knowledge, we cannot ignore the contributions of Aristotle.  Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, had a different view of knowledge compared to his teacher, Plato. Aristotle believed that knowledge is not just a matter of understanding the eternal truths of the world, but it is also a matter of understanding the natural world through empirical observation and investigation. Aristotle believed that knowledge is derived from experience and acquired through a process of observation, classification, and analysis. To him, all knowledge begins with sensory experience, and only through that experience, people get to know of the particular qualities of things in this world. Yet, Aristotle also believed that true knowledge involves more than just observations of individual instances; knowledge requires the identification of general principles or universal truths that underlie the particular instances. This process of general...