Exam 4: The Nature of Reality

Why is it impossible to draw a true triangle, and how does this lend support to Plato's theory of Forms?

Write an essay on how the ontologies of the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle offer different interpretations of the basic reality of the world.   Focus specifically on the following themes: appearance vs. reality, change vs. stasis, materiality (or physicality)vs. immateriality.

According to Descartes, there are only two substances, mind and body.

Cosmology, unlike ontology , is the study of

For Hegel, what is most real is neither the world of science nor the world of religion but the social world, held together by bonds of kinship and community .

Unlike Plato, Aristotle thought that the world most basically consisted in forms but that these forms

Pythagoras thought that numbers were more real than trees and tables because

Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead both developed a process philosophy that synthesized science with a teleological metaphysics.

A problem for Descartes is that if substances are by definition ultimate and totally independent of one another, then

By suggesting that what is most real is neither the world discovered by science nor the world believed in by religion but our social world, Hegel questioned the assumption that

If you were to embrace Spinoza's metaphysics, you would also have to embrace an idea of radical freedom.

How did these three pre-Socratic materialists - Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Democritus - identify the nature of ultimate reality?

To say that one's ontology is evaluative means that

According to Immanuel Kant, we live in two separate but equal worlds:

Parmenides thought that the world is unreal because reality, at its core, must be unchanging, and the world is in a state of constant change.

What three things does Leibniz believe are true of monads?

Approaches to the question "What is real?" seem to start from two very different places,

Kant argues that our minds automatically and necessarily impose categories such as space and time on the world we experience, without which we could not make sense of our experience.

Plato's belief in the priority of an immaterial and eternal world became the central thesis of Saint Augustine's philosophy, while Aristotle's view of a living, growing, goal-directed universe played an important role in the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Descartes was the first idealist.