Reality, the Mind, and God Essay -- Philosophy Religion Essays

Reality, the Mind, and GodThe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Great Britain are marked by a general and persistent concern most threats to orthodoxy in religion. mankindy doctrines and views were seen as threatening theories more or less the origin and nature of human knowledge, metaphysical claims about the nature of the world, claims about human nature, about the person and action. (Yolton 3) According to the study viewpoints held in metaphysics, one of the four major categories in the study of philosophy, there are three major ways to regard the constitution of reality. Materialism is the view that all that exists is cloth or is completely dependent on matter (Gould 421) in order to be perceived and to exist. This is one of the two major, extreme views that exist concerning the substance of reality. The other(a) extreme view, judgmentlism, is the belief that reality consists of mental perception and ideas, that what exists is either an idea or a perceiver of that idea (Gould 437). According to this view, matter ticks no material substance. All matter is comprised of a collection of ideas and the one who is accept and interpreting those ideas. Beyond these two extreme viewpoints is one of the most favorite beliefs concerning reality, especially in Western culture. The belief of dualism denotes that reality is a unvaried combination of both material and non-material substance. This view states that reality is made of objects that contain material substance to them. But this perspective of reality holds that there is also a component to reality that depends upon the perceiver, what mental impression he obtains from the material substance, and how he can manipulate th... ...ry expression (Thayer xv). And Newtons go on literary expression as well as philosophic reasoning can be easily seen when viewing the works of such(prenominal) famous writers as tin can Locke or Isaac Watts. Works CitedBennett, Jonathan. Locke, Ber keley and Hume Central Themes. Oxford Clarendon, 1971. Damrosch, David, et al., eds. The Longman Anthology British Literature. Vol. 1. New York Longman, 1999. Gould, James A. ed. Classic Philosophical Questions. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River Prentice, 1995. Randall, John Herman Jr. Introduction. Thayer. ix-xvi. Thayer, H. S. ed. Newtons Philosophy of Nature Selections from His Writings. New York Hafner, 1953. Watts, Isaac. Man Frail, and God Eternal. Damrosch, et al. 2638. Yolton, John W. Thinking Matter Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. manganese U of Minnesota P, 1983.