Philosophy Exam #2

An ontological argument for the existence of God attempts the method of a priori proof, which uses intuition and reason alone.

A teleological argument, or argument from design, is an argument for the existence of God or a creator based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design, or direction — or some combination of these — in nature.

The cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of a First Cause (or instead, an Uncaused cause) to the universe, and by extension is often used as an argument for the existence of an "unconditioned" or "supreme" being, usually then identified as God.

A priori knowledge or justification is independent of experience (for example 'All bachelors are unmarried'). A priori justification makes reference to experience; but the issue concerns how one knows the proposition or claim in question—what justifies or grounds one's belief in it.

a posteriori knowledge or justification is dependent on experience or empirical evidence (for example 'Some bachelors are very happy').

PSR claims that (a) For everything that exists, there must be an explanation or a reason why that thing exists; and (b) for every positive fact, there must be an explanation or reason why the fact is the case.

God is omnipoten (all-powerful), God is omnibenevolent (all-good), and yet there is evil in the world. The problem is that any two of the propositions seems to entail the falsity of the other. i.e. if God is all-powerful, all-good God certainly could have created a world without the presence of evil.

Denying that there is evil in the world. a. Good cannot exist without evil. b. Evil is a necessary means to good. c. The universe is better with some evil in it that it could be if there were no evil. If God is all-powerful, couldn't it have been brought about good exists without evil? Good and evil aren't opposites, so it is at least logically possible that we could have many good without having evil. Thus denying that there is evil on the basis isn't a very good strategy, because it tends to impugn God's omnipotence. If God can do anything logically possible, then God could make it the case that we have without evil. Repsonse to c: First, does there have to be actual suffering in the world in order for humans ot have these kinds of virtues? It seems, for example, that people just have to believe that there is danger to exibit bravery, or that it just has to seem that there is suffering in order for people to exhibit compassion.

The second strategy is to claim that God is not responsible for teh evil in the world - people are. It is better to have free will than to not have free will. But people can't have free will without there being good or evil (or good or bad). Thus God is not responsible for the evil in the world - people who misuse their free will are. (Remember God can't do everything, only that which is logically possible; it is not logically possible to have free will without evil).

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that addresses fundamental questions regarding propositional knowledge. We'll be concerned with three questions in particular: 1. What is to know something? 2. How do we come to know things? 3. What is the extent of our propositional knowledge? a. Can we know anything? b. If so, what can we know?

Propositional knowledge is a matter of knowing that something is the case. Knowledge that some state of affairs exists. To give a satisfactory account of knowledge one must state the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. S (where S is some person) knows that P (where is P is some proposition) = 1. P is true 2. S believes P 3. S is justified in believing P When philosophers say that knowledge is justified true belief, then they are referring to this account of knowledge.

The view that the human mind is capable of a direct apprehension of certain truths about the world. i.e., rational minds can learn about the world; we can know meaningful things about the world a priori. More specifically, rationalists believe that there exist synthetic truths which are knowable a priori.

The view that our empirical knowledge (knowledge of the world) arises entirely out of sense experience (i.e. we cannot know meaningful things about the world a priori). More specifically, empiricists believe that there do not exist synthetic truths that are knowable a priori.

Argues that the traditional account of knowledge (the justified true belief account) is not the correct model of knowledge. More specifically, Gettier is arguing that while Justification, Truth and Belief may all be necessary for knowledge, they are not jointly sufficient. What this means is that one can satisfy all three conditions for knowledge and still fail to have knowledge. What this argument shows is that there is at least one further condition for knowledge that needs to be identified (or possibly, we need a whole new model for knowledge altogether).

He begins by noting that his refutation of the traditional account of knowledge will work for close variants of traditional account (i.e. accounts in which the justification condition is replaced by an "adequate evidence" condition or a "right to be sure" condition). So his criticism is not just a criticism of some fine detail of the traditional account (which could be easily repaired); Gettier is going to show that there is serious structural problem with the traditional account of knowledge (no small bit of tinkering is going to fix it).