What are the Objects of Visual Perception?
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
There is much debate about what it is we actually perceive of the world, if anything at all. In this essay I wish to focus on the theory of Direct Realism, and show why I believe it to be the correct theory. I will show this by looking at all the main objections to Direct Realism, and show that...
Is Creation Due to Nature or God? Discuss the Arguments for Creation in the Samkhyakarika.
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
The Samkhya School of philosophy has what I believe to be an agnostic note on the nature of creation and on the existence of God, although not atheistic in the sense that there is still a cause for evolution. In this essay I will try to show how the Samkhya idea of creation is appealing but it...
Can Knowledge Be Characterised as Justified True Belief? What Would a Better Account of Knowledge Look like?
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
There have been many attempts over the years to try and define what constitutes knowledge. Up until the early 1960's, the general consensus was that the tripartite analysis of knowledge was correct. However, it is now widely accepted that this is not the case, due to the work of Edmund Gettier...
Essay on the Vaisesika and Bhagavad Gita Distinctions between Self and Body
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
It is my opinion that the distinction between self and body, as set out in the Vaisesika and mentioned in the Vedanta (Sourcebook, 1957, pp121-138, 386-423) , is an extremely cogent theory which seems to be able to reply to most objections raised to it. In this essay I will attempt to show how...
Is Sound Eternal, as the Mimansa Philosophers Believe It to Be or Is It Transitory as the Nyaya Says?
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Behind the claim that sound is eternal appears to be the idea that it must be eternal because the utterance of the word is for the purpose of another. Without this eternality, one person could not make anything known to another, because once the word was spoken, it would no longer exist. Another...
Are Theories Incommensurable Due to the Untranslatability of One Scientific Language to Another?
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The most famous exponent of the theory of incommensurability is Thomas Kuhn. To state his theory in the simplest form, incommensurability is simply the idea that theories within science are not compatible, and that the languages they use are, at least in part, mutually untranslatable. This is...
What Would It Mean for an Event to Be a 'Miracle' in the Sense that Hume Describes It?
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
In this essay, I hope to show that some of the criticisms levelled against Hume, especially those by Robert Hambourger (1980), are not effective in their attempts to erode Hume's argument. These issues were discussed in an article by Dorothy Coleman (1988), which I will use to outline the...
Does the Argument from the Systematicity of Thought to the Language of Thought Hypothesis Work?
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
One of the main arguments to support the language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), as proposed by Fodor (1975), is that of the systematicity of thought. This argument consists of the idea that the ability to entertain certain thoughts is linked to the ability to entertain certain other thoughts....
Has Hume Refuted the Design Argument?
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
In my opinion, David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, completely destroys the traditional design argument. In this essay I will outline an example of the traditional design argument, as written by Newton, and also Hume's critique of this argument, in his ‘Dialogues...
Short Story Review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Readers love the story of the predator and the prey, regardless of where or with whom the sympathy falls. A tale of survival or near-survival keeps us craving more, and if the creator or messenger of that story can secretly divulge wisdom along the way, then both reader and author benefit....
Surf's Up, Dude: Cowabunga
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The mission lies before us: how are we, the American people, going to come together so that “cowabunga” is reinvigorated into mainstream conversation. It was not too terribly long ago, maybe 15 years, that this delightfully lighthearted interjection tickled the ears of various...
The Deceit of Ghosts
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The concept of family t presently, as the world has grown smaller, children no longer have and loyalty to family has been a virtue in nearly all times and cultures of this world. Albeithe need to embrace their parents as they once did. Yet in Ibesn's play Ghosts, the parent-child relationship is...
Behind the Murders
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Patricia Highsmith's short stories exemplify her interpretation of the human condition. However, her stories tend to involve characters with very extreme emotional conditions which ultimately cause them take surprising actions, those being the typical climaxes of Highsmith short stories. In...
A Systematic Method for Interpreting Novel Compounds
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
A novel word is one that is not found in the lexicon of the general population; in other words, it is a word that people have not heard or seen previously. A novel compound is a compound word formed out of two or more individual known words where the combination of these words has not previously...
Syntactic Movement and Locative Incorporation in Exocentric Compounds
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
Most people will agree that there are two main types of compound words, endocentric and exocentric. Endocentric compounds are those where the rightmost constituent, called the grammatical head, is what defines the category of speech and the semantic interpretation of the word. Exocentric...
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Bartolome De Las Casas was a Dominican Monk of Spanish descent, best known for his moving work A Short Account Of The Destruction Of The Indies, which details the barbaric actions of the Spanish conquistadors in their relations with the natives of the New World. Even though it was written in the...
Book Review: Women in the Viking Age
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Women in the Viking Age by Judith Jesch is a detailed and informative publication that discusses women during the Viking Age through the close examination of a vast amount of resources. Judith Jesch is currently teaching at the University of Nottingham, and has extensive experience in a variety...
Lily and Becky: A Flower and a Weed
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair was published in book form for the first time in 1848, and was available in serialized editions one year prior. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth was published in 1905 making it highly likely that Wharton was aware of Vanity Fair and the main character...
The Sound and the Fury Review
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
William Faulkner was one of the most influential writers of his time. He was a pioneer author and some even consider him to be the only true modernist fiction writer who composed in the 1930's. In that period he wrote many works that became famous, including novels such as: As I Lay Dying,...
"Ligeia," "The Raven," and "The Cask:" Poe's Untrustworthy Narrators
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “Marginalia,” published in 1844, Edgar Allen Poe wrote, “To be thoroughly conversant with a Man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.” His outlook on humanity was somber at best, and is a theme that we see flowing through a large...
The Person of Gaius Caligula: A Study of the Man, and An Attempt to Discern Fact from Fiction
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The historical figure of Gaius Caligula is one that has been mythologized, vilified, and misconstrued over the course of time. At this point in time, thousands of years after his historical reign over Rome, it is hard to tell what is fact and what is fiction regarding his life and his actions....
Fallen Leaves
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Environmentalism is a concept that has been long argued on many fronts. There is a large rift between those who scream for the need to protect our planet and those who could not care less. Now, with the planet moving closer and closer to possible biological peril, we find ourselves stopping to...
Aristotle's "The Rhetoric"
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
When digging deeply into Aristotle's “The Rhetoric” it only begs the question of the origins of the author. Many of us learn about Aristotle's legacy in grade school and learn about his works. However, many of us also fail to learn the basic elements that made Aristotle who he was then...
Isolation in the Scarlet Letter
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
It is not uncommon for authors to manifest their personal experiences in their works. Nathaniel Hawthorne himself spent numerous years in seclusion. The diverse characters in Hawthorne's timeless tale of adultery and sin, do so as well. The various forms of estrangement are experienced to...
The Prominence of "ANIMAL for HUMAN" Metaphor
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The role metaphor plays in language is viewed differently by scholars in different fields. The extremes are the classical view based on Aristotle's writings about metaphor and the Romantic view. Those that follow the classical view see metaphor as a purely literary device used to decorate...
Freudian Psychology and Euripides's The Bacchae
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Freudian psychology follows the notion that it can dissect the human mind into various parts and pieces that can be interpreted even if the individual doesn't realize what any of the messages mean. In literature, Freudian psychology can be utilized to understand themes, characters, or actions....
Mothering Desires in LeFanu's "Carmilla"
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
William Veeder's essay “Carmilla: The Arts of Repression”, claims that LeFanu's “Carmilla” attempts to explain the two-sided nature of human life through what he describes as “dualisms.” He says that humans attempt to find the side of these dualisms they wish to...
Okonkwo's Telling Duality
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the definitive post-colonial, African novel, focuses on a character who is in constant struggle with his tribe and with himself. Okonkwo, a purveyor of masculinity in his society, has many reasons for his actions in the novel. The continuing cultural violence...
The Morpho-Semantics of English Compound Words: Formation, Meaning and Productivity
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The ability to compound words in the English language has always been a very productive method of adding new words to the lexicon. Compound words are generally formed in one of two ways, as root compounds or synthetically. Whichever way they are formed, the rightmost constituent is always the...
Existence and Absence of Individualism
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
There are many ways you can define a human being; through the volume of their voice to their everyday habits. Another is handwriting and when looked at in detail it can be a definition of one's self. I will discuss how handwriting and the means you go through to create it can show who you are....
