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Personal View of Philosophy

It is no more possible to exclusively follow one's senses and find the truth than it is possible to exclusively follow one's reason and find the truth. Both Plato and Descartes are trying to falsely isolate the stuff of the senses from the stuff of the reasoning mind. It cannot be done.

The mind and the senses are joined forevermore and cannot be torn asunder. Obviously, it is nice for philosophers to think that the senses and the mind can be so easily separated. They are, after all, trying to make sense out of a world---within and without---that very often does not make much sense at all. It is, therefore, not surprising to find philosophers either focusing exclusively on the senses or the reasoning mind in creating their philosophic systems.

It is simply too complicated to try to unravel the complex and often contradictory threads of the mind and the senses. Philosophers such as Descartes and Plato favor the mind over the senses, and they propose that we can know reality by using the reasoning mind and distrusting the senses except to the degree that the mind is able to separate reasonable sense perception from illusion, dream, hallucination, etc.

Again, to this observer, the mind has little---if anything--in it that does not come originally from the senses. I am not, however, against reason, by any means. In fact, I would argue that the reasoning mind is crucial for interpreting the material observed by the senses. The argument here is simply that it is unrealistic to base a philosophic system on the belief that one can actually separate the mind from the senses.

The reasoning mind and the senses are meant to operate, I believe, in conjunction with one another in assessing the world and coming to a reasonable and acceptable portrait of the reality of that world and the place of human beings in it.

There is no doubt that Plato and Descartes are correct in declaring that the senses are not to be fully trusted. ...

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Personal View of Philosophy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:14, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701480.html