Definitions of Knowledge Essay -- Philosophy Papers

As Walker Percy explores the dogfish of perception and shaftledge in his essay, The Loss of the Creature, I wonder if he realizes how slippery and feisty the topic squirming on his desk is. Although anyone who has interpreted a guided tour will surely agree that the handed-down tourist experience is necessarily divorced from that of a discoverer, the broad epistemic claims that Percy quotes from this scenario seem more complicated than Percy gives them credit, or space, for. When Percy suggests that an individual should aim to extract the thing from the package, he insists that the individual seek out some unanimous bedrock beneath the surface of perception (519). In this statement, he implicitly calls the reader to believe that such bedrock exists and is accessible to humans, a disputed position in the postmodernist world.By arguing that excavation towards a static and fixed creature is possible, Percy echoes the voice of Plato, who argues that humans should strive to know the essential forms lying beneath ephemeral existence. Plato and his mentor, Socrates, devised their theory of forms in adult part to reconcile a constantly changing physical origination with the criterion of permanence inherent in the Greek definition of knowledge, an main(prenominal) problem for philosophers of the time, and still today. In other words, the Greeks, believing that only lasting and unchanging entities could truly be known, needed a way to give knowledge in light of a constantly changing inwrought world. With the forms, Plato provided a solution to this problem, saying that beneath the physical world a human perceives there exists a dimension of forms, or essences, which persist passim time, independent of human perception but ... ...ans or dogfish. Like the physicist, they squirt benefit from recognizing elements of uncertainty inherent in the creature. In a way, the postmodern knower is much like the man in Percys essay, who takes the Grand canon bus tou r as an exercise in familiarity (513). He intakes the kindred interpreted information as those who are on the level at a lower place him, yet he recognizes its limitations and understands what he sees all the more because of this awareness.Works CitedHeisenberg, Werner. physical science and Philosophy The Revolution in Modern Science. New York Harper & Row, 1958.Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky, eds. ship canal of Reading. 3rd Ed. New York Bedford, 1995.Percy, Walker. The Loss of the Creature. Bartholomae and Petrosky. 423-436. Tompkins, Jane. Indians Textualism, Morality and the Problem of History. Bartholomae and Petrosky. 584-601.