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

Reality, the Mind, and God The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Great Britain are marked by a general and persistent concern about threats to orthodoxy in religion. Many doctrines and views were seen as threatening: theories about 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 major 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 material 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 extreme view, idealism, 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 contains no material substance. All matter is comprised of a collection of ideas and the one who is accepting and interpreting those ideas. Beyond these two extreme viewpoints is one of the most popular beliefs concerning reality, especially in Western culture. The belief of dualism denotes that reality is a uniform 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 Newton’s influence on literary expression as well as philosophical reasoning can be easily seen when viewing the works of such famous writers as John Locke or Isaac Watts. Works Cited Bennett, Jonathan. Locke, Berkeley 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. Newton’s 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. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1983.