Question

What is the source of the ideas we have about ideals that are not encountered in our physical world (such as beauty, justice, goodness)?

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) Locke and Hume’s empiricism approach led them to theorise that all information within the human mind comes from one of the senses. This is an epistemological theory or a theory of how we have information.

Plato believed that knowledge came from some unchanging principle that one retains. Descartes similarly believed that knowledge is based on an indubitable principal or belief.

Locke and Hume are correct in saying that all knowledge is absorbed through the senses. However, what Plato and Descartes say is that the knowledge we end up retaining is information that is related to our principals or beliefs.

The ideals one generally retains depends on introspect of the experiences of daily life. The quality of introspection depends on Emotional Intelligence or EQ. EQ measures one’s ability to establish “quality” relationships and emotional stability. This includes the relationship an individual establishes with oneself.

EQ can help an individual to read people, approach different relationships and people with the right emotional tools and undertake a just and compassionate approach towards dealing with relationships. Including the relationship, an individual builds with oneself. Based on this “self-relationship” and applying the theory of epistemology, the information we absorb is churned through introspecting and retained based on the principals we begin to inculcate within ourselves.