Logic can very often restrain us from recognising the truth when it is presented to us. Allow me to begin by asking a question.
What is man? Who are we indeed? We struggle, we grapple, we strain, grasping for truth that is always there, but we feel is out of our reach. We make ourselves prisoners by our own embankment of logic, an instrument that we work too hard. An ox that we send to the field, but provide no water for, driving it on, past exhaustion; a tool that we abuse without having even a miniscule sentiment of remorse. Who are we to think that we can fit our world, our emotions, our lives, our beliefs into neatly packaged little boxes? What right do we have to fit anyone or anything else into our own little spheres we have somehow managed to contrive? Us and our logic! What pharisees we are, what fools we can be! We think we know best; we make our little plans and we analyse our little strategies until there’s nothing left but jargon. We argue our points away until our memory is lost as to what our question was is the first place. Who cares about answers! They won’t help! Answers are of no use. I just want my opinion out there and my voice to be heard. Well, a lot of help that is when everyone is screaming so hard that all becomes numb and meaningless and silent. Just watch then as our individual universes we’ve been able to construct explode into oblivion, leaving us broken, desolate, torn. We are then left begging for love, starving our spirits in desperation, frantically stripping away our own will. What simpletons we can be! Can we not see the truth that has all this time been staring us blatantly in the eyes?
Stop grasping, I ask you, be still! Stop bellowing and just be calm! The truth is simple. The truth is bare. We need only to shred those strategies, burn those boxes, and clear the table to see the truth we’ve left buried there, watching us, hoping we will acknowledge it.
make any sense to me and still doesn't. The only real logical reasoning is that the government
In the essay “There Is Such a Thing as Truth” Errol Morris argues that truth actually exists. At 10 years old Errol encountered his first “ bet you money I’m right” argument. It was at this point were he realized that although he used logic to his argument about which city is further west: Reno, Nevada, or Los Angeles, his neighborhood friend thought otherwise. Errol Morris states, “There is such a thing as truth, but we often have a vested interest in ignoring it or outright denying it.” Not only did he go by this, he decided to test it with an innocent man who was sentenced to die. Errol fought for the process of finding the truth; he fought to find the answer to the question, “Did he do it?” The only way he knew to find this was through
It is up to us to preserve the countless lives that could be lost if one man lost his temper, to stop the development of military grade weapons, and instead nurture ideas that can heal, ideas that can help the world evolve. We don’t need weapons. We don’t need bloodshed. We don’t need useless fighting or brutal violence. We don’t need to be like Batman and offer ultimatum. What we need is to heal together, to evolve together. What we need is
Veteran defense analyst and AEI resident fellow Thomas Donnelly wants to know the answers to the questions behind Operation: Iraqi Freedom. He states that “More than a year after President George W. Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in the invasion of Iraq, a fuller victory is yet to be won. This is in part, because a fuller understanding of the war itself remains elusive.” This elusiveness is the biggest mystery of the war and because of it four key observations have emerged. Also these observations emerge after an examination of the conventional invasion of Iraq, the resulting counterinsurgency campaign and their broader significance for the global war on terrorism.
... The fact is that the trend of violence is only growing stronger, and we are becoming blind to the injustices committed by our government in the name of freedom. So as we focus on Iraq and our adversaries become more ambiguous and indiscriminate, we must ask ourselves, "Who is the real enemy?"
The dictionary term and understanding for the word ‘logic’ is “of sound thinking and proof by reasoning” (Merriam-Webster, 2009). Logic is the examination of the methods and doctrine used to determine ‘correct’ from ‘incorrect’ and is used in the structure of an argument. Allied to critical thinking, logic has a place and holds a relationship that reflects the thought process yet; critical thinking has a more diverse standard of questioning relative to developing both intellectual and emotional queries that can better evaluate reason.
Although Hobbes has created a logical response to the Fool, I have some objections to his argument. According to Hobbes, every man has the right to self-preservation and are permitted to do whatever it takes to hold that right. This also means that the world’s worst criminal could reasonably refuse punishment. That person could escape imprisonment, lie under oath while in court, or commit theft and he or she could argue that it was all necessary for their self-preservation. Strictly speaking, this means anything one does could be deemed as necessary for his or her self-preservation and it could never be considered unjust or unreasonable. It would be difficult to determine what actions can be properly defined as unjust because everything by
Throughout the years many eyebrow-raising statements have been brought up concerning the war, which quickly begins to make any war effort basis appear shallow and weak. Peter Baker, a former White House correspondent, wrote a book in which an anonymous senior Bush administration official is quoted saying, “The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick.” In addition, General John Abizaid, a former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq for 2007 said, “Of course it's about oil; we can't really deny that," in and interview with CNN (Juhasz 1). With such startling statements over the years...
In the past few centuries there have been a handful of books written that offer up ideas about humanity that are so completely new to a reader but are so completely convincing that they can force a reader to take a step back and assess all that they know to be true about their life and their purpose. Daniel Quinn has succeeded in creating such a book in Ishmael, a collection of new ideas about man, his evolution, and the “destiny” that keeps him captive.
In viewing 12 Angry Men, we see face to face exactly what man really is capable of being. We see different views, different opinions of men such as altruism, egoism, good and evil. It is no doubt that human beings possess either one or any of these characteristics, which make them unique. It is safe to say that our actions, beliefs, and choices separate us from animals and non-livings. The 20th century English philosopher, Martin Hollis, once said, “Free will – the ability to make decisions about how to act – is what distinguishes people from non-human animals and machines 1”. He went to describe human beings as “self conscious, rational, creative. We can fall in love, write sonnets or plan for tomorrow. We are capable of faith, hope and charity, and for that matter, of envy, hated and malice. We know truth from error, right from wrong 2.” Human nature by definition is “Characteristics or qualities that make human beings different from anything else”. With this said, the topic of human nature has been around for a very long time, it is a complex subject with no right or wrong answer. An American rabbi, Samuel Umen, gave examples of contradictions of human nature in his book, Images of Man. “He is compassionate, generous, loving and forgiving, but also cruel, vengeful, selfish and vindictive 3”. Existentialism by definition is, “The belief that existence comes before essence, that is, that who you are is only determined by you yourself, and not merely an accident of birth”. A French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, is the most famous and influential 20th - century existentialist. He summed up human nature as “existence precedes essence”. In his book, Existentialism and Human Emotions, he explained what he meant by this. “It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will be something, and he himself will have made what he will be 4”. After watching 12 Angry Men, the prominent view on human nature that is best portrayed in the movie is that people are free to be whatever they want because as Sartre said, “people create themselves every moment of everyday according to the choices they make 5”.
The human is the only animal that has questioned its own existence and purpose. Throughout centuries, different philosophers have pondered over this issue, with each question asked slowly peeling off the layers obscuring the answer. As psychology has come along, as well as a better preservation of historical records, it has become clear what human nature is like. As Sigmund Freud once said, “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed”. As a famous psychologist and one who spent his days peering into the abyss of the human soul, he had seen a variety of people and saw the evil within them. Even before
Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology and psychology are concerned with it...….If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences. (Carnap 57)
What exactly is truth? What is true? These questions are two completely different questions. In order to answer what is true, you must first determine what truth actually is. If we look in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, we see the definition that says “The things that are true”. This is not what we are looking for in a definition of this word, but really there is no defining line between what is true, and what is not.
In the area of mathematics, it has been stated that Aristotle “is the real father of logic” (Thompson, 1975, p. 7) and although it may be a minor exaggeration, it is not far off the truth. Aristotle’s ideas on philosophy and logic were great advancers in Western culture, and are still being discussed and taught today. The ancient Greeks focused their mathematics on many areas, but one main question continuously asked by the Greeks was “what are good arguments?” (Marke & Mycielski, 2001, pg. 449). This question brought about the study of logic. Aristotle’s philosophy on the importance of logic was unique for his time as he believed that logic had to be considered in all disciplines, and that the aim of logic was to provide a system that allowed one to “investigate, classify, and evaluate good and bad forms of reasoning” (Groarke). Aristotle studied and contributed to various disciplines including philosophy, science, and astronomy, but his greatest influence was in the study of mathematical logic and more specifically, the introduction of syllogism. As Ulrich (1953) states, “any discussion of syllogism necessarily involves logic as it is the field that the syllogism plays a very important role” (p. 311). Aristotle’s ideas surrounding logic and syllogism are still being used in mathematics today, and over the course of history they have influenced many mathematicians’ areas of study.
After, one semester trying to understand what is logic about and how it works, finally, I understood that Logic is always present in our life.