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Reinalde Silvestre was forced to go into the army as a doctor, and he staged as a plastic surgeon in Miami Beach, Florida. When he first came to the United States he started to treat his patients in his home. He later then opened Ocean Health Center as a surgical office.…
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French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once said, “We are our choices.” Human beings make the choices that determine their fate and the person they become. Wes Moore, the author of The Other Wes Moore, explores this concept in his novel. Wes shows how their environment, education and societal expectations led them to the decisions that changed their lives.…
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Paul Sartre’s atheistic existentialism divides the world into 2 groups, authentic and inauthentic. Authentic people are distinguished by their deliberate choices to use their freedom to find purpose and meaning in their existence, while inauthentic people are characterized by passivity. John Gardner disagrees with moral relativism evidenced in Sartre’s existentialism and chooses to believe in moral absolutes. He portrays Grendel in his book Grendel as a condemnation of the moral relativism expressed by Jean Paul Sartre’s ideas of atheistic existentialism. Through Grendel 's experiences with contrasting religions and his philosophical mentors, Grendel chooses to embody Sartre’s idea of authenticity by terrorizing the people around him.…
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Existentialism greatly supports free will, the idea that we are responsible in ourselves for our moral behaviour and it is our choices and actions that give us purpose. “It is only in our decisions that we are important.” Jean-Paul Sartre was a great believer in this: that everything depends on the individual and the meaning he gives to his life. He argued that all physical objects have an essence that…
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1F. The idea of existence preceding essence of Sartre is the basic principle of existentialism. This means that a personality is not built over a previously designed model or a precise purpose,…
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Is it true that the society we live in, we have the right to make and produce our own decisions and its purely down to each individual to any actions they produce? In this essay I will explore if we have the right to be responsible for any action we take. Some may believe its down to God and his decisions, obviously, this cannot be proved, however surely each human have the right to be responsible for any actions. This question comes down to; do we have free will or is it determinism?…
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Sartre believes that in order for anything to have a function, its existence must come prior. For example, the function of a knife, which is to stab and cut, did not come before the existence of the knife. The saying “existence precedes essence” is Sartre’s answer for the objection saying that Existentialism is pessimism. Sartre says no, existence is not pessimistic but instead it is optimistic. An individual does have action and choice to how they want to live their life and that there can be meaning. Existence can be described as biological, while essence can be known as a social form that an individual picks up through interaction. Even though an individual cannot choose who they are biological…
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According to A.J. Ayer, the problem of free will arises from the apparent incompatibility of two common assumptions about human action : excepting certain rare and easily identifiable cases, human action is free in the sense required for holding agents responsible for their actions, and that like all events, human actions are governed by deterministic causal laws. If human actions are governed by such laws, it would seem that we are never free to act otherwise than we do and hence that we can never be held responsible for what we do. Much of the free will debate has proceeded with determinists on one side affirming and denying and those Ayer calls “moralists” doing exactly the opposite in an attempt to preserve the reality or legitimacy of moral responsibility. Ayer believes that this way of proceeding is hopeless for the moralists because so long as we understand the freedom required for moral responsibility as freedom from causal determination, then will be false whether it is true or not. Ayer argues that the freedom required for moral responsibility should not be construed as freedom from causal determination, but rather as freedom from compulsion or constraint. This kind of freedom, he argues, is compatible with the principle that all events are causally determined. The moralist agrees with the determinist that if our actions are determined by causal laws, then we are not free in the sense required by moral responsibility. So, if he is to maintain that we are free and responsible, he must deny Determinism. But, Ayer would demand, the denial of Determinism can be of no help to the moralist. If our actions are not under the purview of causal laws, then to that extent, they are random and…
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Sartre says Freedom of choice regardless of experiences. You are a free creature you may choose otherwise. “Existence Precedes Essence”…
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Have you ever wondered if the decision that you have just made was the best possible decision for you to make? An agent 's relationship between responsibility and his decisions in life are affected by the alternative choices that were not taken as well as the choices that were made. Thomas Nagel believes that an agent 's autonomy is always being threatened by the possibility of a viewpoint that is more objective than his own. His view on responsibility is such that in order to place responsibility on an agent, sufficient reflection about alternative choices must be considered. On the other hand, Carl Ginet claims that free will cannot be caused (free will is not determined), but rather that the will is free. He claims that responsibility is…
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As we go through life we encounter various situations that we have to deal with, and our emotions help us deal with these situations. For example, if we find a food looks disgusting, we will not eat it, and for good reason, disgust is a mechanism that stops us getting ill, as if some food appears disgusting to us, then it is probably because it is putrid or rotten, and would actually make us ill. The emotion of disgust controls our actions and a situation has been dealt with, we experience emotions to help ourselves deal with life, but we can control these emotions. Our minds alter their perception of things to better cope with a situation or event. However, Sartre argues that our emotions transform the world. Our consciousnesses will be altered by our emotions under certain situations. One example that Sartre uses is a bunch of grapes. There are some grapes that I would like to harvest, but they are out of reach. So I walk away and shrug my shoulders and tell myself that the grapes looked too green anyway, and they were sour. I tell myself this in order to make myself feel better about not being able to reach the grapes. I project onto the…
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I would lean more towards the compatibilist view stating, unless I am the cause of my actions I am not responsible for them. As compatibilist holds that free will and determinism are compatible, we can properly understand what it means for our actions to be free so we see that a free action is doing what one wants. Believing in compatibilism doesn't mean the determinist view is false, but if it is true, we can still have free will. I believe that we make decisions based on our own desires and beliefs. It is said that compatibilists attempt to revise and weaken the commonsense notion of free will. Thomas Hobbes was the first person to articulate a compatibilist position believing that although the person is free to act on their motive, the motive is determined. In other words, he says “Everything we choose to do is strictly determined by the need to relieve the physical pressures of our bodies. Humans…
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Most of everyone wants the freedom to decide how to live our own lives, but independence requires us to take personal responsibility for our actions. This statement shows just how the world works, although most people do not own up to their own actions. There is always people that ruin, or destroy our freedoms. Some people will even be selfish and blame their mistakes on other people just so they won't have to face the punishments. These actions are what make our world so unequal.…
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What does personal responsibility mean? To me personal responsibility means that I am responsible for what I choose in life. I have to hold myself accountable and cannot blame others for the choices I make. Jake Lawson wrote on the Livestrong.com website, “Accepting personal responsibility includes but is not limited to: acknowledging that you are solely responsible for the choices in your life and accepting that you are responsible for what you choose to feel or think” (Lawson, 2011). That statement is very profound and powerful. It is easy to place the blame on others but all that really does is hold us back from finding our true potential. We cannot use scapegoats to hide the fact that we possibly make bad decisions in life. Whichever direction my life heads, I am the captain of this ship and I cannot let others control what I do. I have control over my emotional responses to outside interference and must live with the consequences of my actions. In the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (Issue 4), 497-515, Dana Klein wrote ‘people are responsible when they act with the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons, or a good thing for good reasons.’(Klein, pg. 497) What exactly does that mean? It means that if we choose not to do the right thing or make bad decisions, they have not shown personal responsibility. I have to be willing to improve myself professionally, academically and personally in life. I can never be complacent or else I will never accomplish more and…
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Cited: Desan, Wilfrid. "Jean-Paul Sartre (French Philosopher and Author)." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2014. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.…
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