Böcker av Claire Smyser

Knowledge of reality is distinctly personal. Human beings encounter the world through five senses and find themselves confined to search for objective truths through this pinhole of their own subjective existence. Understanding ourselves in relation to the world has largely been an investigation of how to reconcile subjectivity to objectivity with any degree of certainty. How can we ever know our beliefs about reality to be true if we can only access the world through the bars of our proverbial sensory-experience cage? Cartesian doubt epitomizes the nature of this inquiry and no attempt has yet successfully come to a conclusion that can move us definitively beyond the knowledge of phenomenon perceived by the senses to real knowledge about objective reality. The epistemological skeptic is ever present and as a result many philosophies have chosen to abandon the attempt to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity and pursue subjectivity alone as a viable means of understanding oneself and reality.