Research Paper on:
Man Philosophically Defined

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
unrest? Is man merely a combination of stimulus and response, is he merely a spiritual being inhabiting a corporeal body? Is mankind a combination of both? To what end does  reason and intuition serve man? All these questions and more are not new to the human condition, in fact many of the worlds greatest classical thinkers have debated the absolute  definition of man. The problem is, almost none of them agree on what that definition is. Sometimes considered the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes strove to sort out what  was real and what was unsubstantiated common thought. But he went beyond the proving of this with his quest to understand that mechinism by which mankind utilized the senses in  determining reason. Therefore, he was fascinated with reality, what is and what is not. The act of reasoning, which can be defined  as inferring something, or drawing a conclusion about something based on given premises can be said to be one of the two functions of reasoning capacity in the human being.  The second function can be said to be literal. In other words, what is inferred in immediately testable and will hold true for every person. For example, 3+4 is always  going to equal seven. He states in his Mediations on First Philosophy: "SEVERAL years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from  my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity  of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired