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Major of Philosophy 1.

IDEALISM In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideasespecially beliefs and valuesshape society.[1] As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit.[2] Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind. The earliest extant arguments that the world of experience is grounded in the mental derive from India and Greece. The Hindu idealists in India and the Greek Neoplatonistsgave pane theistic arguments for an all-pervading consciousness as the ground or true nature of reality.[3] In contrast, the Yogcra school, which arose within Mahayana Buddhism in India in the 4th century CE,[4] based its "mind-only" idealism to a greater extent on phenomenological analyses of personal experience. This turn toward the subjective anticipated empiricists such as George Berkeley, who revived idealism in 18th-century Europe by employing skeptical arguments against materialism. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, German idealists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Schopenhauer dominated 19th-century philosophy. This tradition, which emphasized the mental or "ideal" character of all phenomena, birthed idealistic and subjectivist schools ranging from British idealism to phenomenalism to existentialism. The historical influence of this branch of idealism remains central even to the schools that rejected its metaphysical assumptions, such as pragmatism and positivism.

2. Naturalism Is "the idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world; (occas.) the idea or belief that nothing exists beyond the natural world."[1] Adherents of naturalism (i.e., naturalists) assert that natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe, that the changinguniverse at every stage is a product of these laws.[2] "Naturalism can intuitively be separated into a [metaphysical] and a methodological component."[3] Metaphysical here refers to the philosophical study of the nature of reality. Philosopher Paul Kurtz argues that nature is best accounted for by reference to materialprinciples. These principles include mass, energy, and other physical and chemical properties accepted by the scientific community. Further, this sense of naturalism holds that spirits, deities, and ghosts are not real and that there is no "purpose" in nature. Such an absolute belief in naturalism is commonly referred to as metaphysical naturalism.[4] In contrast, assuming naturalism in working methods, without necessarily considering naturalism as an absolute truth with philosophical entailments, is called methodological naturalism.[5] The subject matter here is a philosophy of acquiring knowledge.

With the exception of pantheistswho believe that Nature and God are one and the same thingtheists challenge the idea that nature is all there is. They believe in one or more gods who created nature. Natural laws have a place in their theology; they describe the effects of so-called secondary causes, i.e., the causes found in the natural world. But natural laws do not define nor limit deities as primary causes. In the 20th century, W.V. Quine, George Santayana, and other philosophers argued that the success of naturalism in science meant that scientific methods should also be used in philosophy. Science and philosophy are said to form a continuum, according to this view.

3. Pragmatism Is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around 1870. [1] Pragmatism is a rejection of the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Instead, pragmatists develop their philosophy around the idea that the function of thought is as an instrument or tool for prediction, action, and problem solving. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topicssuch as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and scienceare all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes rather than in terms of representative accuracy. A few of the various but interrelated positions often characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include:

Epistemology (Justification): a coherentist theory of justification that rejects the claim that all knowledge and justified belief rest ultimately on a foundation of no inferential knowledge or justified belief. Coherentists hold that justification is solely a function of some relationship between beliefs, none of which are privileged beliefs in the way maintained by foundation lists theories of justification. Epistemology (Truth): a deflationary or pragmatist theory of truth; the former is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a property called truth to such a statement while the latter is the epistemological claim that assertions that predicate truth of a statement attribute the property of useful-to-believe to such a statement. Metaphysics: a pluralist view that there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the world and its content. Philosophy of Science: an instrumentalist and scientific anti-realist view that a scientific concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality. Philosophy of Language: an anti-representation list view that rejects analyzing the semantic meaning of propositions, mental states, and statements in terms of a correspondence or representational relationship and instead analyzes semantic meaning in terms of notions

like dispositions to action, inferential relationships, and/or functional roles (e.g. behaviorism and inferentialism). Not to be confused with pragmatics, a sub-field of linguistics with no relation to philosophical pragmatism.

Additionally, forms of empiricism, fallibilism, verifications, and a Quineian naturalist metaphilosophy are all commonly elements of pragmatist philosophies. Many pragmatists are epistemological relativists and see this to be an important facet of their pragmatism (e.g. Richard Rorty), but this is controversial and other pragmatists argue such relativism to be seriously misguided (e.g. Hilary Putnam, Susan Haack).

4. Supernaturalism 5. Humanism Is a group of philosophies and ethical perspectives which emphasize the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers individual thought and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). The term humanism can be ambiguously diverse, and there has been a persistent confusion between several related uses of the term because different intellectual movements have identified with it over time.[1] In philosophy and social science, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of a "human nature" (contrasted with anti-humanism). In modern times, many humanist movements have become strongly aligned with secularism, with the term Humanism often used as a byword for non-theistic beliefs about ideas such as meaning and purpose; however, many early humanists, such as Ulrich von Hutten, a strong supporter of Martin Luther and the Reformation, were religious. Before the word was associated with secularism, German historian and philologist Georg Voigt used humanism in 1856 to describe the movement that flourished in the Italian Renaissance to revive classical learning; this definition won wide acceptance.[2] During the Renaissance period in Western Europe, humanist movements attempted to demonstrate the benefit of gaining learning from classical, pre-Christian sources in and of themselves, or for secular ends such as political science and rhetoric. The word "humanist" derives from the 15thcentury Italian term umanista describing a teacher or scholar of classical Greek and Latin literature and the ethical philosophy behind it, including the approach to the humanities.[3][4] During the French Revolution, and soon after in Germany (by the Left Hegelians), humanism began to refer to philosophies and morality centered on human kind, without attention to any notions of the divine. Religious humanism developed as more liberal religious organizations evolved in more humanistic directions. Religious humanism integrates humanist ethical philosophy with the rituals and beliefs of some religions, although religious humanism still centers on human needs, interests, and abilities.[5] As the ethical movement began using the word in the 1930s, the term "humanism" became increasingly associated with philosophical naturalism, and with secularism and the secularization of society. The first Humanist Manifesto, formalized at the University of Chicago in 1933,[6] identified humanism as an ideology that espouses reason, ethics, and justice, while

specifically rejecting supernatural and traditional religious ideas as a basis of morality and decision-making. While a distinction has often been drawn between secular and religious humanism, the International Humanist and Ethical Union and other organizations prefer to describe their life stance as 'Humanism', capitalized and without qualification.

6. Realism Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, perceptions, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Realism may be spoken of with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, and thought. Realism can also be promoted in an unqualified sense, in which case it asserts the mind-independent existence of a visible world, as opposed to skepticism and solipsism. Philosophers who profess realism state that truth consists in the mind's correspondence to reality.[1] Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now is only an approximation of reality and that every new observation brings us closer to understanding reality.[2] In its Kantian sense, realism is contrasted with idealism. In a contemporary sense, realism is contrasted with anti-realism, primarily in the philosophy of science. 7. Existentialism Existentialism is a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences,[1][2][3] shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subjectnot merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.[4] In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.[5] Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.[6][7] Sren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher,[1][8][9] though he did not use the term existentialism.[10] He proposed that each individualnot society or religionis solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely ("authentically").[11][12] Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II, and strongly influenced many disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology. 8. Constructivism Constructivism, a perspective in education, is based on experimental learning through real life experience to construct and conditionalize knowledge. It is problem based, adaptive learning, that challenges faulty schema, integrates new knowledge with existing knowledge, and allows for creation of original work or innovative procedures. The types of learners are self-

directed, creative, innovative, drawing upon visual/spatial, musical/rhythmic, bodily kinesthetic, verbal/linguistic, logical/mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic intelligences. The purpose in education is to become creative and innovative through analysis, conceptualizations, and synthesis of prior experience to create new knowledge. The educators role is to mentor the learner during heuristic problem solving of ill-defined problems by enabling quested learning. The learning goal is the highest order of learning: heuristic problem solving, metacognitive knowledge, creativity, and originality that may modify existing knowledge and allow for creation of new knowledge. Exemplars of constructivist theory may be found in the works of John Dewey, 1926, [1] 1933/1998, [2]; Maria Montessori, 1946, [3]; and David Kolb, 1975, [4] 1976, [5] 1984. [6] [7] Constructivism influences Instructional theory by encouraging discovery, hands-on, experiential, collaborative, project-based, and task-based learning. Constructivist epistemology, as a branch of the philosophy of science, offers an explanation of how human beings construct knowledge from information generated by previous experiences. It has roots in cognitive psychology and biology and is an approach to education that lays emphasis on the ways knowledge is created while exploring the world. Ernst von Glasersfeld describes constructivism as a theory of knowledge with roots in philosophy, psychology, and cybernetics.[8] Radical Constructivism and Social Constructivism Radical constructivists and social constructivists assume that people cannot directly perceive the objective reality but that they rather construct their view of the world based on knowledge they already possess. Radical constructivists claim that people develop their individual view of the world. Social constructivists, however, state that people only attain knowledge of their surroundings by dealing with others, that is, in social discourse. For both schools of constructivism, the criterion of viability plays the decisive role, which means that it is not 'truth as such' that matters, but usefulness (Douillet 15). Constructivism in Teaching Learners do not have direct access to reality because the brain only processes electronic signals. Reality is constructed on the basis of these signals. Constructivists have abandoned the concept that knowledge is a kind of substance which can be transferred from the head of the teacher to the head of the learner. Learning is regarded as a creative, inventive act performed by the individual. If every learner has his/her own way of processing learning material, there have to exist 'as many individual and unpredictable ways of learning as there are learners' (Thissen 8). Ernst von Glasersfeld demands that each learner should be treated as an intelligent, independently thinking individual (Prksen 65).

Description of a Constructivistic Classroom Situation In a class, which is run according to constructivistic guidelines, the teacher does not act as a pure knowledge transmitter who only accepts ONE true answer to his/her problem but as a coach or facilitator offering thought provoking suggestions for solving the tasks given. Students are expected to use their own experiences to solve a problem as a group using different ways and methods. In constructivism, there is not a 'one and only true way' to solve a task. The solution of a problem rather

depends upon individual experiences and thoughts. As already mentioned above, most of the time students work together in groups, exchange their suggestions and thoughts in discussions to reach one or more solutions. The teacher judges and evaluates the skills and deficiencies of each individual student, for example, in the course of a discussion. Teachers are more flexible because they cannot expect only one correct answer to their questions.

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