A Level Philosophy

We encounter the world through our senses; but does what we sense delineate what we think? Isn’t it possible to conceive some things that I could never confront via sensation? We experience the world as something more or less understood, but does recognising what we see, taste, touch, hear or smell involve nothing more than submitting ourselves to stimuli?

How much do we contribute to the way the world appears to us in experience? How could mere conglomerates of sensation yield the principles we use to judge anything? Perhaps these guiding principles are not derived from, but known independently of, experience. If these principles are grasped a priori, then do they track the way the world is or just articulate the way the world appears to me?

Reflecting on the nature of a supreme being has generated a constellation of divine attributes. Can we make sense of them? The idea that a maximally perfect being exists necessarily is expressed in the distinctive ontological argument for the existence of God. Is the argument successful and how should we treat it? But is the idea of God really an idea that reaches out to something beyond, and distinct from, the familiar? Perhaps ‘God’ is merely the product of mundane social and psychological processes.