Truth

St. Thomas Aquinas

states that truth is "the conformity of the mind to the object"; that is, if we accept the outward
information that our senses are transmitting to our intellect, and our intellect accepts these as
they are, and doesn't deny them or distort them, through self-interest or other motives.

Plato
Plato believed that truth was something that only the wise could see (Plato also believed that
wisdom was knowledge and talent that only belonged to certain people as a birthright) and that
it was the duty of the wise to help the others see the truth. In Plato's Allegory of the cave the
wise man was the one who managed to escape the cave and see the wonders of the world. This
wise man realizes that he must share this discovery with the other people in the cave who are
skeptical to believe him. Truth for Plato was essentially knowledge and discovery.

A modern example of this would be of a psychologist or therapist. The therapist tries to help
their client to understand themselves better, but the client is often times resistant to believe
everything that the therapist tells him because he (the client) cannot accept that there is
another way to live his life.

Justice
Plato
doing good to your friends if they are good and doing harm to your enemies if they are bad
Justice, therefore, is a relation between individuals depending on social and political
organization. It is to be studied as part of the structure of the community than as a quality of
personal conduct. If one can visualize a just state, it is also easy to picture a just individual.

Thasymachus
what is the interest of the stronger party, according to Thrasymachus it is right to show
obedience to the ruling power whatever the condition is.

Aristotle
Justice is equality, but only for equals; and justice is inequality, but only for those who are
unequal.
Aristotle claims that justice can mean either lawfulness or fairness, since injustice is
lawlessness and unfairness. In his view, laws encourage people to behave virtuously so, the just
person, who by definition is lawful, will necessarily be virtuous. He says that virtue differs from
justice because it deals with ones moral state, while justice deals with ones relations with
others. According to Aristotle, justice must be distributed proportionately. For instance, a
shoemaker and a farmer cannot exchange one shoe for one harvest, since shoes and harvests
are not of equal value (Aristotle, book 5, part 5). Aristotles equation of justice with lawfulness
can create a problem since laws can be unjust too. However, Aristotle refutes this idea again by
separating political justice from domestic justice.
According to Aristotle, although political justice and domestic justice are related, they are
also distinct. Political justice is about laws since justice exists only between men whose mutual
relations are governed by law (Aristotle, book 5, part 6). So, political justice is governed by the
rule of law, while domestic justice relies more on respect.

Freedom
Jean-Paul Sartre
"Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence." This means that what we do, how
we act in our life, determines our apparent "qualities." It is not that someone tells the truth
because she is honest, but rather she defines herself as honest by telling the truth again and
again.
I am a professor in a way different than the way I am six feet tall, or the way a table is a table.
The table simply is; I exist by defining myself in the world at each moment.
FREEDOM is the central and unique potentiality which constitutes us as human. Sartre rejects
determinism, saying that it is our choice how we respond to determining tendencies.

Kant
WILL is a kind of causality belonging to living beings so far as they are rational. Freedom would
then be the property this causality has of being able to work independently of determination by
alien causes; just as natural necessity is a property characterizing the causality of all non-
rational beings the property of being determined to activity by the influence of alien causes.
Love
Thomas Hobbes
Love is a persons idea about his/her needs in other person what you are attracted to

Aristotle
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies

Rene Descartes
A person has two passions for love and abhorrence. A big disposition to excessiveness has just
a love, because it is more ardent and stronger
Equality
Socrates
Socrates go further saying "Did we not see equalities of material things, such as pieces of wood
and stones, and gather from them the idea of an equality which is different from them?" and he
also said "Do not the same pieces of wood or stone appear at one time equal, and at another
time unequal?"

Engel
In treating the notion of equality, then, Engels as well as Marx holds fundamentally to two ideas:
first, that equality is properly speaking only a political notion, and even a specifically bourgeois
political notion; and second, that the real meaning of the proletarian demand for equality, to the
extent that it has a meaning, is the demand for the abolition of classes and that this demand
is a better developed and more precise expression of proletarian aspirations.

Marx
Equality as a political concept Bourgeois equality before the law. The Marxian idea that equality
is a political notion is itself a complex idea as complex as Marxs understanding of the political
itself. The most basic bourgeois equality, as Marx understands it, is a form of procedural
equality6 , namely, equality before the law: the legal system must not accord some estates
more privileges than others

Kant
Kant, for instance, the identification of equality with independence of being bound by others to
more than one can in turn bind them
Democracy
Plato
Democracy comes into being as degenerating oligarchy. Oligarchs are rich, fat, and lazy.
"Democracy comes about when the poor are victorious, killing some of their opponents and
expelling others, and giving the rest an equal share in ruling under the constitution, and for the
most part assigning people to positions of rule by lot." (Rep., 557a-b)
 Democracy is characterized by great freedom in every sense, where a person can do anything
he wishes or wills to do. It is the form of government in which one finds people of all varieties.

Peace
peace has been considered to be a high if not one of the highest ends of political action, but
anyone looking to account for what we mean by peace faces the fact that we seem to
understand peace not on its own terms but only in relation to its opposite, war.

Cicero
The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference
between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquility, servitude is the worst of all evils,
to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.
Einstein
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. You cannot subjugate
a nation forcibly unless you wipe out every man, woman, and child. Unless you wish to use such
drastic measures, you must find a way of settling your disputes without resort to arms.

Pope John Paul II

There is no true peace without fairness, truth, justice and solidarity