Port of Ostia During a Tempest by Leonardo Carlo...

As I stood staring at the beautifully detailed oil-on-canvas painting, my mind began racing, conjuring up random stories behind all the people, the place, and the weather in this painting. This painting, titled Port of Ostia During a Tempest by Leonardo Carlo Coccorante, is nothing more than just a story portrayed on a canvas and its words, the oils, are scattered all over it, depicting a story about a populous port going through some horrible weather and the people experiencing it first-hand. The interactions between the people are perfectly portrayed and from each one a different story can be contrived—each sharing the subject of the brutal weather. The amount of detail in this scenic painting is overwhelming; thus, countless thoughts†¦show more content†¦The Coccorante painting is a straight-forward depiction of a scene, while on the other hand the Grooms painting is a more abstract painting of an unlikely scene. The Grooms painting shows a big collection of vegeta bles in the middle of a white canvas; out of the middle of this pile of vegetables Dali’s face pops out along with both his hands. The caricature of Dali is very cartoon-ish as he is shown with an over-sized mustache, unkempt and crazy hair, unsynchronized eyes, and pursed lips. But regardless of the more limited-in-scope perspective, the Groom’s painting provided as wide a universe of knowledge as the Coccarante piece. But what is the process involved in taking these observations and manipulating them into ideas and then critiques and then even further into analysis? A certain branch of philosophy, called epistemology, deals with knowledge—more specifically with the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge. Even though there is a large amount of philosophers that study within this branch of philosophy, the one that I automatically (almost subconsciously) relate to issues about the origin of knowledge is one Scottish philosopher by the name of David Hume. His basic belief is that knowledge is based on experience—shown by the quote: â€Å"It is therefore by experience only, that we can infer the existence of one object from that of another.† (Hume, Section VI). In his most