Classical Modern Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction

Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy

by Jeffrey Tlumak

Classical Modern Philosophy introduces students to the key philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and explores their most important works. Jeffrey Tlumak takes the reader on a chronological journey from Descartes to Kant, tracing the themes that run through the period and their interrelations. The main texts covered are:

* Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy
* Spinoza's Ethics
* Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding
* Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology
* Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
* Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
* Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Classical Modern Philosophy is the ideal textbook to accompany a course in the history of modern philosophy, but each chapter can also be studied alone as an introduction to the featured philosopher or work. Jeffrey Tlumak outlines and assesses prominent interpretations of the texts, and surveys the legacy of each great thinker.

Genres: Philosophy

382 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 2006

Reviews

[Moderated · Rating 5 out of 5]

Descartes’ philosophy embodies the central, modern idea that each person can discover which beliefs are true, and what actions are right, without imposition of outside authority.

If you look at a seventeenth-century dictionary, “meditation” is generically defined as earnest, attentive study of any topic, and Descartes does stress that attentive reflection is required of all who take his project seriously

the devout Catholic mathematician Blaise Pascal, said in his Pensées 77, “I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy, he would have been quite willing to dispense with God but he could not help granting him a flick of the forefinger to start the world in motion. Beyond this, he has no need for God.”

Practical matters are context-dependent, and Descartes acknowledges that we must often act even when we are uncertain. For example, if we were to eat only when we were absolutely certain that a food is not poison, then we would die from starvation. Our everyday notion of knowledge is influenced by the constraints of social practice, and the demands of action and community. We are implicitly aware of these constraints, so that we are ordinarily satisfied with less than full knowledge.6 But if we aim for indisputable truth, we must constantly and fully criticize not only what we believe to be false, but also our uncertain beliefs, and even the things we strongly believe to be true.

"The Cogito has caused a major philosophical stir. Many scholars have applauded Descartes’ innovative notion that the subjective self is the necessary starting point for all sound philosophy. But many others have criticized this innovation, suggesting that this emphasis on the subjective self necessarily denies or contradicts the existence of objective truth. Other critics note that if you aim to show that you indubitably exist, you’re cheating if you start by saying that you are thinking, thus assuming what you set out to prove. Relatedly, some say we are just playing with the structure of language when we move from the verb “thinking” to a phrase that says “a subject doing the thinking.” The eighteenth-century German satirist and philosopher, Georg Lichtenberg, seems to have been the first to level such a criticism at Descartes. He conceived philosophy as the frustrating effort to correct linguistic usage while inescapably using the very language being critiqued, and in this case urged that we should say, “There is thinking,” just as we would say, “There is lightning,” since as soon as we say “I think,” it seems necessary to postulate an “ego.” The nineteenth-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, also made this sort of objection, and the twentieth-century British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, made a similar point:
The word ‘I’ is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premise in the form ‘there are thoughts.’ The word ‘I’ is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum. When he goes on to say ‘I am a thing which thinks,’ he is already using uncritically the apparatus of categories handed down by scholasticism. He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker, nor is there reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense."

"Descartes says that the object itself – the object’s essence – can be known only by a judgment of the intellect. Indeed, the very concept of sameness through change – a concept that applies to objects like the wax – cannot be derived from our ever-fluctuating experience; somehow it is supplied by the mind."

"In the Third Meditation, Descartes sought to go beyond his own consciousness and to establish genuine knowledge of a wider world. He examined his thoughts from different angles to see what other knowledge might be based on them. He noticed that some thoughts are like mental images that represent things in a certain way; he called these thoughts ideas – a new way of using the term that has now become commonplace."

Descartes said it is a fundamental misconception to think of a human being as being identical with his or her body. Rather, a human being is a compound of a body (which is spatially extended) and a mind (which has no extension in space). The mind is the thinking “I” or “self” first discovered in the Cogito; it can exist independently of any body, including the brain. The brain weighs about three pounds, while the mind is weightless. Since the mind is a completely different kind of thing from the body, one crucial condition for personal survival of bodily death is met. In a living human being, however, the mind and body causally interact through the nervous system. The body affects the mind, for example, when a wound causes pain; the mind affects the body when it chooses to initiate a bodily movement.

Baruch Spinoza’s (1632–1677) masterwork is Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order. His title alerts us to the guiding ideas of our discussion. Spinoza aims to discover and lead the good human life, indeed the way to blessedness. Success requires, or is at least best achieved by, use of the deductive, axiomatic method of mathematics. How to live must be impartially deduced or explained as a necessary consequence of one’s status as a finite aspect of Nature, conceived as a completely intelligible, unique, infinite and self-contained causal system. We must understand our position in Nature and the true causes of our imperfections to free ourselves from them.

It is not incidental that Spinoza begins the Ethics with a purportedly undeniable metaphysics, from which he aims strictly to derive a correct model of human nature, including a theory of knowledge (which explains how to move from inadequate imaginative cognition, to rational scientific knowledge, to rational intuitive knowledge) and a theory of the emotions, which he thinks leads inexorably to an ethics or way of life (optimally, blessedness, an abiding, self-sufficient well-being). Contrast this with Descartes, for whom it was vital to begin with epistemology, thence to derive a metaphysics.

I will outline the argument of Part I of the Ethics. Its main conclusions are that nothing exists except the one substance – the self-contained, selfsustaining, and self-explanatory system which constitutes the world; that this system properly may be understood in different ways, as God or Nature, as mind or matter, as creator or created; that this system can be known clearly and adequately through what Spinoza calls its attributes, but only confusedly and partially through what he calls its finite modes; and that to understand it in its totality, under the aspect of eternity, is to recognize that everything exists by necessity, so that nothing could be other than it is.

[Campbell Rider · Rating 3 out of 5]

While basically a useful introduction, this book desperately needs a revised edition. The chapters on Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Locke, and Kant are great, but the section on Hume is unusual: It focusses on just the two Enquiries, without much content covering the Treatise, which is what most students will read. Even worse is the dismal chapter on Leibniz, which barely covers the two most important texts—the Discourse and the Monadology, instead digressing into a discussion on the implications of Leibniz for contemporary theories of logic. The strongest chapters involve section by section summaries and explanations of key texts, and this is the model that should be repeated for the whole book.

[Imlac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good and clear overview of the principal figures of the period.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best book on Classical Modern Philosophy, Jeffrey Tlumak surveys the major works of everybody from Rene Descartes (1596-1650) to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Readers will be apprised of these men's contributions to philosophy and science, especially at a time when the distinction between philosophy and science was not a meaningful one. These figures were part-theologian, part-psychologist, part-political scientist. And the sorts of issues they addressed still have not been resolved within the social sciences. For instance, in any of the sciences related to mind/brain, many scientists divide over whether the basis for our understanding of how the world works comes mainly as a construction of the mind/brain (Rationalism) or whether it is primarily a matter of sense experience and data from outside the mind/brain (Empiricism). This Rationalist-Empiricist debate has not yet been resolved, but perhaps reading some of the views and arguments of these major figures would help general readers decide on where they might stand. It might also help scientists better articulate their research programs. Really.