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In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study.
Fatalism, or the belief that the future is fixed whatever we do,
Hobbes (1588–1679) memorably called ‘the war of all against all’.
Convictions are infectious,
it is ideas for which people kill each other.
I tgink this isnt in the end but still in the middle. In the end the killing is for the impulse of self interest like hoarding resources for my country to the exclusion of another or forcig slave labor for my benefit. Tje ideology enshrouding such a behavior is merely a justification for this impulse. Maybe to resolve cognitive dissonance. Then again inasmuch as these mysanthropic behaviors arise from us vs. Them, ideas may play a role in defining these two groups and who is in which group
the sleep of reason, critical awakening is the antidote.
Some are fearful that their ideas may not stand up as well as they would like if they start to think about them.
identified critical self-reflection with freedom,
Descartes was also a pious Catholic.
Descartes also intends to rescue the modern world view from the charge of atheism and materialism.
we start with Descartes because he was the first great philosopher to wrestle with the implications of the modern scientific world view.
An argument is valid when there is no way—meaning no possible way—that the premises, or starting points, could be true without the conclusion being true (we explore this further in Chapter 6).
Whereas to open the way to Descartes’s major doubts, it would seem that he needs ‘we cannot distinguish even over time and with care whether our senses are deceiving us’. And this last does not seem to be true.
it is psychologically impossible to keep doubt about the external world alive outside the study. But that does not matter. The doubt is worth bothering about because of the task he is engaged upon. This is the task of finding foundations of knowledge, of ensuring that his beliefs are built on a sound footing. Descartes’s inquiry is made for purely intellectual reasons.
Our reasonings are apt to be even more fallible than our senses.
Knowledge achieved by this kind of rational insight is known as ‘a priori’: it can be seen to be true immediately, without any experience of the way of the world.
trusting only clear and distinct ideas.
Descartes. He was undoubtedly more optimistic about the trademark argument than we can be because he inherited a number of ideas from previous philosophical traditions. One very important one is that genuine causation is a matter of the cause passing on something to an effect. Causation is like passing the baton in a relay race. So, for example, it takes heat to make something hot, or movement to induce motion. This is a principle that surfaces again and again in the history of philosophy,
it seems as though Descartes (once more influenced by ideas from previous philosophical traditions) may have slipped into thinking that an idea of X actually shares X. So an idea of infinity, for instance, would be an infinite idea.
I think this is true. Inasmuch as true infinity cant be conceived; we cant picture in lour minds an inumerable amount of objects; at best we can imagine a series of individual objects or a limited group of them in succession but tgis is not true infinity. Or else we can imagine the idea of negating finitude; we could comment that an object is limited bt tgis is not the same as infinity.
likewisde its true for any x.
I arrived at this comment after reflecting that any thought in our minds is a nmuemonic and neurological analog of an experienced, sensed, object as in the bok to build a mind by ray kurtzweil
the infamous ‘Cartesian circle’.
I may recognize something as a Pomeranian, or a member of the Rolling Stones, or my wife, without knowing any general principles that ‘justify’ the verdict.
Socrates’ procedure is only apt to give philosophers a bad name.
Some of us may have the dark suspicion that it is because mention of God clouds the mind rather than clarifying it.
no reasoning could ever bring us to a state of assurance
non-rational or natural foun-dationalism.
The emphasis on natural ways of forming belief chimes in with another strand in Hume and other British philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Their paradigm was knowledge by sense experience rather than by reason. Because of this, they are labelled empiricists, whereas Descartes is a card-carrying rationalist
the champion of British empiricism, John Locke (1632–1704),
‘God’ simply labels whatever it is that ensures this harmony between belief and the world.