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This idea of wholesale radical deception has been the subject of popular films such as The Matrix and Twelve Monkeys. Descartes realises, however, that there is one proposition that neither the evil demon nor even God could ever make false. This is that at any time when he thinks, it must be the case that he exists. For he must exist in order to be able to think. By such reasoning Descartes is led to the cogito as the one certain, infallible rock of knowledge.
For Descartes, the cogito was the beginning of a project in which he attempted to prove the existence of God, in order to guarantee the rest of human knowledge.
Antoine Arnauld
Precision of thought is essential to every aspect and walk of life
Last-born son of a lawyer who fathered twenty children, Arnauld became a theologian, logician and philosopher. He collaborated with both Nicole and Pascal on their famous The Art of Thinking, which later became known as ‘the Port Royal Logic’ or sometimes just ‘The Logic’. He is also remembered for authoring several of the replies to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, gaining in the process a reputation as an intellectually rigourous and perceptive critic, and bringing attention to the problem now known as
‘the Cartesian ...
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The Art of Thinking consists of four parts corresponding to the principal operations of the mind: conceiving, judging, reasoning and ordering.
Although his principal work, The Search after Truth
covers a wide variety of topics, Malebranche is remembered principally for his theory of occasionalism as a solution to Descartes’ mind-body problem.
in Cartesian ontology there are only three kinds of substance: mind, matter and God.
Accordingly, claimed Malebranche, the only causal power is God.
Geulincx,
They are like two clocks wound up by God and kept in synchronicity with each other through divine acts. Whenever I will to move my arm, God causes the arm to move on that occasion. Whenever we think we are doing something, God is really doing it for us.
occasionalism
mind is really just the brain, or functions of the brain, and consists in nothing other than matter or the arrangement of matter in a certain specified way: see also Gilbert Ryle).
There is only one substance and that substance we can conceive of as either Nature or God
Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin,
In the posthumously published Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata (Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order), Spinoza sets out the axioms which he takes to be self-evident and then proceeds, step by step, to deduce ethical conclusions.
Central to Spinoza’s philosophy is the idea, similar to that of Parmenides, that everything in the universe is One. There is only one substance and that substance we can conceive of as either Nature or God. This substance has infinitely many attributes but human beings, being finite, can only perceive two of them, extension and thought. Unlike Descartes, who thought mind and body were two separate kinds of thing, Spinoza argues that mind and body are just different ways of conceiving the same reality.
pantheistic view
Insofar as the quasi-individual is ruled by his emotions, he is unfree and at the mercy of finite understanding. To become free, the individual must, by means of rational reflection, understand the extended causal chain that links everything as one. To become aware of the totality of the universe is to be freed, not from causal determinism, but from an ignorance of one’s true nature.
That which appears evil does so only because we lack the understanding to see the bigger picture, the chain of causes that make all events a necessary part of divine reality.
German philosopher, Leibniz is the third of the three great rationalists, after Descartes and Spinoza.
A monad is in one sense similar to the atoms of Democritus and yet more akin to the geometrical points of Pythagoras. Like atoms, monads are the ultimate indivisible elements of reality of which all material things are constituted. But they are not themselves either extended nor composed of matter. In a completely original thesis Leibniz holds that a monad is a psychological entity, which, when embodied in human beings, he calls ‘souls’.
Leibniz expressed this point in a logical way, saying that of every true proposition, the predicate is contained within the subject. What this amounts to is the extreme view that every truth is a necessary truth – a conclusion Leibniz does not shy away from but embraces, claiming that everything happens the way it does because it must, and it must because God has chosen to make actual the best of all possible worlds. Things could only have been different if God had chosen to actualise a different possible world.
the continuous spatio-temporal history of the same physical body from one event to the other.
The mind at birth is like a blank slate, waiting to be written on by the world of experience
Two Treatises of Government.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The works of Berkeley, Kant and Hume are all direct successors to Locke’s Essay.
The subject of Locke’s Essay, as given in the title, is the nature of human understanding, that is, the very way in which the human mind collects, organises, classifies and ultimately makes judgements based on data received through the senses. Greatly influenced by the scientific turn of his day, and a personal friend of two renowned contemporary scientists, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, Locke’s intent was to set the foundations of human knowledge on a sound scientific footing.
This is the view now known as empiricism, a view still central, in essence if not detail, to the philosophies of Quine and other modern thinkers. Locke’s detractors, the Rationalists (see Descartes, Berkeley, Leibniz) with whom the Empiricists battled for ideological supremacy throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, have their modern counterparts in the supporters of Noam Chomsky and his philosophy of innate, or generative, grammar.
Locke states that the mind at birth is like a blank slate, or tabula rasa, waiting to be written on by the world of experience. All human knowledge is derived from ideas presented to the mind by the world of experience. However, these ideas can be classified into two general sorts. There are complex ideas and simple ideas. Simple ideas are the immediate products of sensory stimulation, examples would be ‘yellow’, ‘bitter’, ‘warm’, ‘round’, ‘hard’ and so on. Complex ideas are constructions out of simple ideas, and are the product of internal mental operations.
Among Locke’s simple ideas is a distinction between those that are primary qualities of objects and others that are secondary qualities. The distinction divides those qualities thought to be essential and inherent to all objects and those that are apparent only on account of the effect objects have on our senses. Primary qualities are those such as solidity, extension, shape, motion or rest, and number. Secondary qualities are those such as colour, scent and taste. These are secondary because, according to Locke, they do not inhere in objects themselves, but are causally produced only in our
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There is no justification for believing that there is any causal necessity in the ordering of events
From Locke, Hume drew the conclusion that all human knowledge is based on relations amongst ideas, or ‘sense impressions’. Anything not given in experience is mere invention and must be ruthlessly discarded. As a result he denies the existence of God, the self, the objective existence of logical necessity, causation, and even the validity of inductive knowledge itself.
Treatise on Human Nature
Hume observes that we never experience our own self only the continuous chain of our experiences themselves. This psychological fact leads Hume to the dubious metaphysical conclusion that the self is an illusion, and that in fact personal identity is nothing but the continuous succession of perceptual experience. ‘I am,’ Hume famously says, ‘nothing but a bundle of perceptions’.
Following a similar line of thought, Hume notices that the force that compels one event to follow another, causation, is also never experienced in sense impressions. All that is given in experience is the regular succession of one kind of event followed by another. But the supposition that the earlier event, the so-called ‘cause’, must be followed by the succeeding event, the ‘effect’, is merely human expectation projected onto reality. There is no justification for believing that there is any causal necessity in the ordering of events.
Inductive reasoning is the process that leads us to make generalisations from observing a number of similar cases. For example, having observed many white swans but no black swans, one might seemingly be justified in the conclusion that ‘All swans are white’. Equally, being aware that men often die, we conclude ‘All men are mortal’.
Since all scientific laws are merely generalisations from inductive reasoning, this so-called ‘problem of induction’ has been an urgent one for philosophers of science. Trying to show how induction is justified has taxed them throughout the 20th century. Karl Popper is notable for offering the most promising solution to Humean scepticism.
Thomas Reid
Inquiry into the Human Mind
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.
Principally, this amounted to rejecting the assumption, common to Descartes, Locke and Berkeley as well as Hume, that ideas in the mind are intermediaries between the subject and the world. Rather, Reid espoused a form of direct perception in an attempt to deny Hume’s conclusions and bring philosophy back to common-sense.
Locke had maintained that a sufficient criterion of personal identity was psychological connectedness. What this amounts to is the idea that an individual is the same person over time just so long as they maintain a psychological connection, principally memory, from one time to another.
Francois-Marie Arouet,
After a second spell in prison, he quit France for England, where he came under the lasting influence of the works of Locke and Newton.
As a philosopher Voltaire is not by his own work particularly original. However, he must be included in any retrospective of Western thought for the huge influence his writings have had. Voltaire did more to popularise and instigate ‘the age of reason’ than any other philosopher. His style is always readable, provocative and laced with wit. Not until the plays and stories of the existentialists in the twentieth century would philosophy be again so popularly read.
Rousseau was born in Geneva, the son of a watchmaker. Rousseau’s mother died in child birth and his father showed little interest in him: the young Rousseau was left in Geneva when his father was exiled to Lyons. At the age of fourteen Rousseau left Geneva and after several adventures, ended up in Turin.
