In defending the principle of sufficient reason sometimes described as the principle that nothing can be so without there being a reason why it is so. But the reason has to be of a particularly potent kind: eventually it has to ground contingent facts in necessities, and in particular in the reason an omnipotent and perfect being would have for actualizing one possibility than another. Among the consequences of the principle is Leibniz's relational doctrine of space, since if space were an infinite box there could be no reason for the world to be at one point in rather than another, and God placing it at any point violate the principle. In Abelards' (1079-1142), as in Leibniz, the principle eventually forces te recognition that the actual world is the best of all possibilities, since anything else would be inconsistent with the creative power that actualizes possibilities.
If truth consists in concept containment, then it seems that all truth are analytic and hence necessary. If they are all necessary, surely they are all truth of reason. In that not every truth can be reduced to an identity in a finite number of steps; in some instances revealing the connexion between subject and predicate concepts would require an infinite analysis, while this may entail that we cannot prove such proposition as a prior, it does not appear to show that proposition could have ben false. Intuitively, it seems a better ground for supposing that it is a necessary truth of a special sort. A related question arises from the idea that truth of fact depend on Gods' decision to create the best world: If it is part of the concept of this world that it is best, how could its existence be other than necessary? An accountable and responsively answered explanation would be so, that any relational question that brakes the norm lay eyes on its existence in the manner other than hypothetical necessities, i.e., it follows from Gods' decision to create the world, but God had the power to create this world, but God is necessary, so how could he have decided to do anything else? Leibniz says much more about these matters, but it is not clear whether he offers any satisfactory solutions.
The view that the terms in which we think of some area is sufficiently infected with error for it to be better to abandon them than to continue to try to give coherent theories of their use. Eliminativism should be distinguished from scepticism that claims that we cannot know the truth about some area; eliminativism claims rather that there is no truth there to be known, in the terms that we currently think. An eliminativist about theology simply counsels abandoning the terms or discourse of theology, and that will include abandoning worries about the extent of theological knowledge.
Eliminativists in the philosophy of mind counsel abandoning the whole network of terms mind, consciousness, self, Qualia that usher in the problems of mind and body. Sometimes the argument for doing this is that we should wait for a supposed future understanding of ourselves, based on cognitive science and better than any our current mental descriptions provide, sometimes it is supposed that physicalism shows that no mental description of ourselves could possibly be true.
Sceptical tendencies emerged in the 14th-century writings of Nicholas of Autrecourt. His criticisms of any certainty beyond the immediate deliverance of the senses and basic logic, and in particular of any knowledge of either intellectual or material substances, anticipate the later scepticism of Balye and Hume. The; latter distinguishes between Pyrrhonistic and excessive scepticism, which he regarded as unlivable, and the more mitigated scepticism that accepts every day or commonsense beliefs (not as the delivery of reason, but as due more to custom and habit), but is duly wary of the power of reason to give us much more. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by ancient scepticism from Pyrrho through to Sexus Empiricus. Although the phrase Cartesian scepticism is sometimes used, Descartes himself was not a sceptic, but in the method of doubt, uses a sceptical scenario in order to begin the process of finding a secure mark of knowledge. Descartes himself trusts a category of clear and distinct ideas, not far removed from the phantasia kataleptiké of the Stoics.
Scepticism should not be confused with relativism, which is a doctrine about the nature of truth, and may be motivated by trying to avoid scepticism. Nor is it identical with eliminativism, which counsels abandoning an area of thought altogether, not because we cannot know the truth, but because there are no truth capable of being framed in the terms we use.
Descartes theory of knowledge starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-point or foundation on the basis alone of which progress is possible. This is eventually found in the celebrated Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. By locating the point of certainty in my own awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the theory of knowledge that dominated them following centuries in spite of various counter-attacks on behalf of social and public starting-point. The metaphysics associated with this priority is the famous Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but interacting substances, Descartes rigorously and rightly sees that it takes divine dispensation to certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the senses invokes a clear and distinct perception of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance: as Hume drily puts it, to have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.
In his own time Descartes conception of the entirely separate substance of the mind was recognized to give rise to insoluble problems of the nature of the causal connexion between the two. It also gives rise to the problem, insoluble in its own terms, of other minds. Descartes notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration of the problem. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation over anything derived from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature. Descartes thought, as reflected in Leibniz, that the qualities of sense experience have no resemblance to qualities of things, so that knowledge of the external world is essentially knowledge of structure rather than of filling. On this basis Descartes erects a remarkable physics. Since matter is in effect the same as extension there can be no empty space or void, since there is no empty space motion is not a question of occupying previously empty space, but is to be thought of in terms of vortices (like the motion of a liquid).
Although the structure of Descartes epistemology, theory of mind, and theory of matter have ben rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity, and even their initial plausibility, all contrive to make him the central point of reference for modern philosophy.
The self conceived as Descartes presents it in the first two Meditations: aware only of its own thoughts, and capable of disembodied existence, neither situated in a space nor surrounded by others. This is the pure self of I-ness that we are tempted to imagine as a simple unique thing that make up our essential identity. Descartes view that he could keep hold of this nugget while doubting everything else is criticized by Lichtenberg and Kant, and most subsequent philosophers of mind.
Descartes holds that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical proposition about anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason, roughly put, is that there is a legitimate doubt about all such propositions because there is no way to deny justifiably that our senses are being stimulated by some cause (an evil spirit, for example) which is radically different from the objects that we normally think affect our senses.
He also points out, that the senses (sight, hearing, touch, etc., are often unreliable, and it is prudent never to trust entirely those who have deceived us even once, he cited such instances as the straight stick that looks ben t in water, and the square tower that looks round from a distance. This argument of illusion, has not, on the whole, impressed commentators, and some of Descartes contemporaries pointing out that since such errors become known as a result of further sensory information, it cannot be right to cast wholesale doubt on the evidence of the senses. But Descartes regarded the argument from illusion as only the first stage in a softening up process which would lead the mind away from the senses. He admits that there are some cases of sense-base belief about which doubt would be insane, e.g., the belief that I am sitting here by the fire, wearing a winter dressing gown.
Descartes was to realize that there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or from direct experience as distinctly human. In a mechanistic universe, he said, there is no privileged place or function for mind, and the separation between mind and matter is absolute. Descartes was also convinced, that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invent algebraic geometry.
Foundationalism was associated with the ancient Stoics, and in the modern era with Descartes (1596-1650). Who discovered his foundations in the clear and distinct ideas of reason? Its main opponent is Coherentism, or the view that a body of propositions mas be known without a foundation in certainty, but by their interlocking strength, than as a crossword puzzle may be known to have been solved correctly even if each answer, taken individually, admits of uncertainty. Difficulties at this point led the logical passivists to abandon the notion of an epistemological foundation altogether, and to flirt with the coherence theory of truth. It is widely accepted that trying to make the connexion between thought and experience through basic sentences depends on an untenable myth of the given.
Meanwhile, the truth conditions of a statement is the condition the world must meet if the statement is to be true. To know this condition is equivalent to knowing the meaning of the statement. Although his sounds as if it gives a solid anchorage when in turns out that the truth condition can only be defined by repeating the very same statement. The truth condition of 'snow is white' is that snow is white, the truth condition of 'Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded' is that Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded. It is disputed whether this element of running-on-the-spot disqualifies truth conditions from playing the central role in a substantive theory of meaning. Truth-conditional theories of meaning are sometimes opposed by the view that to know the meaning of a statement is to be able to use it in a network of inferences.
The view that the role of sentences in inference gives a more important key to their meaning than their 'external' reflation to things in the world. The meaning of a sentence becomes its place in a network =of inferences that it legitimates. Also known as functional role semantics, procedural semantics, or conceptual role semantics. The view bears some relation to the coherence theory of truth and suffers from the same suspicion that it divorces meaning from any suspicion ta it divorces meaning from any clear association with things in the world.
Still, in spite of these concerns, the problem, least of mention, is of defining knowledge in terms of true beliefs plus some favoured relations between the believer and the facts that began with Platos view in the Theaetetus, that knowledge is true belief, and some logos. Due of its nonsynthetic epistemology, the enterprising of studying the actual formation of knowledge by human beings, without aspiring to certify those processes as rational, or its proof against scepticism or even apt to yield the truth. Natural epistemology would therefore blend into the psychology of learning and the study of episodes in the history of science. The scope for external or philosophical reflection of the kind that might result in scepticism or its refutation is markedly diminished. Despite the fact that the terms of modernity are so distinguished as exponents of the approach include Aristotle, Hume, and J. S. Mills.
The task of the philosopher of a discipline would then be to reveal the correct method and to unmask counterfeits. Although this belief lay behind much positivist philosophy of science, few philosophers now subscribe to it. It places too well a confidence in the possibility of a purely previous first philosophy, or viewpoint beyond that of the work ones way of practitioners, from which their best efforts can be measured as good or bad. These standpoints now seem that too many philosophers to be fanciful, that the more modest of tasks that are actually adopted at various historical stages of investigation into different areas with the aim not so much of criticizing but more of systematization, in the presuppositions of a particular field at a particular tie. There is still a role for local methodological disputes within the community investigators of some phenomenon, with one approach charging that another is unsound or unscientific, but logic and philosophy will not, on the modern view, provide an independent arsenal of weapons for such battles, which indeed often come to seem more like political bids for ascendancy within a discipline.
This is an approach to the theory of knowledge that sees an important connexion between the growth of knowledge and biological evolution. An evolutionary epistemologist claims that the development of human knowledge processed through some natural selection process, the best example of which is Darwin's theory of biological natural selection. There is a widespread misconception that evolution proceeds according to some plan or direct, but it has neither, and the role of chance ensures that its future course will be unpredictable. Random variations in individual organisms create tiny differences in their Darwinian fitness. Some individuals have more offsprings than others, and the characteristics that increased their fitness thereby become more prevalent in future generations. Once upon a time, at least a mutation occurred in a human population in tropical Africa that changed the haemoglobin molecule in a way that provided resistance to malaria. This enormous advantage caused the new gene to spread, with the unfortunate consequence that sickle-cell anaemia came to exist.
Chance can influence the outcome at each stage: First, in the creation of genetic mutation, second, in wether the bearer lives long enough to show its effects, thirdly, in chance events that influence the individuals actual reproductive success, and fourth, in whether a gene even if favoured in one generation, is, happenstance, eliminated in the next, and finally in the many unpredictable environmental changes that will undoubtedly occur in the history of any group of organisms. As Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould has so vividly expressed that process over again, the outcome would surely be different. Not only might there not be humans, there might not even be anything like mammals.
We will often emphasis the elegance of traits shaped by natural selection, but the common idea that nature creates perfection needs to be analysed carefully. The extent to which evolution achieves perfection depends on exactly what you mean. If you mean Does natural selections always take the best path for the long-term welfare of a species? The answer is no. That would require adaption by group selection, and this is, unlikely. If you mean Does natural selection creates every adaption that would be valuable? The answer again, is no. For instance, some kinds of South American monkeys can grasp branches with their tails. The trick would surely also be useful to some African species, but, simply because of bad luck, none have it. Some combination of circumstances started some ancestral South American monkeys using their tails in ways that ultimately led to an ability to grab onto branches, while no such development took place in Africa. Mere usefulness of a trait does not necessitate a means in that what will understandably endure phylogenesis or evolution.
This is an approach to the theory of knowledge that sees an important connexion between the growth of knowledge and biological evolution. An evolutionary epistemologist claims that the development of human knowledge proceeds through some natural selection process, the best example of which is Darwin's theory of biological natural selection. The three major components of the model of natural selection are variation selection and retention. According to Darwin's theory of natural selection, variations are not pre-designed to do certain functions. Rather, these variations that do useful functions are selected. While those that do not employ of some coordinates in that are regainfully purposed are also, not to any of a selection, as duly influenced of such a selection, that may have responsibilities for the visual aspects of a variational intentionally occurs. In the modern theory of evolution, genetic mutations provide the blind variations: Blind in the sense that variations are not influenced by the effects they would have-the likelihood of a mutation is not correlated with the benefits or liabilities that mutation would confer on the organism, the environment provides the filter of selection, and reproduction provides the retention. Fatnesses are achieved because those organisms with features that make them less adapted for survival do not survive in connexion with other organisms in the environment that have features that are better adapted. Evolutionary epistemology applies this blind variation and selective retention model to the growth of scientific knowledge and to human thought processes overall.
The parallel between biological evolution and conceptual or epistemic evolution can be seen as either literal or analogical. The literal version of evolutionary epistemology deeds biological evolution as the main cause of the growth of knowledge. On this view, called the evolution of cognitive mechanic programs, by Bradie (1986) and the Darwinian approach to epistemology by Ruse (1986), that growth of knowledge occurs through blind variation and selective retention because biological natural selection itself is the cause of epistemic variation and selection. The most plausible version of the literal view does not hold that all human beliefs are innate but rather than the mental mechanisms that guide the acquisitions of non-innate beliefs are themselves innately and the result of biological natural selection. Ruse, (1986) demands of a version of literal evolutionary epistemology that he links to sociolology (Rescher, 1990).
On the analogical version of evolutionary epistemology, called the evolution of theories program, by Bradie (1986). The Spenserians approach (after the nineteenth century philosopher Herbert Spencer) by Ruse (1986), the development of human knowledge is governed by a process analogous to biological natural selection, rather than by an instance of the mechanism itself. This version of evolutionary epistemology, introduced and elaborated by Donald Campbell (1974) as well as Karl Popper, sees the [partial] fit between theories and the world as explained by a mental process of trial and error known as epistemic natural selection.
Both versions of evolutionary epistemology are usually taken to be types of naturalized epistemology, because both take some empirical facts as a starting point for their epistemological project. The literal version of evolutionary epistemology begins by accepting evolutionary theory and a materialist approach to the mind and, from these, constructs an account of knowledge and its developments. In contrast, the metaphorical version does not require the truth of biological evolution: It simply draws on biological evolution as a source for the model of natural selection. For this version of evolutionary epistemology to be true, the model of natural selection need only apply to the growth of knowledge, not to the origin and development of species. Crudely put, evolutionary epistemology of the analogical sort could still be true even if Creationism is the correct theory of the origin of species.
Although they do not begin by assuming evolutionary theory, most analogical evolutionary epistemologists are naturalized epistemologists as well, their empirical assumptions, least of mention, implicitly come from psychology and cognitive science, not evolutionary theory. Sometimes, however, evolutionary epistemology is characterized in a seemingly non-naturalistic fashion. Campbell (1974) says that if one is expanding knowledge beyond what one knows, one has no choice but to explore without the benefit of wisdom, i.e., blindly. This, Campbell admits, makes evolutionary epistemology close to being a tautology (and so not naturalistic). Evolutionary epistemology does assert the analytic claim that when expanding ones knowledge beyond what one knows, one must precessed to something that is already known, but, more interestingly, it also makes the synthetic claim that when expanding ones knowledge beyond what one knows, one must proceed by blind variation and selective retention. This claim is synthetic because it can be empirically falsified. The central claim of evolutionary epistemology is synthetic, not analytic. If the central contradictory, which they are not. Campbell is right that evolutionary epistemology does have the analytic feature he mentions, but he is wrong to think that this is a distinguishing feature, since any plausible epistemology has the same analytic feature (Skagestad, 1978).
Two extraordinary issues lie to awaken the literature that involves questions about realism, i.e., What metaphysical commitment does an evolutionary epistemologist have to make? Progress, i.e., according to evolutionary epistemology, does knowledge develop toward a goal? With respect to realism, many evolutionary epistemologists endorse that is called hypothetical realism, a view that combines a version of epistemological scepticism and tentative acceptance of metaphysical realism. With respect to progress, the problem is that biological evolution is not goal-directed, but the growth of human knowledge seems to be. Campbell (1974) worries about the potential dis-analogy here but is willing to bite the stone of conscience and admit that epistemic evolution progress toward a goal (truth) while biologic evolution does not. Many another has argued that evolutionary epistemologists must give up the truth-topic sense of progress because a natural selection model is in essence, is non-teleological, as an alternative, following Kuhn (1970), and embraced in the accompaniment with evolutionary epistemology.
Among the most frequent and serious criticisms levelled against evolutionary epistemology is that the analogical version of the view is false because epistemic variation is not blind (Skagestad, 1978, 613-16, and Ruse, 1986, ch.2 (. Stein and Lipton (1990) have argued, however, that this objection fails because, while epistemic variation is not random, its constraints come from heuristics that, for the most part, are selective retention. Further, Stein and Lipton come to the conclusion that heuristics are analogous to biological pre-adaptions, evolutionary pre-biological pre-adaptions, evolutionary cursors, such as a half-wing, a precursor to a wing, which have some function other than the function of their descendable structures: The function of descendable structures, the function of their descendable character embodied to its structural foundations, is that of the guidelines of epistemic variation is, on this view, not the source of disanalogy, but the source of a more articulated account of the analogy.
Many evolutionary epistemologists try to combine the literal and the analogical versions (Bradie, 1986, and Stein and Lipton, 1990), saying that those beliefs and cognitive mechanisms, which are innate results from natural selection of the biological sort and those that are innate results from natural selection of the epistemic sort. This is reasonable as long as the two parts of this hybrid view are kept distinct. An analogical version of evolutionary epistemology with biological variation as its only source of blondeness would be a null-set theory: This would be the case if all our beliefs are innate or if our non-innate beliefs are not the result of blind variation. An appeal to the legitimate way to produce a hybrid version of evolutionary epistemology since doing so trivializes the theory. For similar reasons, such an appeal will not save an analogical version of evolutionary epistemology from arguments to the effect that epistemic variation is blind (Stein and Lipton, 1990).
Although it is a new approach to theory of knowledge, evolutionary epistemology has attracted much attention, primarily because it represents a serious attempt to flesh out a naturalized epistemology by drawing on several disciplines. In science is relevant to understanding the nature and development of knowledge, then evolutionary theory is among the disciplines worth a look. Insofar as evolutionary epistemology looks there, it is an interesting and potentially fruitful epistemological programme.
What makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? Thinking that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals is natural depends on what caused the depicted branch of knowledge to have the belief. In recent decades a number of epistemologists have pursued this plausible idea with a variety of specific proposals. Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that 'p' is knowledge just in case it has the right causal connexion to the fact that 'p'. Such a criterion can be applied only to cases where the fact that 'p' is a sort that can reach causal relations, as this seems to exclude mathematically and there necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization, and proponents of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual representations where knowledge of particular facts about subjects environments.
For example, Armstrong (1973), predetermined that a position held by a belief in the form This perceived object is 'F' is [non-inferential] knowledge if and only if the belief is a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is 'F', that is, the fact that the object is F contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictated that, for any subject '?' and perceived object 'y', has those properties and believed that 'y' is 'F', then 'y' is 'F?'. (Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account, in terms of the beliefs being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is 'F').
Goldman (1986) has proposed an importantly different causal criterion, namely, that a true belief is knowledge if it is produced by a type of process that is globally and locally reliable. Causing true beliefs is sufficiently high is globally reliable if its propensity. Local reliability has to do with whether the process would have produced a similar but false belief in certain counterfactual situations alternative to the actual situation. This way of marking off true beliefs that are knowledge does not require the fact believed to be causally related to the belief, and so it could in principle apply to knowledge of any kind of truth.
Goldman requires the global reliability of the belief-producing process for the justification of a belief, he requires it also for knowledge because justification is required for knowledge. What he requires for knowledge, but does not require for justification is local reliability. His idea is that a justified true belief is knowledge if the type of process that produced it would not have produced it in any relevant counterfactual situation in which it is false. Its purported theory of relevant alternatives can be viewed as an attempt to provide a more satisfactory response to this tension in our thinking about knowledge. It attempts to characterize knowledge in a way that preserves both our belief that knowledge is an absolute concept and our belief that we have knowledge.
According to the theory, we need to qualify rather than deny the absolute character of knowledge. We should view knowledge as absolute, reactive to certain standards (Dretske, 1981 and Cohen, 1988). That is to say, in order to know a proposition, our evidence need not eliminate all the alternatives to that preposition, rather for us, that we can know our evidence eliminates al the relevant alternatives, where the set of relevant alternatives (a proper subset of the set of all alternatives) is determined by some standard. Moreover, according to the relevant alternatives view, and the standards determining that of the alternatives is raised by the sceptic are not relevant. If this is correct, then the fact that our evidence cannot eliminate the sceptics alternative does not lead to a sceptical result. For knowledge requires only the elimination of the relevant alternatives, so the relevant alternative view preserves in both strands in our thinking about knowledge. Knowledge is an absolute concept, but because the absoluteness is relative to a standard, we can know many things.
The interesting thesis that counts as a causal theory of justification (in the meaning of causal theory intended here) are that: A belief is justified in case it was produced by a type of process that is globally reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs-that can be defined (to a good approximation) As the proportion of the beliefs it produces (or would produce) that is true is sufficiently great.
This proposal will be adequately specified only when we are told (I) how much of the causal history of a belief counts as part of the process that produced it, (ii) which of the many types to which the process belongs is the type for purposes of assessing its reliability, and (iii) relative to why the world or worlds are the reliability of the process type to be assessed the actual world, the closet worlds containing the case being considered, or something else? Let us look at the answers suggested by Goldman, the leading proponent of a reliabilist account of justification.
(1) Goldman (1979, 1986) takes the relevant belief producing process to include only the proximate causes internal to the believer. So, for instance, when recently I believed that the telephone was ringing the process that produced the belief, for purposes of assessing reliability, includes just the causal chain of neural events from the stimulus in my ears inward ands other concurrent brain states on which the production of the belief depended: It does not include any events I the telephone, or the sound waves travelling between it and my ears, or any earlier decisions I made that were responsible for my being within hearing distance of the telephone at that time. It does seem intuitively plausible of a belief depends should be restricted to internal ones proximate to the belief. Why? Goldman does not tell us. One answer that some philosophers might give is that it is because a beliefs being justified at a given time can depend only on facts directly accessible to the believers awareness at that time (for, if a believer ought to holds only beliefs that are justified, she can tell at any given time what beliefs would then be justified for her). However, this cannot be Goldmans answer because he wishes to include in the relevantly process neural events that are not directly accessible to consciousness.
(2) Once the reliabilist has told us how to delimit the process producing a belief, he needs to tell us which of the many types to which it belongs is the relevant type. Coincide, for example, the process that produces your current belief that you see a book before you. One very broad type to which that process belongs would be specified by coming to a belief as to something one perceives as a result of activation of the nerve endings in some ones sense-organs, as following a set arrangement, design or pattern that an orderly procedure houses the surrounding order. A constricted type, in which that unvarying processes belong would be specified by coming to a belief as to what one sees as a result of activation of the nerve endings in ones retinas. A still narrower type would be given by inserting in the last specification a description of a particular pattern of activation of the retinas particular cells. Which of these or other types to which the token process belongs is the relevant type for determining whether the type of process that produced your belief is reliable?
(3) Should the justification of a belief in a hypothetical, non-actual example turn on the reliability of the belief-producing process in the possible world of the example? That leads to the implausible result in that in a world run by a Cartesian demon-a powerful being who causes the other inhabitants of the world to have rich and coherent sets of perceptual and memory impressions that are all illusory the perceptual and memory beliefs of the other inhabitants are all unjustified, for they are produced by processes that are, in that world, quite unreliable. If we say instead that it is the reliability of the processes in the actual world that matters, we get the equally undesired result that if the actual world is a demon world then our perceptual and memory beliefs are all unjustified.
Goldmans solution (1986) is that the reliability of the process types is to be gauged by their performance in normal worlds, that is, worlds consistent with our general beliefs about the world . . . about the sorts of objects, events and changes that occur in it. This gives the intuitively right results for the problem cases just considered, but indicate by inference an implausible proportion of making compensations for alternative tending toward justification. If there are people whose general beliefs about the world are very different from mine, then there may, on this account, be beliefs that I can correctly regard as justified (ones produced by processes that are reliable in what I take to be a normal world) but that they can correctly regard as not justified.
However, these questions about the specifics are dealt with, and there are reasons for questioning the basic idea that the criterion for a beliefs being justified is its being produced by a reliable process. Thus and so, doubt about the sufficiency of the reliabilist criterion is prompted by a sort of example that Goldman himself uses for another purpose. Suppose that being in brain-state 'B' always causes one to believe that one is in brain-states 'B'. Here the reliability of the belief-producing process is perfect, but we can readily imagine circumstances in which a person goes into grain-state 'B' and therefore has the belief in question, though this belief is by no means justified (Goldman, 1979). Doubt about the necessity of the condition arises from the possibility that one might know that one has strong justification for a certain belief and yet that knowledge is not what actually prompts one to believe. For example, I might be well aware that, having read the weather bureaus forecast that it will be much hotter tomorrow. I have ample reason to be confident that it will be hotter tomorrow, but I irrationally refuse to believe it until Wally tells me that he feels in his joints that it will be hotter tomorrow. Here what prompts me to believe or not justify my belief, but my belief is nevertheless justified by my knowledge of the weather bureaus prediction and of its evidential force: I can advert to any disavowable inference that I ought not to be holding the belief. Indeed, given my justification and that there is nothing untoward about the weather bureaus prediction, my belief, if true, can be counted knowledge. This sorts of example raises doubt whether any causal conditions, are it a reliable process or something else, is necessary for either justification or knowledge.
Philosophers and scientists alike, have often held that the simplicity or parsimony of a theory is one reason, all else being equal, to view it as true. This goes beyond the unproblematic idea that simpler theories are easier to work with and gave greater aesthetic appeal.
One theory is more parsimonious than another when it postulates fewer entities, processes, changes or explanatory principles: The simplicity of a theory depends on essentially the same consecrations, though parsimony and simplicity obviously become the same. Demanding clarification of what makes one theory simpler or more parsimonious is plausible than another before the justification of these methodological maxims can be addressed.
If we set this description problem to one side, the major normative problem is as follows: What reason is there to think that simplicity is a sign of truth? Why should we accept a simpler theory, instead of its more complex rivals? Newton and Leibniz thought that the answer was to be found in a substantive fact about nature. In Principia, Newton laid down as his first Rule of Reasoning in Philosophy that nature does nothing in vain . . . for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes. Leibniz hypothesized that the actual world obeys simple laws because Gods' taste for simplicity influenced his decision about which world to actualize.
The tragedy of the Western mind, described by Koyré, is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. We discovered the certain principles of physical reality, said Descartes, not by the prejudices of the senses, but by the light of reason, and which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth. Since the real, or that which actually exists external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes conclude that all quantitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
The most fundamental aspect of the Western intellectual tradition is the assumption that there is a fundamental division between the material and the immaterial world or between the realm of matter and the realm of pure mind or spirit. The metaphysical frame-work based on this assumption is known as ontological dualism. As the word dual implies, the framework is predicated on an ontology, or a conception of the nature of God or Being, that assumes reality has two distinct and separable dimensions. The concept of Being as continuous, immutable, and having a prior or separate existence from the world of change dates from the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. The same qualities were associated with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and they were considerably amplified by the role played in theology by Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy.
Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton were all inheritors of a cultural tradition in which ontological dualism was a primary article of faith. Hence the idealization of the mathematical ideal as a source of communion with God, which dates from Pythagoras, provided a metaphysical foundation for the emerging natural sciences. This explains why, the creators of classical physics believed that doing physics was a form of communion with the geometrical and mathematical forms resident in the perfect mind of God. This view would survive in a modified form in what is now known as Einsteinian epistemology and accounts in no small part for the reluctance of many physicists to accept the epistemology associated with the Copenhagen Interpretation.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pierre-Simon LaPlace, along with a number of other French mathematicians, advanced the view that the science of mechanics constituted a complete view of nature. Since this science, by observing its epistemology, had revealed itself to be the fundamental science, the hypothesis of God was, they concluded, entirely unnecessary.
LaPlace is recognized for eliminating not only the theological component of classical physics but the entire metaphysical component as well. The epistemology of science requires, he said, that we proceed by inductive generalizations from observed facts to hypotheses that are tested by observed conformity of the phenomena. What was unique about LaPlaces view of hypotheses was his insistence that we cannot attribute reality to them. Although concepts like force, mass, motion, cause, and laws are obviously present in classical physics, they exist in LaPlaces view only as quantities. Physics is concerned, he argued, with quantities that we associate as a matter of convenience with concepts, and the truth about nature are only the quantities.
As this view of hypotheses and the truth of nature as quantities was extended in the nineteenth century to a mathematical description of phenomena like heat, light, electricity, and magnetism. LaPlaces assumptions about the actual character of scientific truth seemed correct. This progress suggested that if we could remove all thoughts about the nature of or the source of phenomena, the pursuit of strictly quantitative concepts would bring us to a complete description of all aspects of physical reality. Subsequently, figures like Comte, Kirchhoff, Hertz, and Poincaré developed a program for the study of nature hat was quite different from that of the original creators of classical physics.
The seventeenth-century view of physics as a philosophy of nature or as natural philosophy was displaced by the view of physics as an autonomous science that was the science of nature. This view, which was premised on the doctrine of positivism, promised to subsume all of nature with a mathematical analysis of entities in motion and claimed that the true understanding of nature was revealed only in the mathematical description. Since the doctrine of positivism assumes that the knowledge we call physics resides only in the mathematical formalism of physical theory, it disallows the prospect that the vision of physical reality revealed in physical theory can have any other meaning. In the history of science, the irony is that positivism, which was intended to banish metaphysical concerns from the domain of science, served to perpetuate a seventeenth-century metaphysical assumption about the relationship between physical reality and physical theory.
Epistemology since Hume and Kant has drawn back from this theological underpinning. Indeed, the very idea that nature is simple (or uniform) has come in for a critique. The view has taken hold that a preference for simple and parsimonious hypotheses is purely methodological: It is constitutive of the attitude we call scientific and makes no substantive assumption about the way the world is.
A variety of otherwise diverse twentieth-century philosophers of science have attempted, in different ways, to flesh out this position. Two examples must suffice here: Hesse (1969) as, for summaries of other proposals. Popper (1959) holds that scientists should prefer highly falsifiable (improbable) theories: He tries to show that simpler theories are more falsifiable, also Quine (1966), in contrast, sees a virtue in theories that are highly probable, he argues for a general connexion between simplicity and high probability.
Both these proposals are global. They attempt to explain why simplicity should be part of the scientific method in a way that spans all scientific subject matters. No assumption about the details of any particular scientific problem serves as a premiss in Poppers or Quines arguments.
Newton and Leibniz thought that the justification of parsimony and simplicity flows from the hand of God: Popper and Quine try to justify these methodologically median of importance is without assuming anything substantive about the way the world is. In spite of these differences in approach, they have something in common. They assume that all users of parsimony and simplicity in the separate sciences can be encompassed in a single justifying argument. That recent developments in confirmation theory suggest that this assumption should be scrutinized. Good (1983) and Rosenkrantz (1977) has emphasized the role of auxiliary assumptions in mediating the connexion between hypotheses and observations. Whether a hypothesis is well supported by some observations, or whether one hypothesis is
or whether a hypothesis is well supported by some observations, or whether one hypothesis is better supported than another by those observations, crucially depends on empirical background assumptions about the inference problem here. The same view applies to the idea of prior probability (or, prior plausibility). In of a single hypo-physical science if chosen as an alternative to another even though they are equally supported by current observations, this must be due to an empirical background assumption.
Principles of parsimony and simplicity mediate the epistemic connexion between hypotheses and observations. Perhaps these principles are able to do this because they are surrogates for an empirical background theory. It is not that there is one background theory presupposed by every appeal to parsimony; This has the quantifier order backwards. Rather, the suggestion is that each parsimony argument is justified only to each degree that it reflects an empirical background theory about the subjective matter. On this theory is brought out into the open, but the principle of parsimony is entirely dispensable (Sober, 1988).
This local approach to the principles of parsimony and simplicity resurrects the idea that they make sense only if the world is one way rather than another. It rejects the idea that these maxims are purely methodological. How defensible this point of view is, will depend on detailed case studies of scientific hypothesis evaluation and on further developments in the theory of scientific inference.
It is usually not found of one and the same that, an inference is a (perhaps very complex) act of thought by virtue of which act (1) I pass from a set of one or more propositions or statements to a proposition or statement and (2) it appears that the latter are true if the former is or are. This psychological characterization has occurred over a wider summation of literature under more lesser than inessential variations. Desiring a better characterization of inference is natural. Yet attempts to do so by constructing a fuller psychological explanation fail to comprehend the grounds on which inference will be objectively valid-A point elaborately made by Gottlob Frége. Attempts to understand the nature of inference through the device of the representation of inference by forma-logical calculations or derivations better (1) leave us puzzled about the relation of formal-logical derivations to the informal inferences they are supposedly to represent or reconstruct, and (2) leaves us worried about the sense of such forma derivations. Are these derivations inference? Are not informal inferences needed in order to apply the rules governing the constructions of forma derivations (inferring that this operation is an application of that forma rule)? These are concerns cultivated by, for example, Wittgenstein.
Coming up with an adequate characterization of inference-and even working out what would count as a very adequate characterization here is demandingly by no means nearly some resolved philosophical problem.
The rule of inference, as for raised by Lewis Carroll, the Zeno-like problem of how a proof ever gets started. Suppose I have as premises (I) p and (ii) p ➞ q. Can I infer q? Only, it seems, if I am sure of (iii) (p & p ➞ q) q. Can I then infer q? Only, it seems, if I am sure that (iv) (p & p ➞ q & (p & p ➞ q) q) q. For each new axiom (N) I need a further axiom (N + 1) telling me that the set so far implies q, and the regress never stops. The usual solution is to treat a system as containing not only axioms, but also rules of inference, allowing movement from the axioms. The rule modus components allow us to pass from the first premise to ‘q’. Carrolls puzzle shows that distinguishing two theoretical categories is essential, although there may be choice about which theses to put in which category.
Traditionally, a proposition that is not a conditional, as with the affirmative and negative, modern opinion is wary of the distinction, since what appears categorical may vary with the choice of a primitive vocabulary and notation. Apparently categorical propositions may also turn out to be disguised conditionals: 'X' is intelligent (categorical?) Equivalent, if 'X' is given a range of tasks, she does them better than many people (conditional?). The problem is not merely one of classification, since deep metaphysical questions arise when facts that seem to be categorical and therefore solid, come to seem by contrast conditional, or purely hypothetical or potential.
Its condition of some classified necessity is so proven sufficient that if 'p' is a necessary condition of 'q', then 'q' cannot be true unless 'p'; is true? If p is a sufficient condition, thus steering well is a necessary condition of driving in a satisfactory manner, but it is not sufficient, for one can steer well but drive badly for other reasons. Confusion may result if the distinction is not heeded. For example, the statement that 'A' causes 'B' may be interpreted to mean that 'A' is itself a sufficient condition for 'B', or that it is only a necessary condition fort 'B', or perhaps a necessary parts of a total sufficient condition. Lists of conditions to be met for satisfying some administrative or legal requirement frequently attempt to give individually necessary and jointly sufficient sets of conditions.
What is more, that if any proposition of the form if 'p' then 'q'. The condition hypothesized, 'p'. Is called the antecedent of the conditionals, and 'q', the consequent? Various kinds of conditional have been distinguished. Its weakest is that of material implication, merely telling that either 'not-p', or 'q'. Stronger conditionals include elements of modality, corresponding to the thought that if 'p' is truer then 'q' must be true. Ordinary language is very flexible in its use of the conditional form, and there is controversy whether conditionals are better treated semantically, yielding differently finds of conditionals with different meanings, or pragmatically, in which case there should be one basic meaning with surface differences arising from other implicatures.
It follows from the definition of strict implication that a necessary proposition is strictly implied by any proposition, and that an impossible proposition strictly implies any proposition. If strict implication corresponds to 'q' follows from 'p', then this means that a necessary proposition follows from anything at all, and anything at all follows from an impossible proposition. This is a problem if we wish to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments with necessary conclusions or impossible premises.
The Humean problem of induction is that if we would suppose that there is some property A concerning and observational or an experimental situation, and that out of a large number of observed instances of 'A', some fraction m/n (possibly equal to 1) has also been instances of some logically independent property 'B'. Suppose further that the background proportionate circumstances not specified in these descriptions have been varied to a substantial degree and that there is no collateral information available concerning the frequency of B’s among A’s or concerning causal or nomologically connections between instances of 'A' and instances of 'B'.
In this situation, an enumerative or instantial induction inference would move rights from the premise, that m/n of observed 'A's are 'B's to the conclusion that approximately m/n of all 'A's are 'B's. (The usual probability qualification will be assumed to apply to the inference, rather than being part of the conclusion.) Here the class of As should be taken to include not only unobserved 'A's' and future 'A's', but also possible or hypothetical As (an alternative conclusion would concern the probability or likelihood of the adjacently observed 'A' being a 'B').
The traditional or Humean problem of induction, often referred to simply as the problem of induction, is the problem of whether and why inferences that fit this schema should be considered rationally acceptable or justified from an epistemic or cognitive standpoint, i.e., whether and why reasoning in this way is likely to lead to true claims about the world. Is there any sort of argument or rationale that can be offered for thinking that conclusions reached in this way are likely to be true in the corresponding premisses is true ?or even that their chances of truth are significantly enhanced?
Humes discussion of this issue deals explicitly only with cases where all observed 'A's' are 'B's' and his argument applies just as well to the more general case. His conclusion is entirely negative and sceptical: Inductive inferences are not rationally justified, but are instead the result of an essentially a-rational process, custom or habit. Hume (1711-76) challenges the proponent of induction to supply a cogent ligne of reasoning that leads from an inductive premise to the corresponding conclusion and offers an extremely influential argument in the form of a dilemma (a few times referred to as Humes fork), that either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, under which case we are also not responsible for them.
Such reasoning would, he argues, have to be either deductively demonstrative reasoning in the concerning relations of ideas or experimental, i.e., empirical, that reasoning concerning matters of fact or existence. It cannot be the former, because all demonstrative reasoning relies on the avoidance of contradiction, and it is not a contradiction to suppose that the course of nature may change, that an order that was observed in the past and not of its continuing against the future: But it cannot be, as the latter, since any empirical argument would appeal to the success of such reasoning about an experience, and the justifiability of generalizing from experience are precisely what is at issue-so that any such appeal would be question-begging. Hence, Hume concludes that there can be no such reasoning (1748).
An alternative version of the problem may be obtained by formulating it with reference to the so-called Principle of Induction, which says roughly that the future will resemble the past or, somewhat better, that unobserved cases will resemble observed cases. An inductive argument may be viewed as enthymematic, with this principle serving as a supposed premiss, in which case the issue is obviously how such a premiss can be justified. Humes argument is then that no such justification is possible: The principle cannot be justified a prior because having possession of been true in experiences without obviously begging the question is not contradictory to have possession of been true in experiences without obviously begging the question.
The predominant recent responses to the problem of induction, at least in the analytic tradition, in effect accept the main conclusion of Humes argument, namely, that inductive inferences cannot be justified in the sense of showing that the conclusion of such an inference is likely to be true if the premise is true, and thus attempt to find another sort of justification for induction. Such responses fall into two main categories: (I) Pragmatic justifications or vindications of induction, mainly developed by Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953), and (ii) ordinary language justifications of induction, whose most important proponent is Frederick, Peter Strawson (1919-). In contrast, some philosophers still attempt to reject Humes dilemma by arguing either (iii) That, contrary to appearances, induction can be inductively justified without vicious circularity, or (iv) that an anticipatory justification of induction is possible after all. In that:
(1) Reichenbachs view is that induction is best regarded, not as a form of inference, but rather as a method for arriving at posits regarding, i.e., the proportion of As remain additionally of B’s. Such a posit is not a claim asserted to be true, but is instead an intellectual wager analogous to a bet made by a gambler. Understood in this way, the inductive method says that one should posit that the observed proportion is, within some measure of an approximation, the true proportion and then continually correct that initial posit as new information comes in.
The gamblers bet is normally an appraised posit, i.e., he knows the chances or odds that the outcome on which he bets will actually occur. In contrast, the inductive bet is a blind posit: We do not know the chances that it will succeed or even that success is that it will succeed or even that success is possible. What we are gambling on when we make such a bet is the value of a certain proportion in the independent world, which Reichenbach construes as the limit of the observed proportion as the number of cases increases to infinity. Nevertheless, we have no way of knowing that there are even such a limit, and no way of knowing that the proportion of As are in addition of B’s converges in the end on some stable value than varying at random. If we cannot know that this limit exists, then we obviously cannot know that we have any definite chance of finding it.
What we can know, according to Reichenbach, is that if there is a truth of this sort to be found, the inductive method will eventually find it. That this is so is an analytic consequence of Reichenbachs account of what it is for such a limit to exist. The only way that the inductive method of making an initial posit and then refining it in light of new observations can fail eventually to arrive at the true proportion is if the series of observed proportions never converges on any stable value, which means that there is no truth to be found pertaining the proportion of 'A's' additionally constitute 'B's'. Thus, induction is justified, not by showing that it will succeed or indeed, that it has any definite likelihood of success, but only by showing that it will succeed if success is possible. Reichenbachs claim is that no more than this can be established for any method, and hence that induction gives us our best chance for success, our best gamble in a situation where there is no alternative to gambling.
This pragmatic response to the problem of induction faces several serious problems. First, there are indefinitely many other methods for arriving at posits for which the same sort of defence can be given-methods that yield the same result as the inductive method over time but differ arbitrarily before long. Despite the efforts of others, it is unclear that there is any satisfactory way to exclude such alternatives, in order to avoid the result that any arbitrarily chosen short-term posit is just as reasonable as the inductive posit. Second, even if there is a truth of the requisite sort to be found, the inductive method is only guaranteed to find it or even to come within any specifiable distance of it in the indefinite long run. All the same, any actual application of inductive results always takes place in the presence to the future eventful states in making the relevance of the pragmatic justification to actual practice uncertainly. Third, and most important, it needs to be emphasized that Reichenbachs response to the problem simply accepts the claim of the Humean sceptic that an inductive premise never provides the slightest reason for thinking that the corresponding inductive conclusion is true. Reichenbach himself is quite candid on this point, but this does not alleviate the intuitive implausibility of saying that we have no more reason for thinking that our scientific and commonsense conclusions that result in the induction of it . . . is true than, to use Reichenbachs own analogy (1949), a blind man wandering in the mountains who feels an apparent trail with his stick has for thinking that following it will lead him to safety.
An approach to induction resembling Reichenbachs claiming in that those particular inductive conclusions are posits or conjectures, than the conclusions of cogent inferences, is offered by Popper. However, Poppers view is even more overtly sceptical: It amounts to saying that all that can ever be said in favours of the truth of an inductive claim is that the claim has been tested and not yet been shown to be false.
(2) The ordinary language response to the problem of induction has been advocated by many philosophers, none the less, Strawson claims that the question whether induction is justified or reasonable makes sense only if it tacitly involves the demand that inductive reasoning meet the standards appropriate to deductive reasoning, i.e., that the inductive conclusions are shown to follow deductively from the inductive assumption. Such a demand cannot, of course, be met, but only because it is illegitimate: Inductive and deductive reasons are simply fundamentally different kinds of reasoning, each possessing its own autonomous standards, and there is no reason to demand or expect that one of these kinds meet the standards of the other. Whereas, if induction is assessed by inductive standards, the only ones that are appropriate, then it is obviously justified.
The problem here is to understand to what this allegedly obvious justification of an induction amount. In his main discussion of the point (1952), Strawson claims that it is an analytic true statement that believing it a conclusion for which there is strong evidence is reasonable and an analytic truth that inductive evidence of the sort captured by the schema presented earlier constitutes strong evidence for the corresponding inductive conclusion, thus, apparently yielding the analytic conclusion that believing it a conclusion for which there is inductive evidence is reasonable. Nevertheless, he also admits, indeed insists, that the claim that inductive conclusions will be true in the future is contingent, empirical, and may turn out to be false (1952). Thus, the notion of reasonable belief and the correlative notion of strong evidence must apparently be understood in ways that have nothing to do with likelihood of truth, presumably by appeal to the standard of reasonableness and strength of evidence that are accepted by the community and are embodied in ordinary usage.
Understood in this way, Strawsons response to the problem of inductive reasoning does not speak to the central issue raised by Humean scepticism: The issue of whether the conclusions of inductive arguments are likely to be true. It amounts to saying merely that if we reason in this way, we can correctly call ourselves reasonable and our evidence strong, according to our accepted community standards. Nevertheless, to the undersealing of issue of wether following these standards is a good way to find the truth, the ordinary language response appears to have nothing to say.
(3) The main attempts to show that induction can be justified inductively have concentrated on showing that such as a defence can avoid circularity. Skyrms (1975) formulate, perhaps the clearest version of this general strategy. The basic idea is to distinguish different levels of inductive argument: A first level in which induction is applied to things other than arguments: A second level in which it is applied to arguments at the first level, arguing that they have been observed to succeed so far and hence are likely to succeed in general: A third level in which it is applied in the same way to arguments at the second level, and so on. Circularity is allegedly avoided by treating each of these levels as autonomous and justifying the argument at each level by appeal to an argument at the next level.
One problem with this sort of move is that even if circularity is avoided, the movement to higher and higher levels will clearly eventually fail simply for lack of evidence: A level will reach at which there have been enough successful inductive arguments to provide a basis for inductive justification at the next higher level, and if this is so, then the whole series of justifications collapses. A more fundamental difficulty is that the epistemological significance of the distinction between levels is obscure. If the issue is whether reasoning in accord with the original schema offered above ever provides a good reason for thinking that the conclusion is likely to be true, then it still seems question-begging, even if not flatly circular, to answer this question by appeal to anther argument of the same form.
(4) The idea that induction can be justified on a pure priori basis is in one way the most natural response of all: It alone treats an inductive argument as an independently cogent piece of reasoning whose conclusion can be seen rationally to follow, although perhaps only with probability from its premise. Such an approach has, however, only rarely been advocated (Russell, 19132 and BonJour, 1986), and is widely thought to be clearly and demonstrably hopeless.
Many on the reasons for this pessimistic view depend on general epistemological theses about the possible or nature of anticipatory cognition. Thus if, as Quine alleges, there is no a prior justification of any kind, then obviously a prior justification for induction is ruled out. Or if, as more moderate empiricists have in claiming some preexistent knowledge should be analytic, then again a prevenient justification for induction seems to be precluded, since the claim that if an inductive premise is truer, then the conclusion is likely to be true does not fit the standard conceptions of analyticity. A consideration of these matters is beyond the scope of the present spoken exchange.
There are, however, two more specific and quite influential reasons for thinking that an early approach is impossible that can be briefly considered, first, there is the assumption, originating in Hume, but since adopted by very many of others, that a move forward in the defence of induction would have to involve turning induction into deduction, i.e., showing, per impossible, that the inductive conclusion follows deductively from the premise, so that it is a forma contradiction to accept the latter and deny the former. However, it is unclear why a prior approach need be committed to anything this strong. It would be enough if it could be argued that it is deductively unlikely that such a premise is true and corresponding conclusion false.
Reichenbach defends his view that pragmatic justification is the best that is possible by pointing out that a completely chaotic world in which there is simply not true conclusion to be found as to the proportion of As in addition that occur of, but B’s is neither impossible nor unlikely from a purely a prior standpoint, the suggestion being that therefore there can be no a prior reason for thinking that such a conclusion is true. Nevertheless, there is still a substring wayin laying that a chaotic world is a prior neither impossible nor unlikely without any further evidence does not show that such a world os not a prior unlikely and a world containing such-and-such regularity might anticipatorially be somewhat likely in relation to an occurrence of a long-run patten of evidence in which a certain stable proportion of observed A’s are B’s ~. An occurrence, it might be claimed, that would be highly unlikely in a chaotic world (BonJour, 1986).
So, to a better understanding of induction we should then term is most widely used for any process of reasoning that takes us from empirical premises to empirical conclusions supported by the premises, but not deductively entailed by them. Inductive arguments are therefore kinds of applicative arguments, in which something beyond the content of the premise is inferred as probable or supported by them. Induction is, however, commonly distinguished from arguments to theoretical explanations, which share this applicative character, by being confined to inferences in which he conclusion involves the same properties or relations as the premises.
The rational basis of any inference was challenged by Hume, who believed that induction presupposed belie in the uniformity of nature, but that this belief has no defence in reason, and merely reflected a habit or custom of the mind. Hume was not therefore sceptical about the role of reason in either explaining it or justifying it. Trying to answer Hume and to show that there is something rationally compelling about the inference referred to as the problem of induction. It is widely recognized that any rational defence of induction will have to partition well-behaved properties for which the inference is plausible (often called projectable properties) from badly behaved ones, for which it is not. It is also recognized that actual inductive habits are more complex than those of similar enumeration, and that both common sense and science pay attention to such giving factors as variations within the sample giving us the evidence, the application of ancillary beliefs about the order of nature, and so on.
Nevertheless, the fundamental problem remains that ant experience condition by application show us only events occurring within a very restricted part of a vast spatial and temporal order about which we then come to believe things.
Uncompounded by its belonging of a confirmation theory finding of the measure to which evidence supports a theory fully formalized confirmation theory would dictate the degree of confidence that a rational investigator might have in a theory, given some-body of evidence. The grandfather of confirmation theory is Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1718), who believed that a logically transparent language of science would be able to resolve all disputes. In the 20th century a fully forma confirmation theory was a main goal of the logical positivist, since without it the central concept of verification by empirical evidence itself remains distressingly unscientific. The principal developments were due to Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), culminating in his Logical Foundations of Probability (1950). Carnaps idea was that the measure necessitated would be the proportion of logically possible states of affairs in which the theory and the evidence both hold, compared ti the number in which the evidence itself holds that the probability of a preposition, relative to some evidence, is a proportion of the range of possibilities under which the proposition is true, compared to the total range of possibilities left by the evidence. The difficulty with the theory lies in identifying sets of possibilities so that they admit of measurement. It therefore demands that we can put a measure on the range of possibilities consistent with theory and evidence, compared with the range consistent with the evidence alone.
Among the obstacles the enterprise meets, is the fact that while evidence covers only a finite range of data, the hypotheses of science may cover an infinite range. In addition, confirmation proves to vary with the language in which the science is couched, and the Carnapian programme has difficulty in separating genuinely confirming variety of evidence from less compelling repetition of the same experiment. Confirmation also proved to be susceptible to acute paradoxes. Finally, scientific judgement seems to depend on such intangible factors as the problems facing rival theories, and most workers have come to stress instead the historically situated scene of what would appear as a plausible distinction of a scientific knowledge at a given time.
Descartes, because of the principle already established in his method, had first to seek out a solid starting point (a clear and distinct concrete idea), and from this opens his deductive process. To arrive at this solid starting point, he begins with methodical doubt, that is, a doubt that will be the means of arriving at certitude. This differs from the systematic doubt of the Skeptics, who doubt to remain in doubt. Made accessibly available, as far as having made possible to see the doubt of all the impressions that exist within my knowing faculties, whether they are those impressions that come to me through the senses or through the intellect. I may doubt even mathematical truths, in as far as it could be that the human intelligence is under the influence of a malignant genius which takes sport in making what is objectively irrational appear to me as rational.
Doubt is thus carried to its extreme form. Nonetheless, asides this fact, doubt causes to rise in me the most luminous and indisputable certainty. Even presupposing that the entire content of my thought is false, the incontestable truth is that I think: One cannot lack confidence in doubt without thinking, and if I think, I exist: "Cogito ergo sum."
It is to be observed that for Descartes the validity of "Cogito ergo sum" rests in this, that the doubt presents intuitively to the mind the subject who doubts, that is, the thinking substance. In this, Cartesian doubt differs from that of St. Augustine ("Si fallor, sum"), which embodies a truth sufficiently strong to overcome the position of Skepticism. Gainfully to employ the "Cogito ergo sum," Descartes is to presume, not only stifling or to subdue the Skeptic position, but as the supportive foundation for which its structural data format of a primary reality, the existence of the "res cogitans,” is of the essence, in ways too further research, for which it has betaken.
This is the point that distinguishes the classic realistic philosophy from Cartesian and modern philosophy. With Descartes, philosophy ceases to be the science of being, and becomes the science of thought (epistemology). Whereas, at the outset, being applied to as conditioned to thought, now it is thought that conditions being. This principal, mostly realized by the philosophers immediately following Descartes, was to reach its full consciousness in Kant and modern Idealism.
The "Cogito" reveals the existence of the subject, limited and imperfect because liable to doubt. Arriving at an objective and perfect reality is necessary, i.e., to prove the existence of God. Descartes uses three arguments that can be summarized thus: (1) Cogito has given me a consciousness of my own limited and imperfect being. This proves that I have not given existence to myself, for in such a case I would have given myself a perfect nature and not the one I have, which is subject to doubt. (2) I have the idea of the perfect: If I did not possess it, I could never know that I am imperfect. Within all possibilities, from where comes the emergent idea of the perfect? Not from myself, for I am imperfect, and the perfect cannot arise from the imperfect. Therefore it comes from a Perfect Being, that is, from God. (3) The very analysis of the idea of the perfect includes the existence of the perfect being, for just as the valley is included in the idea of a mountain, so also existence is included in the idea of the perfect.
Regarding the nature of God, Descartes chose for less of the same attributes as does traditional Christian theistic thought. In Descartes, however, these attributes assume a different significance and value. God, above all, is absolute substance: The only substance, properly so-called (so the way is open to the pantheism of Spinoza). An attribute that has great value for Descartes is the veracity of God.
God: the perfect being, cannot be deceived and is unable to deceive. Thus, the singularity of God serves as a guarantee for the entire series of collection as acclaimed by an intuitive certainty and its distinctiveness inhabited of such characteristic cleanliness in order, that is readily seen through the perfection of ideas. They are true because if they are not true, I, having proved the existence of God, would have to say that he is deceiving, and perhaps, less than creating a rational creature from which one who is, can be deceived even in the apprehension of clear and distinct ideas. Thus, with the proof of the existence of God, the hypothesis of a malignant genius falls of its own weight.
Regarding the origin of ideas, Descartes holds that the idea of God, all primitive notions, all logical, mathematical, moral principals, and so forth, are innate. God is the guarantee of the truth of these innate ideas. Alongside these innate ideas Descartes distinguishes two other groups of ideas (a) the adventitious, which are derived from the senses; (b) the fictitious, which are fashioned by the thinking subject out of the former. Both groups are considered of little worth by Descartes because they do not enjoy the guarantee of the divine veracity, and so are fonts of error. Only innate ideas and the rational deduction prospered from them have the value of truth. This proves the existence of the world, not from the testimony of our experience of this fact but from the innate idea of the "res extensa." We have a certain idea that is clear (presenting but one quality, extension), and it is distinct from the "res’ cogitans." This idea, granted the veracity of God, cannot be false; Therefore the world exists, and its principal attribute is extension.
Concerning the nature of this corporeal world, Descartes distinguishes between what is presented through the senses (colours, odours, tastes, tactile sensations) and that which comes by way of the intellect, i.e., dimensions, figures, weight, position, motion. The first, not guaranteed by the veracity of God, do not have objective value; they are secondary qualities, modes with which the subject represents reality. The second that, according to Descartes, must be innate ideas, are primary qualities and are guaranteed by the veracity of God; therefore, they are real and objective.
To this we must add the fact that Descartes considers ‘thought’ not as an executed function but as the thinking substance ("res cogitans"), that is, as a soul, whose essence is thought. Forthwith, this is the identification that could only belong to God. Therefore, seeing it in this teaching of Descartes throughout the dangers of unifying the conceptual representations of man and God is easy ("Homo Deus") and consequently the latent danger of pantheism.
In the world of Cartesian matter, there exist no qualities, but only quantity, matter and motion, which act fatally, necessarily and mechanically. The mechanistic concept was to be inherited by Rationalism and Empiricism, which considered the world as a huge machine acting through mechanical forces, without purposes.
Regarding definitive morality, Descartes holds to the full liberty of God, so that all depends on the divine liberty. God, if he so wished, could have created a world governed by moral principals opposed to those with which we hold today. Such ideas bring ethical disaster, in that, if morality is like this would it not be found through its justification in the absolute essence of God or in the arbitrary act of his will.
Granted the present order of creation, Descartes recognizes that the end of man is virtue and happiness. The actuation of this end is caused through reason -through the knowledge of God, of the soul, and of the world. It is attained through knowledge of God because God is the creator and unifier of the universe; of the soul, because the soul makes clear to us our superiority over material nature; of the physical world, because, governed by causal necessity, it teaches man the virtue of resignation and indifference in the face of the evils of life. As evident, Cartesian morality does not greatly differ from Stoic ethics, in which the wise man appeals to reason to assure himself of tranquillity and felicity. Descartes left two questions unsolved: (i) the determination of the relationship between the infinite substance (God) and finite substance (the world), and (ii) the relationship between the spirit-substance (the soul) and the extended substance (body).
To fill the gap that he left between the infinite and finite, between spirit and matter, as it was, only three possible solutions are to be, that only once are we to have had to enjoy of something through the recourse to an earlier shape or type that in all forms that enlighten us to some philosophical deprivation. All three solutions were tried and developed by later philosophers: Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz, whose systems can justly be considered as developments of the rationalistic premises of Cartesian principals.
The first possible solution lay in uniting Cartesianism with Platonism and conceiving of the two Cartesian substances (thought-substance and extended substance) as attributes deriving from a single divine substance. This was the solution of Spinoza, the strongest and most coherent of the Cartesian thinkers. He abolished the distinction between finite and infinite, and explained monistically and pantheistically the procession of the finite from the infinite. Spinoza answered the first of the unsolved questions, that of the relationship between God and creatures. Nonetheless, he maintained the second distinction and determined the relationship between soul and body by a psycho-physical law: That which is produced in thought by it’s very nature finds’ determination in extension (body).
The second possible solution came from Augustinians. Augustinians, faced with the impossibility of deriving ideas from experience, had recourse to God, to a divine illumination in which God’s very implantation to not any but of more ideas that implicate man as having to enact in the light of a unique and comprehensible intellect. This supernatural intervention or influence could be extended to all finite reality in a way that filled the gap between the infinite and the finite, between spirit and matter, through the intervention of God Himself. This was the solution taken by Malebranche, according to whom creatures are the simple occasions; a direct intervention of God is the direct cause of all effects -Occasionalism.
As Christian Malebranche maintains the distinction between God and the world, two forces, which were unified in Spinoza. However, in determining the relationship between God and the world, Malebranche also has recourse to repose of God. By this he obtainably achieves the originality that is found, through the means of the latent constructs that seem most effectively striking for the Cartesian Rationalists. That, not to acknowledge the conceptual substances, is not to exceed in the differentiations between any two substances, from which will be found to have all of the same. The third possible solution was sought in bringing Cartesian Rationalism into some related harmonic symmetry with Aristotelian Scholasticism. Yet, to endeavour through the persuasions, least of mention, those that have possession for bringing us to a certain state of particular satisfactions, in that of some fixed relationship between spirit and matter can by way of accommodating any of the ideas from which are construed by their conceptual determinants. Their circulatory spontaneity is comparatively distributively contributive, as they over flow within the dynamics of emptiness, by that, their participating functions are accorded by laws that pre-established the penetrations curtailed through discovery, also, it might be to some effect, that their appraisals are very much as been sanctioned from God. This law would also explain the relationship between the finite and the infinite. The monad of Leibniz is developed according to a pre-established harmony; its development is a passage or transition from a potential state to a state of representation.
In the face of these intrinsic deficiencies and in spite of appositional constraints with which Cartesianism has caused, in a major way there is given to appear of both subject fields of philosophy (Gassendi, Hobbes), and the religiosity of combining formidable denominations (both Catholic and Protestant), bringing together the estranged dissimilarities by foreign legitimacies that are thoroughly categorized by enforcing priorities of culminating Cartesianism, but, it is nonetheless, that a spread of rapid emigration throughout Europe and representations in the dominant vectors of thought, so let us be pleased of the ripening season. It influenced all branches of culture. Catholic thinkers for example, those at noted centres like the Paris Oratory and the Benedictine abbey of Port-Royal, favoured the supereminent position it gave to God and the soul. The Jansenist polemics that Cartesianism instigated are a proof of this; Scientists liked the geometric spirit of the system; philosophers and litterateurs were pleased with the clear and distinct ideas and the spirit of criticism carried out according to rational methods. The classic land of Cartesianism, naturally, is France during its golden age of literature, the age of Louis XIV.
Descartes proves the existence of the world, not from the testimony of our experience of this fact but from the innate idea of the "res extensa." We have a certain idea that is clear (presenting but one quality, extension), and it is distinct from the "res’ cogitans." This idea, granted the veracity of God, cannot be false; therefore the world exists, and its principal attribute is extension.
Concerning the nature of this corporeal world, Descartes distinguishes between what is presented through our senses (colours, odours, tastes, tactile sensations) and that which comes by way of the intellect, i.e., dimensions, figures, weight, position, motion. The first, not guaranteed by the veracity of God, do not have objective value; they are secondary qualities, modes with which the subject represents reality. The second that, according to Descartes, must be innate ideas, are primary qualities and are guaranteed by the veracity of God; so they are real and objective.
The Cartesian World is characterized by the essential attribute of extension ("res extensa"), which is infinite. In this extension the power of God has placed force and movement, which are determined by the principal of absolute causality. Not purpose (finalism), but mechanical determination (the laws governing matter and mathematical motion) governs the succession of phenomena in the physical world, in the "res extensa." The world is a machine. The inorganic world, plants and animals, and even man, to his body, are machines governed in the laws existent through the causality of motion.
The integrated priority bestowed of the Cartesian system rests upon its metaphysical dualism: "res cogitans" (God and the human soul) and "res’ extensa" (the corporeal world). These two realities are irreducible, in so far as thought, liberty and activity are essential to the world of the thinking being, and extension, mechanical determinism and passivity are essential to the world of the "res extensa." All reciprocal action between the two substances is excluded because it is impossible. Thus there is opened up the problem that was later to be taken up by rationalism: the determination of the relationship between spirit and matter; between God (the infinite spirit) and the world (finite matter).
Rationalism, however, is a philosophical system based on methods of inquiry grounded in reason, primarily that of mathematical deductive reasoning. Discounting sensory experience as the source of knowledge, extreme rationalists believe that all complex systems of information, such as the truths of the physical sciences and history can be derived simply by thinking about the subjects as consequences of axiomatic principle and their logical corollaries.
Rene Descartes is one best-known proponent of rationalism. He sought to outline a process of philosophical thought that was independent of the old scholastic and theological traditions of his time. Believing that all sound judgments must go on from a mathematical basis, he created of what is called “The Cartesian Method.” Its four basic laws are as follows: The Cartesian Methods comprise as of: (1) Committing to nothing, would define of anyone as not to accept any propositions as true, that are not clear and distinct. (2) Break a problem down into its constituent parts and analyse it as such. (3) Structure thoughts from simple too complex as the order of study. (4) Enumerations must be complete with nothing omitted.
This systematic approach is a way that mathematics is structurally given. As, Descartes applied it to philosophy with which its intention was that it might make metaphysically inquire into the supplementary formality as distinguished through the methodological clearnesses justly as of making of analogous examples much as they can be made clearly by meaning. Making into of what might be agreeable, is that of the satisfactory behaviour -fixed and as a user of this method that is mostly famous to the Cartesian statement: "Cogito ergo sum" (I think; therefore I exist), where he formed the basis for his metaphysics. He thought that doubt was simply a different form of thought, so "doubting" that one did exist was not a serious threat to validity of that principal. It was the intuitively known axiom that formed the basis for the rest of Descartes' philosophy of Rationalism.
Descartes' next work was with the concept of God, a perfect being in his belief that he sought to prove in existence of, . . . He constructed his proof in the following manner, following his own Rationalist method to do so: The Cartesian Proof of God: (A) I am subject to doubt; therefore I am "the perfect" to grasp onto the imperfect; thus, I am not the cause of my existence. (B) I have the "idea" of "the perfect." This idea must come from a perfect Being. That to a greater extent and made clearly satisfactorily, when its point is implied directorially furnished by the analysis of the idea does the existence of the perfect being.
As for ideas, Descartes holds that some ideas come from God; these ideas are innate. Others are derived from sensory experience, and still others are fictitious, that is; they are created by the imagination. He thinks that the only ideas from which are, in fact, valid in those that are innate. All others are subject to fallacy. Also, central to Descartes' argument was his notion of the dualism of substances. Cartesian thought has remained central to philosophy, especially during the 17th century of almost 300 years since. Its understanding of a regiment of guideline principal is most fundamental to grasping rationalism itself. Descartes left several things out of his medium-line of reasoning, in particular, his analysis of God and his lack of defining the interconnection between the sensory and rational world. Other proponents of rationalism would attempt to rectify these problems as rationalism was developed as to simplify a philosophic system after Descartes.
Another famous rationalist, Baruch Spinoza, expanded upon the basic principal of rationalism. His philosophy entered on several principal, most of which relied on his notion that God was the only absolute substance; this idea is very similar to Descartes' conception of God. Spinoza argued that God was a substance composed of two attributes: thought and extension. "Substance" in Spinoza's view is something actual, eternal and perceived by the intellect. Any attributes that a substance has define its essence.
Spinoza also defined the term "mode" in his philosophy to be any variations or modification of that basic substance; essentially they are different forms of a similar thing. He believed that man and all aspects of the natural world were modes of the eternal substance of God. God can only be known through pure thought. This fact is distinctly rationalist; Spinoza thought that the only eternal substance could be known via reason alone, not sensory evidence. Through ethics, then, Spinoza believed that all moral behaviour could only be defined by the fact that we were variations on the definitions, so morality had to come through a definition of God's essence.
Gottfried Leibniz was another famous rationalist. Determined to rectify some problems that were not ratified by Descartes, he explored certain Aristotelian notions and attempted to combine Descartes' work with Aristotle's concept of form. He so believed that ideas exist in the intellect innately, however through his virtuality that established a sense that it is only when the mind reflects upon its own Beingness that it soon becomes actualized. Most of what is real of the substance, the real from Leibniz's point of view, which is the “monad.” Monads are not things of extension, or have the continuance through succession and bring forth a progressive expansion, moreover, all without any supplementary delay. Every bit as their similarity is built upon the same edifice under which is to its supporting structure by which Spinoza, in addition to the many things that include of its strengthening activity, may consist of representational states that are pleasantly apperceptive in their boasting representations that peak within their existent force fields of consciousness. All activity that is represented in the monads is regulated by God, a being that is also a “monad.”
Rationalism relies on the idea that reality has a rational structure in that all aspects of it can be grasped through mathematical and logical principle and not simply sensory experience. Ethical and political principals are structures accorded of what is often given in agreement to the concepts of God as the absolute for moral conduct. The mind under this doctrine is not ‘a blank slate,’ thinking that these are not blank imprints seems positive, but show the evidence for providing senses of some functional details that evoke, least of mention, the principal by whom of responding to mathematical formulation and makes for methodological reason as exceptionally cognate.
It is not really as overwhelming that the philosophical/theological error that we call "modernism" should begin with a dream. The dream, or actualities of self as perhaps are an arousing set of consecutive dreams, that happened on the night of November 10, 1619, the vigil of the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, under which a time of great feasting in the France of Rene Descartes' time. We are right to wonder whether Descartes ‘protests too much’, when he asserted in his autobiographical work that he had abstained from wine for some time before the night of his famous dreams. What he does admit, however, is that for several days before his experience, which would transform the basic orientation of philosophy, he had felt a "steady rise of temperature in his head."
The young Descartes, some 23 years old when he found himself on that cold November night "shut up alone in a stove-heated room, had been quite an eccentric in his early years. Might there be of some controversy between English-speaking commentators about their concerns that regard of whether poles show that Descartes was "shut up in a stove-heated room" or that he was "shut up in a stove," or whether of possibilities that might say that, “Dogs bark” is true, or whether they simply say that, dogs bark, still might they say that the truth condition of “snow is white” is that snow is white, also saying that “Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded” is that Britain would have capitulated had Hitler invaded? These disputed elementary definition of running-on-the-spot disqualifies truth conditions from playing the central role in a substantive theory of meaning. It is, that Descartes' periodic intervals of general restlessness of spirit (not surprising if he were in the habit of shutting himself up in stoves) had manifested themselves during his adolescent years when he left behind his Jesuit schooling, of which he had a decidedly mixed impression, and "took up the book of the world." Tired of what he felt to be the endless intellectual discussions and controversies that taxed and left dubious the minds of so many, he put aside the reading of books and took up the practical matter of war, which the Central Europe of the early seventeenth century had made available to him as the 30 Years War between the forces of the Habsburg Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and those of the Protestant Princes of Northern Europe. It was as a "fighting man" of the army of the Duke of Bavaria (although, no historic evidence had been given by Descartes, only for which he did not assert strongly of), that he found himself on that November day, holed up in a stove-heated room, wintering with the army in the German city of Ulm.
On this day, Descartes was meditating on the "disunity and uncertainty" of his knowledge. Since his days at the Jesuit lycee [i.e., high-school/college] at La Fleche, he had marvelled at mathematics, especially geometry, a science in which he found certainty, necessity, and precision. How could he find a basis for all knowledge so that it might have the same unity and certainty as mathematics? Having in mind, for several years, a project and method to bring all the sciences together within the context of new universal philosophical "wisdom," Descartes interpreted the vivid dreams that he had connected along with the night of the Vigil of the Feast of St. Martin as a sign from God Himself. From that moment on, Descartes would believe that he had a divine mandate to establish an all-encompassing science of human wisdom. He himself was so convinced of this divine endorsement of his "mission," that he would make a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto in Thanksgiving for this "favour."
What could be the contextual representation as regarded to some immeasurable value of dreams, in that it promotes itself of the passions that are unformidably caused by the senses. However the objectivity, that its mission has taken to be so seriously that Descartes was ready to modulate all systems of thought developed before his own, perhaps, the exclusive passion of Scholasticism, was an owing requisite for his ‘pre-Philosophic.’
As for these dreams, it is the third that best expresses the original thought and intention of Rene Descartes' rationalism. During the dream that William Temple aptly calls, "the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe," Descartes saw before him two books. One was a dictionary, which appeared to him to be of little interest and use. The other was a compendium of poetry entitled Corpus Poetarum in which may have the quality of being a union of philosophy in the accompaniment of wisdom. Moreover, the way in which Descartes interpreted this dream set the stage for the rest of his life-long philosophical endeavours. For Descartes, the dictionary stood merely for the sciences gathered in their sterile and dry disconnection; the collection of poems marked more particularly and expressly the union of philosophy with wisdom. He shows that one should not be astonished that poets abound in utterances more weighty, and even more fulling is their meaning and fully expressed, than those found in the writings of philosophers. In each phraseological oddity enough there comes to the conclusion from of a man who would go down in history as the father of Rationalism. As justified by Descartes’ associates he comes through as the “marvel” of wisdom, and to this, is with poets whose divine nature into which their inspiration and that dare have its phantasy. Only from which they’ll “strike out” the seeds of enlightenment, they’re, is existing in the minds of all men like the sparking flames of awareness. By that of burning from the embers that once their glow gave into aflame, the fires of consciousness and their striking effortlessly indirect. Under which the more complacent came for itself, giving reason to posit for itself within the ease of philosophy. The written inscriptions by some professional philosophers of his time, have charged Descartes for failing to extend the assuring certainty for which the human urgency, and charismatic presentation with which we associate with the manifestations as capably organizing our knowledge and influencing our behavioural conduct.
It would be an unfortunate intellectual and historical mistake to take Rene Descartes for a relativist, who wished to undermine all certainty, along with dividing the individual sciences from each other into airtight compartments. That the contemporary result of Cartesian Rationalism has been nothing but relativism and the fragmentation of knowledge is, simply, the ironic outcome of Descartes' efforts toward the attainment of certainty and "universal mathematics." Here we must remember the traditional Aristotelian/Thomistic understanding that each specific science, e.g., botany and entomology had not only its own proper object of study (e.g., plants or insects), but, also, its own proper method of investigation and demonstration. This is why Descartes' insistence upon a single "universal" method, resembling the method employed in geometry, are so destructive and disorienting. As we will be shown the clear and explicative comprehension for which the method that Descartes constructs to achieve scientific certainty, it was his departure from agreed upon philosophical principle and fundamental presuppositions that causes the philosophical trend he initiates to steer the post-Christian mind into the ditch of democratic relativism and religious indifferentism.
To clear an operated misconception about the thought of Rene Descartes will be needed to emphasize that although Mathematics, particularly the mathematical science of Geometry. They’re being for which collocated with to provisions for Descartes the general structure and procedure of his intellectual method, it must be remembered that Descartes did not at all view Mathematics as the highest and most intellectually efficacious science. Borrowed from the Mathematical "methods," which he defines as “reliable rules,” that are easy to apply, and such that if one follows them exactly, one will never take what is false to be true or fruitlessly expend one's mental efforts, but will gradually and constantly invariant changes of the increasing abilities for ones knowledge (scientia) till one arrives at a true understanding within one's capacity. What disturbed Descartes about his own intellectual milieu was that men of learning were becoming specialists to the extent that they were forgetting achieving the state of "wisdom," which had traditionally been the objective of both philosopher and sage.
The image that Descartes used to portray his understanding of the new rationalist scientific "wisdom," was a tree, the "tree of wisdom." Every tree has three appearances, roots from which the tree is fixed to the ground and from which it gains its nourishment. The trunk of the tree that is the main quantitative mass of the tree and upholds the branches, and, finally, the branches that produce the flower or the fruit that both perpetuate the tree’s existence and expresses of the highest productive capabilities, and analogously from the tree, so to with the tree of philosophical and scientific knowledge. Descartes identifies the roots of the tree with metaphysics, especially the three most fundamental metaphysical concepts of God, the human thinking self, and the external material world. These three ideas, we can see the inevitable movement of Rationalism and all the philosophical schools related to it. The most fundamental realities in existence are spoken of and philosophically treated as ideas rather than things, provide the intellectual justification for the "trunk" of the tree, a philosophically grounded physics that would give an account of all motions of quantitative being. The three branches, which Descartes speaks of, are the practical sciences of ethics, mechanics, and medicine. These three were the sciences, which Descartes felt had to be necessarily grounded in metaphysical knowledge, which would allow people to attain the goal that Descartes stated to be the primary goal of his new scientific method, making humanity the "master of nature."
It is for us to see that, from the perspective of the perennial philosophical tradition, Descartes has inverted the very orientation of pedagogy and scientific speculation. In a very real way, Descartes' tree is "upside down." The practical arts and sciences should serve as the practical "ground" (i.e., in the sense of providing for the necessary ordering of the physical and social realm of man) for the ultimate act of human intelligence that of intellectual contemplation of nature, the human soul, and most especially God. In Descartes' "Tree of Wisdom," the newly characterized "ideas" of God, the human "self," and the external material world, are only the intellectually efficacious principles, which allow for the deduction of an entire system of truths derived from an analysis of the conceptual necessities inherent in the "ideas" of God, the human thinking self, and the external material world themselves. In other words, what ought to be the highest object of intellectual contemplation -the goal and fruit of all scientific speculations become no more than a necessary intellectual step in a logical method that has as its intent the subjection of nature to the natural wishes and desires of man. It is interesting that Descartes had as one of his greatest hopes for his new rationalist science, the indefinite extension of a human longevity. That Descartes himself should have died at the young age of 54, after a short spell of cold weather in Stockholm, Sweden in 1650, foreshadowed the sterility of rationalist "first principles" both in the speculative and in the practical domains.
What is prototypically necessitated, is how a system can be consenting by referring to by name "rationalism" and, yet, appear prima facies to be so counterintuitive and irrational. Descartes' honest hope to derive all scientific knowledge concerning the structure and motions of the universe in a deductive way from three "self-evident" ideas by simply analysing the conceptual necessities inherent in those ideas appears not only supremely irrational, but also downright fanciful. It is not surprising that the young scientist Huygens, who was both a physicist and an astronomer, along with being a contemporary of Descartes, saw nothing more in Descartes' great "scientific" work Principes de la philosophe, than an extraordinarily interesting novel. What is even more irrational and counter-intuitive, which Descartes understood thoroughly as a necessity by which its deriving continence to this literal "universe?" Scientific knowledge as based from the idea that Descartes had in himself these existing qualities as to assign a characteristic attribute or the condition from which some processes may have availabilities, least of mention, that individually purposive, must we then have our way of being to think. In every way, it is entirely guised for a thinking being, that may have its ways for any-one particular science, especially of ones own mind and by determining that the mind itself is, by conceiving its own ideas is likely clearer and distinctly certain to falsity and for what is true. Bringing into a different state by some sorted justification, for which are those of the Rationalists of the 17th and 18th centuries, upheld in teaching about humanly civilized intellectual autonomies. In that continues of both the absolute and that without the insignificant basis in any normal human experience. Moreover, one significant consequence of such a view of human knowledge was the rejection of all appeals to authority, both philosophical and dogmatic, in establishing intellectual certainty. Another part of the fall out of the Rationalist attack on the Thomistic synthesis of theological and philosophical learning, was the relegation of Theology, since it could not be derived from the idea of the thinking self, to the realm of "catechism," which was upheld solely based on faith. Thus, Cartesian Rationalism would relegate the believing man to a position of fideisms (i.e., an act of blind faith, unsupported or unsupportable by rational proof or argument).
Descartes’s theory of knowledge starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-point or foundation on the basis alone of which progress is possible, however, the uses of hyperbolic doubt, or Cartesian doubt of investigating the extent of knowledge and its basis in reason or experience used by Descartes in the first two Meditations. It attempts to put knowledge upon a secure foundation by first inviting us to suspend judgement on any proposition whose truth can be doubted, as a bare possibility. The standards of acceptance are gradually raised as we are asked to doubt the deliverance of memory, the senses, and even reason, all of which can let us down. The process is eventually dramatized in the figure of the evil demon, or “malin génie,” whose aim is to deceive us, so that our senses, memories and reasoning lead us astray. Making a request for then becomes one of finding some demon-proof points of certainty, and Descartes produces this in the famous “Cogito ergo sum,” T think, therefore I am. It is on this slender basis that the correct use of our faculties has to be re-established, but apparently Descartes has denied himself any materials to use in reconstructing the edifice of knowledge. He has a basis, but no way of building on it without invoking principles that will not be demon-proof, and so will not meet the standards that has apparently set himself. Interpreting him as using is possible “clear and distinct ideas” to prove the existence of God, whose benevolence e then justifies our use of clear and distinct ideas, e.g., “God is no deceiver,” this is the notorious “Cartesian circle.” Descartes’s own attitude to this problem is not quite, at times he seems more concerned with providing a stable body of knowledge that our natural faculties will endorse, than one that meets the more severe standards with which he starts. For example, in the second set of “Replies” he shrugs off the possibility of “absolute falsity” of our natural system of belief, in favour of our right to retain “any conviction so firm that it is quite incapable of being destroyed.” The need to add such natural belief to anything certified by reason is eventually the cornerstone of Hume’s philosophy, in the basis of most 20th-century reactions to the method of doubt.
By locating the point of certainty in my own awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of various counter-attacks speaking for social and public starting-points. The metaphysicians associated with this priority are the famous Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter have two different but interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly sees that it takes divine dispensation to certify any relationship between the two realms’ thus divided, nd to prove te reliability of the senses invokes a “clear and distinct perception” of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a benevolent deity. Thus, has not net general acceptance: as Hume drily puts it, “to have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.”
In his own time Descartes’s conception of the entirely separate substance of the mind was recognized to cause insoluble problems of the nature of the caudal connection between the two. Although the theory of Occasionalism has never been widely popular, and in its application to the mind-body problem many philosophers would say that it was the result of misconceived Cartesian dualism. It also causes the problem, insoluble in its own terms, of “other minds.” Descartes’s notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is stark illustration of the problem. In his conception of matter, Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation over anything derived from the senses. Since we can conceive chainages to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an entirely geometrical one, with extensions and motion as its only physical nature.
It is, nonetheless, adeptly derived of these foundational "first notions" (i.e., of God, the thinking self, and the external material world) from which all the rest of human knowledge and science would be derived in an deductively fashion (i.e., before and exclusive of any sensible experience of the external natural world), the mind, according the Cartesian Method, needed to engage in two distinct processes. The first was analysis and the second was synthesis. Analysis involved "dividing up each difficulty that I was to examine into as many parts as possible and as seemed requisite. Descartes was convinced that he had followed this way of analysis (really, what should be called reductionism), in his most influential book, The Meditations on First Philosophy, by resolving the bounteous data of human knowledge and experience into the primary existential proposition, Cogito, ergo sum, i.e., I think, therefore, I am.
According to Descartes, all mental content could be reduced to three "innate" (i.e., meaning "in born," that is, not gained by experience of the external world known through the senses) ideas, the idea that I have of myself, the idea I have of God, and the idea I have of materiality. These ideas were to be grasped with an absolute and certain intuition. By "intuition," Descartes meant a purely intellectual activity, and intellectual "seeing" or "vision," which is so clear and distinct that it leaves no room for doubt. In another definition of intuition, Descartes said, "Intuition is the conception, without doubt, of an unclouded and attentive mind, which springs from rational analysis alone." It was from these primary and "irreducible" ideas, which Cartesian Rationalism believed it could derive, through the intellectual process of deduction, all the content of human science and wisdom. That such an theoretical (i.e., that which is gained before and independent of concrete, sensible experience of the material world) conception of human science could ever pass itself off as "rationalism," is one of many ironies presented in the history of philosophy. Surely such counterintuitive gibber can only be explained by the Cartesian desire to establish the mind’s reasoning processes about which the foundation of the mind itself, rather than on a rational and lived encounter with a material created order that the mind necessarily recognizes to exist independently of the thinking "self."
Several years have now since passed, when I realized how numerously faithless opinions that in my youth I had taken to be lawfully-begotten, and in such a way how doubtfully attributed were the subsequent constructs caused to be joined into a mass upon them. Thus I realized that once in my life I had to raze everything and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences, in that providing those who follow this revolution are casually the entire orientation and objective philosophical study. As we have but to see Descartes' proposed intention toward becoming empty, in that which the edifice of his previously held opinions might be build upon those discredited misunderstands, as if by some new structural foundation that supports the possibility of some positional condition, least of mention, be that for out-of-the-ordinary is a contest that in every doubt there has been spoken by the Skeptics, under which it could possibly be among the misguided. It is the key to understanding Descartes, however, that we realize that he commenced his method to eliminate doubt by appealing to doubt. This Cartesian technique of employing doubt to achieve an overcoming of doubt and a putative certainty can be called a methodological doubt (i.e., it is a doubt employed so that all doubt can be overcome). The most important thing to notice here is that Descartes begins his philosophical reflection with doubt, rather than the wonder at the order of material creation that characterizes Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophy. Since Descartes realized that he could not analyse, in any reasonable amount of time, all of his opinions that he had newfound doubts about, he writes that: Nor therefore need I survey each opinion individually, a task that would be never-ending. Because of countervailing circumstances, the substructure of functional causation, in what of anytime can put up a reinforced edifice upon it, yet to crumble of its own accordance, so, then, I will attack of those principles that supported everything as I had once to believe.
What the death-defying crafts of Cartesian Doubt and Rationalism hits were the twin towers, of the Aristotelian philosophical system, (1) our trust that the ideas in our minds are simply perfect reflections of the perceived object in the natural world and (2) the understanding that the five senses give us a real and exact knowledge of the natures of things in the material world. These two attacks were definitely part of a philosophical jihad on Aristotle and his explanation of nature and the human mind and person, however, to forget this overarching anti-Aristotelian aim, would be to overlook the essence. In this regard, we must say that Descartes himself was more anti-Aristotelian than anti-Thomistic, since he admitted, near the end of his life, that he had never read St. Thomas' Summa Theologiae and, even, regretted the fact. What he knew about St. Thomas was, therefore, received second hand from his scholastic manuals and his Jesuit teachers.
Descartes tells us that it is the information supplied to us by sensation that is the primary object of attack in his attempt to "strike at the foundations" of his former opinions. It was his "uncertainty" about the reliability of the data of sensation and of the images in the imagination, which have their origin in the sensible species coming from sensation, that provoked him to state the following: "Surely whatever I had admitted until now as most true I received either from the senses or through the senses. However, I have noticed that the senses are sometimes deceptive. It is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once.” Following adhesive yet congestive conditions from which we are to conclude, if, in at all, to any drawn conclusions upon the observation made at the beginning of this essay, in that, we must, as much of Descartes' philosophical analysis correlated upon any relation by which Descartes himself, assails to the phenomenon of dreaming. At the end of the Meditation, Descartes states that it was the continual misjudgment that the mind warranty made throughout the relational and otherwise distribution of dynamic functional states that were of the dreams. Most undermining of his trust became the shape of future events, in that his sensible experience of the world and the surrounding surfaces about him. In Meditation one, Descartes states that his normal trust in the veracity of his mental experience of the sensible world was all “all right” was I not a man who is accustomed to sleeping at night, and to experiencing in my dreams the very same things, or now and then even fewer plausible ones, as these insane people do when they are awake.
By inserting this slight doubt concerning the veracity of his sensible and imaginative experience, Descartes moved to the next stage of his method that was to state that, should I withhold my assent no less from an opinion that is not completely certain and unconditionally would I of those be patently false. Consequently, it will suffice for the rejection of all these opinions, if I find in each some reason for doubt. It would, therefore, for the sake of a procedural method supposed to yield only certain and specified knowledge. Descartes is going to reject as deceptive and distortive all his ideas that have their origin in sensation.
Descartes' mathematicians had against the probable will even turn themselves upon the science of mathematics, when, in his attempt to radicalize his methodological doubt, Descartes will postulate the idea of an evil genius. This "evil genius" is used as a conceptual device to undermine our trust in the certainty of our judgments concerning mathematical truths. That 4+4=8 seems perfectly evident, with no serious reason for doubt. However, what if a being had created me who wanted to deceive me and he made me so that everything that I take to be absolutely certain is false. With this idea of a creative "evil genius," Descartes clears the mental field of all certain that could upstage his autonomous thinking self.
It is in Meditation two, where Descartes initiates the long-lasting trend, which we could name “philosophical modernism” or “subjectivism,” which bears its bitter fruit in the New Theology of the 20th century. It is here where we see the fatal “movement toward the thinking self,” under which characterizes most of the philosophical movements endured of the last 350 years. It is, no doubt, fitting that Descartes use this counterintuitive idea of the ‘evil creative genius’, finally to achieve his one absolute certain truth, the truth that his own thinking mind exists, precisely just when he is thinking the idea “I exist.” Descartes, is referring to the methodological device of the ‘evil genius’ states, ‘there is some deceiver or other who is supremely powerful and overshading shrewdness by whom in which are always deliberating deceive against me. Then there is no doubt that I exist, if he is deceiving me. Let him do his best at deception, he will never bring it about that I am nothing while I will think that I am something’. Descartes must exist, since even if there was such a thing as an "evil genius" who is perpetually deceiving him, still he must exist to be deceived. The very fact of his possible complete deception is proof for the certain existence of the thinking self. Descartes has found his first certainty; he has established a new foundation for philosophy. For all those who follow in his wake, philosophy will have as its grounding human consciousness, and it will have as its subject matter the ideas present in the human mind.
Descartes, however, whatever the ultimate philosophical consequences of his ideas, did not want to fall into a position of solipsism (i.e., the philosophical position that states that the only things which one can know are the ideas in one's own mind). Yet to avoid this imprisoning subjectivism, Descartes needed to establish that there existed a being that had its existence independently of Descartes' own thinking self. He, also, needed to discover an "idea" not subject to doubt, which would be conceptually rich enough to yield an entire physics of the material world. Descartes knew that the idea that he had of himself was as dominantly characterized by virtue of the enacting toward his thinking and willing of himself yet, was not enough. The only reality that could fit the bill was God Himself, and infinite, perfect, and all-powerful Being. However, an existent God for which is merely an idea, would not yield such results. Descartes', however, began an undertaking of Meditation three, given to turn, he was to provide some explanation as to the factual analysis that Descartes has had to an idea of God in his mind. In that, his God was truly existent and justifiably infinite, perfect, and the all-powerful Being. Even though, in doing this, Descartes uses a doubtless old argument called the ‘ontological argument.’ Nonetheless, it is the use of such an argument for resolving such profound and effectual charges against the modernity that philosophy and theology’s identified position for which their interconnection is or belongs to the idea of God.
Descartes' proof for the real existence of God, being restricted by his method to analysing his own ideas and not the created natural world around him, is that since he had an idea of a God who was an infinite and perfect being, that God must truly exist, since he, as a limited and imperfect thinking self, could not be the origin of the idea of an unlimited and perfect being. If there is to be an existent God, he would perhaps, be one who endures the unlimited and oversees our expansive universe as perfectly impervious, must he have inscribed all reasons, for that Descartes’ conditional state of mind, has taken to be his idea from which he becomes the activator of himself. Therefore, God must truly exist and he must exist independently of Descartes' thinking self.
Having secured the real existence of God, Descartes uses the perfection of God to deduce of his veracity (i.e., God does not lie). If it is against God's nature to be a deceitful evil genius, then I can imply that what I, His creature, perceives as "clear and distinct" with my mind or what is told me by God-given "common sense" (what Descartes calls the “teachings of nature”) from which it becomes the true and intuitively certain. One thing taught me by my "common sense" is that the ideas that I have of the material world come to me from outside me. Since the Creator God is not a deceiver, we can imply that such a material world, independent of the thinking self, truly exists.
When at the end of Meditation (6), the last of the meditations, Descartes says, "Therefore I should no longer fear that those things that are daily shown me by the senses are false. On the contrary, the hyperbolic doubts of the last few days ought to be rejected as ludicrous," one is lead to believe that the created and uncreated orders, as they stood before the employment of the rationalist doubt, have now been reinforced as they were with the added note of ‘mathematical’ certainty. This initial impression is deceptive, however. Coming out from the employment of a universal and radical doubt, the basic realities, of God, man, and the natural material world have been transformed. Man has become a thinking thing. A thing that is philosophically and epistemologically restricted to analysis finds of itself its own ideas, in that the encompassing moderation related by its consciousness will seem as to over flow in the consumerist shopping mall.
The material, and perhaps, all physical theoretic correlations are taken to be an existence along the guide lines of something as already confronting us, how more real are the subjective matters and the opposing physical theories that are measures throughout the world that emerges from this doubt. Ours’ being the one under which Aristotle and St. Thomas gave in the spoken exchange, a world-view of quality values and essences from which we are the same in our motions and potential movement’s of persuasion. That the “cradle” of every Being whereby it may prove of an indirect displacement for which in those might show of its complementarities, in why reasons that justify the intermittent intervals through which time will escape by unseen suspensions that radiate its remittance. The ending of all things can in this way be as one might say, that God Himself, as Descartes explicates too further explain that upon such a rational application, and by it’s very orientation that he centres of all applicable origins, that it seems almost immediate that he adjoins of a nucleated position, and can stand openly acquainted, perhaps, as toward a better understanding of what it should be, as he built upon an edifice of supporting fundamental and yet structural foundations that by exaggerated assertions that is visualizability, viewed through those of which are universally secured by supportive constructions that can only generate its orbited centre. This, of course, is in opposition from being orbital. The red rose has become, not to mention, as a thing to be marvelled at, but also a thing to be measured. Their illuminated aspects of some measurable nature are in those that must be taken seriously by modern science and education. Only from which we are merely those that can emphasize far and beyond of what nature can be measured by quantification and depreciative measure. The ghost of human consciousness floats from mall to machine.
It is the reality of God, however, which suffers the most abuse from Descartes' rationalist method, though it seems as if no one in the history of philosophy has "used" God more extensively than does Descartes. Now, however, God is reduced to a "fruitful" idea that helps Descartes achieve the practical scientific results that he is much in need for those who really are in want. When Nietzsche says that, echoing Hegel, that "God is dead," for which he is simply stating that the "idea" of God, has slipped out, for good, of the consciousness of European Man. Justly as for caused latency, if in fact, that proves of being to exist of some non-committed presents, in other words, of his acknowledged death only causes of God’s owing recognition. The God known by the plenitude of his creation, always studiously avoided by Descartes' deductively mind, is thus banished and, therefore, hidden from the inquiring man’s reflective eye.
When considering the fallout from the Rationalist "razing" of Scholastic philosophy in so much of the Christian World, more most be considered than merely the obvious subjectivism and encroaching relativism seen for the past 350 years. It was the point in which Descartes agreed with the Skeptics of his time, their rejection of the reliability of sensation as a foundation for understanding, which should concern us most and show the path of restoration ahead. Now, in the contemporary process of education, the young are being presented with mathematical reconstructions of the world around them. Having been reduced to its quantitative aspects, at least for the "hard sciences," the world of common human experience is ignored while reconstructed "models" of reality are presented to the young mind. Since God, the real God and not the "idea" of God of course, did not make man to interact, both physically and psychologically, with Cartesian models of things, there will necessarily be, and we might even say that it is a healthy sign of nature "revoking" a lack of interest in such mathematical and scientific models by most students, and a mere mechanical, "problem solving" habit for those who are "interested." Nothing resonates; nothing follows the grain of the created human embodied psyche. Is it surprising then that much of the "work" which is done in the mathematically oriented disciplines has no long lasting impact on the emerging self-understanding of contemporary youth? To build bombs, it is useful; to build boys it is not.
To strike at Modernism, we must plunge into the very heart of the matter. If man is to gain both his theological, philosophical, political, and psychological balance, he must recover that hardy realm that Descartes banished. To take seriously, St. Thomas' teaching that all knowledge begins with sensation, that all our knowledge concerning the existence of real things depends first on our seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and feeling them, such would be the beginning of a return to sanity. For the great Thomistic tradition, the soft, bitter, pungent, melodious aspects of the natural world give us both a knowledge of the existence and the nature of things, along with stepping-stones from creatures to Creator. Let the myriads of Cartesian Men have their "mastery of nature." For us, loving the gas station that stands on the spot where the yet once grew is hard.
It has been well said that "all the thoughts of men, from the beginning of the world until now, are linked together into one great chain”; yet the conception of the intellectual filiation of people expressed in these words may, perhaps, be more fitting metaphor. The thoughts of men are comparable to the leaves, flowers, and fruit upon the innumerable branches of a few great stems, fed by commingled and hidden roots. These stems bear the names of the half-a-dozen men, endowed with intellects of heroic force and clearness, to whom we are led, at whatever point of the world of thought the attempt to trace its history commences, just as following upon the small twigs of a tree to the branchlets that bear them, and tracing the branchlets to their supporting branches, bring us, eventually, to the bole.
It seems to me that the thinker who, more than any other, stands in the relation of such a stem toward the philosophy and the science of modernity, I mean, that if you lay hold of any chorological sequence from which in modern ways of thinking, either in the region of philosophy, or in that of science, you find the spirit of that thought, if not its form, to have been present in the mind of the great Frenchman.
There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said, "he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anybody.” Nevertheless, there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day, and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts that will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such an one was Descartes. Born in 1596, nearly three hundred years ago, of a noble family in Touraine, Réné Descartes grew up into a sickly and diminutive child, whose keen wit soon gained him that title of "the Philosopher, which, in the mouths of his noble blood relations, was more than half a reproach.
In whatever way that is to learn, by its intricate and evolving transactions are the moments whereby the temporary encompassment of consciousness and especially the strong forces of latency, where all things that have pasted are supported by the accumulating of thought, that we are to learn of its surface values, by that we have given to the derivatives in shape and types that are things of the foreseeable nurturing of natures conscious endeavours, that in all, we are to belong, when of a moment has released us upwards and as afar above for us to oversee upon the endless encircling circumference, as we are the endless circle with no end nor belong within to start a beginning as there is a given pease to the end. However, of all things that walk, breath and have their lives in Being, if be to contradiction it seems as enviably given comfort in the hope of what has of hope is that hope is hope for the wrong thing. If only to serve within some purposive allowance, as, perhaps, the dawning of something new is to some created promise by the coming of a world-view that, least of mention, might this that we are to walk upon the corpses of times generations for it is only to attest of what must be truth or a trued eventuality. Only of what is right, which is found by some kindred imagination, whereas, for the moment we draw from the summations that have travelled through space and time, that we are in belonging of our duty to man. All who are unable to satisfy their mental hunger must within the east wind of authority, be allowed in those of us who are immoderately in this position. So it is final, that the circle is now closed, and equations to eternity have all been resolved, and lastly, as it must be so, that the Universe is now complete.
It is one of Descartes' great claims to our reverence as a spiritual ancestor, who, at three-and-twenty, he saw clearly that this was his duty, and acted up to his conviction. At two-and-thirty, in fact, finding all other occupations incompatible with the search after the knowledge that leads to action, and being possessed of a modest achievement, he withdrew into Holland; where he spent nine years in learning and thinking, in such retirement that only one or two trusted friends knew of his whereabouts.
In 1637 the first-fruits of these long meditations were given to the world in the famous "Discourse touching the Method of using Reason rightly and of seeking Scientific Truth," which, at once an autobiography and a philosophy, clothes the deepest thought in language of exquisite harmony, simplicity, and clearness.
The central propositions of the whole "Discourse" are these. There is a path that leads to truth so surely, that anyone who will reason, if entirely possible it must need to reach the goal, or grasp to its thought to the opinions reached, because, it must be to whether his capacities are great or small. There is one guiding rule by which a man may always find this path, and keep himself from straying when he has found it. This golden domineer is -permit no propositions but those that the truth is clear and distinct, in that they cannot be doubted.
The enunciation of this great first commandment of science consecrated Doubt. It removed Doubt from the seat of penance among the serious sins to which it had long been condemned, and enthroned it in that high place among the primary duties, which is assigned to it by the scientific conscience of these latter days. Descartes was the first among the moderns to obey this commandment deliberately. As a matter of religious duty, to strip off all his beliefs and reduce himself to a state of intellectual nakedness, until he could satisfy himself as fit to be issuing. He thought a bare skin healthier than the most respectable and well-cut clothing of what might, possibly, is mere shoddy.
When I say that Descartes consecrated doubt, you must remember that it was that sort of doubt that Goethe has called "the active scepticism,” whose whole aim is to conquer itself. Not that other sort born of flippancy and ignorance, whose aim is only to perpetuate itself, as an excuse for idleness and indifference. Nevertheless, defining what is meant by scientific doubt better than in Descartes’ own words is impossible. After describing the gradual progress of his negative criticism, he tells us: For all that, I did not imitate the sceptics, who doubt only for doubting involvement, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath. Further, since no man of common sense when he pulls down his house for rebuilding it, fails to give himself some shelter while the work is in successively proceeding. Further; so, before demolishing the spacious, if not spaciously mansions in his old beliefs, Descartes thought it wise to equip himself with what he calls “une morale par provision,” this may resolve to govern his practical life until he could be better prepared. The laws of this provisional self-government are embodied in four maxims, of which one binds the philosopher to submit himself to the laws and religion through which he has brought up yet another, and to facilitate the function operatively, of which once he calls for an action, as, perhaps, might he promptly and according to the best of judgments, that he abides without repining, by that result, the third rule is to seek happiness in limiting his desires, of actions that seem of their attempting satisfactions, might he be, while the last is to make the search after truth as a business of his life.
Thus prepared to go on living while he doubted, Descartes continued to face his doubts like a man. One thing was clear to him, he would not lie to himself–would, under no penalties, say, "I am sure" of that of which he was not sure; nonetheless its possibilities would go on digging and delving until he came to the solid adamant or, at worst, made sure there was no adamant. As the record of his progress tells us, he was obliged to confess that life is full of delusion, that authority may be in the wrong, in that its testimony may be false or mistaken, also for what reason lands us in endless fallacies, that our very immediate memories are as often less trustworthy as hope; that the evidence of the very senses may be misunderstood; that dreams are real as long since that they last, and that what we call reality may be a long and restless dream. Nay, it is conceivable that some powerful and malicious being may find his pleasure in deluding us, and in making us believe the thing that is not, every moment of our lives. What, then, are certain? What even, if such a being exists, is beyond the reach of his powers of delusion? Why, the fact that the thought, the present consciousness, exists. Our thoughts may be delusive, but they cannot be fictitious. As thoughts, they are real and existent, and the cleverest deceiver cannot make them otherwise.
Thus, thought is existence. More than that, so far as we are concerned, existence is thought, all our conceptions of existence being some kind or other of thought. Do not for a moment suppose that these are mere paradoxes or subtleties. A little reflection upon the commonest facts is irrefragable truth. For example, I take up a marble, and I find it to be a red, round, hard, single body. We call the redness, the roundness, the hardness, and the singleness, "qualities" of the marble. It sounds, at first, that the highest sculpting form of absurdity might be to say that all these qualities are modes of our own consciousness, which cannot even be conceived to exist in the marble. Yet consider the redness, with which to begin. How does the sensation of redness arise? The waves of intuitive certainty, may it attenuated matter, the particles of which are vibrating with vast rapidity, but with very different velocities, strike upon the marble, and those that vibrate with a particular velocity are thrown off from its surface in all directions. The optical apparatus of the eye gathers some of these together, and gives them such a course that they impinge upon the surface of the retina, which is a singularly delicate apparatus connected with the end of the fibres of the optic nerve. The impulses of the attenuated matter, or ether, affect this apparatus and the fibres of the optic nerve in a certain way; and the change in the fibres of the optic nerve produces yet other changes in the brain; and these, in some fashion unknown to us, lead to the feeling, or consciousness of redness. If the marble could remain unchanged, and either the rate of vibration of the ether, or the nature of the retina, could be altered, the marble seems not red, but some other colour. There are many people who are what is called colour-blind, being unable to distinguish one colour from another. Such an one might declare our marble to be green. He would be quite as right in saying that it is green, as we are in declaring it to be red. Yet then, as the marble cannot can be both green and red, while, as this shows that the quality "redness" must be of our consciousness and not in the marble.
In like manners, since the roundness and the hardness are forms of our consciousness is easy, belonging to the groups that we call sensations of sight and touch. If the surface of the cornea were cylindrical, we should have a very different notion of a round body from that which we possess now. If the strength of the fabric, and the force of the muscles of the body, were increased by some hundredfold, our proportional differences of consistency would possibly equal to that of some upcoming periphery where the marble would be as soft as a pellet of bread crumbs.
Not only is it obvious that all these qualities are in us, but, if you will try, you will find it quite impossible to conceive of "blueness," "roundness," and "hardness" as existing without a call for such consciousness, his frame reference is to some such consciousness as our own. Saying that even the might seem strange “singleness” of the marble is about us, but simple experiments will show that this is veritably the case, and that our two most trustworthy senses may be made to contradict one another on this notable point. Hold the marble between the finger and thumb, and look at it in the ordinary way. Sight and touch agree that it is single. Now squint, and sight tells you that there are two marbles, while touch asserts that there is only one. Next, return the eyes to their natural position, and, having crossed the forefinger and the middle finger, put the marble between their tips. Then touch will declare that there are two marbles, while the naked eye says that there is only one. Our sense of touch proclaims our belief, however when we appear to it, just as imperatively as the naked eye does.
Nevertheless, it may be said, the marble takes up a certain space that could not be occupied, while, by anything else. In other words, the marble has the primary quality of matter, extension. Surely this quality must be in the thing and not in our minds? Nonetheless, the reply must still be; whatever may, or may not, exist in the thing, all that we can know of these qualities is a state of consciousness. What we call extension is a consciousness of a relation between two, or more, affections of the sense of sight, or of touch. It is wholly inconceivable that what we call extension, is the branch of a progressional contingence and should exist independently of consciousness, as we knew it to be. Whether, this is inconceivability, it does so exist, or not, is a point on which I offer no opinion. Thus, whatever our marble may be, all that we can know of it is under the shape of a bundle of our own consciousness.
Nor is our knowledge of anything we know or feel more, or less, than a knowledge of states of consciousness. Our whole life is made up of such states. Some of these relational states as inferred by its cause we call ‘self’, and others to the cause or causes that may be comprehended under the title of “not-self.” Nonetheless, inform that holds the existence neither of ‘self’ nor of that of which is “not-being-of-self” have or can that we by any possibility have, any such unquestionable and immediate certainty, that we have of our relational states of consciousness, under which we can consider having been their effects. They are not immediately observed facts, but results of the application of the law of causation to those facts. Strictly speaking, the existence of a "self" and of a "not-self" are hypotheses by which we account for the facts of consciousness. They stand upon the same footing as the belief in the general trustworthiness of memory, and in the general constancy about A Nature-as hypothetical literature or academic summations for which acquires its doctorate to be acquainted and familiarized about its defending dissertation, only to be proven, or known with by way of its highest degree of certainty given by immediate consciousness, which, is, nevertheless, of the highest practical value, since the conclusions logically drawn are from them are always verifiably experienced.
This, in my judgment, is the ultimate issue of Descartes' argument, bearing to point out that we have left Descartes himself some way behind us. He stopped at the famous formula, “I think, therefore I am.” Yet, the concerning considerations will show this formula to be full of intertwining fibres and verbal dissimulations that only assimilates entanglement. In the first place, the conclusive ly idealistic term said to be, “therefore” which has no deserving business, and must legitimately find its way home. Also, “I am” of being assume in that ‘I think’, may from which it is simply another way of saying “I am thinking” or “I am conscious.” All the same, it is in the second place, “I think” which is not one simple proposition, it is, that there are three distinct assertions rolled into one. The first of these is, something called ‘I exist,’ the second is, something called ’thought exists’ and the third is, “the thought is the result of the action of I-ness.”
Now, it will be obvious to you, that the only one of these three propositions that can stand the Cartesian test of certainty is the second. It cannot be doubted, for the very doubt is an existent thought. However, the first and third, whether true or not, may be doubted, and have been doubted. For the assenter may be asked, How do you know that thought is not self-existent, or that a given thought is not to affect of its previous line of thinking, or given to something otherwise to some external power? A diversity of other questions, much more easily put than answered. Descartes, determined as he was to strip off all the garments that the intellect weaves for itself, forgot this gossamer shirt of the ‘self’ bringing of a greater detriment, and the ruin of his expression when he began to clothe himself again.
Nevertheless, it is beside my purpose to dwell upon the minor peculiarities of the Cartesian philosophy. All I wish to put clearly before your minds thus far, is that Descartes, having commenced by declaring doubt to be a duty, found certainty in consciousness alone; and that the necessary outcome of his views is what may properly be termed Idealism; namely, the doctrine that, whatever the universe may be, all we can know of it is the picture presented to us by consciousness. This picture may be a true likeness–though how this can be is inconceivable; It may have no more resemblance to its cause than one of Bach's fugues has to the person who is playing it, than a piece of poetry has to the mouth and lips of a reciter. It is enough for all the practical purposes of human existence if we find that our trust in the representations of consciousness is verified by results. That, by their help, we are enabled "to walk surefootedly in this life."
Thus the method, or path that leads to truth, showed by Descartes, takes us straight to the Critical Idealism of his great successor Kant. It is that Idealism that declares the ultimate fact of all knowledge to be consciousness, or, in other words, a mental phenomenon. Consequently, affirms the highest of all certainties, and the only absolute certainty, to be the existence of mind. However, it is moreover that Idealism that refuses to make any speculative assertions, either positive or negative, find there parallel in what lies beyond consciousness. It accuses the subtle Berkeley of stepping beyond the limits of knowledge when he declared that a substance of matter does not exist. Existence may paradoxically be for not as the arguments for which he is supposed to have vanquished into the Northern sea, but reasons hold to its existence for the sake of matter itself, only from which we were equally destructive to the existence of soul. Nevertheless, it refuses to listen to the jargon of more recent days about the "Absolute" and all the other hypostasised adjectives, the initial letters of the names of which is generally printed are the capital letters, just as you give a Grenadier a bearskin cap, it much seems as to give the appearance of ponderosity for more than he is by nature.
The path indicated and followed by Descartes, which we have previously been treading, leads through doubt to that critical Idealism that lies at the heart of modern metaphysical thought. Yet the "Discourse" shows us another, and apparently very different, the path, which leads, quite as definitely, to that correlation of all the phenomena of the universe with matter and motion, which lies at the heart of modern physical thought, that most people call Materialism.
The early part of the seventeenth century, when Descartes reached manhood, is an epoch of the intellectual life of manhood. Then, physical science suddenly strode into the arena of public and familiar thought, and openly challenged not only Philosophy and the Church, but that common ignorance that often passes by the name of Common Sense. The assertion of the motion of the earth was a defiance to all three, and Physical Science threw down her glove by the hand of Galileo.
Thinking of the immediate result of the combat is not pleasant, to see the defender of science, old, worn, and on his knees before the Cardinal Inquisitor, signing his name to what only he knew to be a lie. No doubt, the Cardinals rubbed their hands as they thought of themselves to how well they had silenced and discredited their adversary. Still, two hundred years have passed, and have long since diminished of any but one feeble or erroneous combatant. Physical Science sits crowned and enthroned as one legitimate ruler of the world in thought. Charity children would be ashamed not to know that the earth moves; while the Schoolmen are forgotten; and the Cardinals–well, the Cardinals are at the Ecumenical Council, still at their old business of trying to stop the movement of the world.
According to Descartes, if we make errors in our thinking, it is our own fault. Human beings are given to a free will, and most substantially significant, and just a flawless part of our species. This free will acts independently to either affirm or deny, or pursue or shun any some thing. The free will acts properly when the will has access to knowledge and reason and can "perceive what is true with sufficient clarity and distinctness.” To attain truth, and to act correctly, the will must rely on those perceptions that cannot come from anything, but rather, come from something, and that something must be from God in all his supreme perfection. God, in essence, must play the celestial orchestrator in any perception that is true. Following this path cannot lead one to err; that is, the path of humility that relies on one's God-given faculties and God himself to use the will properly.
On the other hand, if freedom calls of the will, it is confronted with something of which it has no knowledge, it will act indifferently. Without God and the knowledge of what is true, the will "easily turns away from the true and the good," leading to deception and sin. In addition, use of the will with only partial knowledge, that is, without full clarity and distinct perception based on knowledge, will also lead to error. Indifference and conjecturing or making speculative assertions are not true or false, it is a misuse of the will, even if by the change of chance it could possible take or give oneself of luck, the outcome happens upon the truth. The deliberation from illiteracy, is one who arrogantly relies only upon then immigrated transitions for which all unexcepted modulations in doings, occurs from those that are without truth only inaccessibly from God, thus, the make-upon of some unequivocal misuse of free will, are ultimately and undeniably, as merely of an error.
Spinoza would disagree with Descartes' idea of the free will. While the will for Descartes uses the intellect freely (in the proper way), Spinoza asserts that "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in other order than is the case.” The will is not a free cause, but a necessary cause, because it is only a "definite mode of thinking" and thus subject to the greater causal matrix. Since all causes in the matrix can be followed back to God as an absolutely infinite being, everything has its cause in God. While, not even God has freedom of the will, as he is constrained by his divine nature and can only act as his nature would have it-the only way it can be as it is perfectly so. Therefore, there are no error, no sin, and no deception. Everything simply is as it should be according to the perfection of God's divine nature.
Substance is defined differently for Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz contributing to the fundamental differences between their assertions in their philosophies. For Descartes, there are primarily three substances: God, thought and extension. For Spinoza there is only one substance: God. For Leibniz, there are two substances: God and monads. For each of these three, their concept of substance dramatically affects the outcomes of their philosophies and their explanations for the nature of the universe and our place in humanely, and we might consider ourselves as inseparable of it, and in our relation to God.
Descartes' determination foreshadows to carry through his need to readily rethink along everything he has ever thought to be True and Right. In doing so, he realizes that the only thing he can really be sure of is his ability to think, thus affirming his existence, and the substance of thought. He bears to witness in the conditions of truth that he is in himself from that which is a prefect God, and that God must be both omnipotent and benevolent. He can then determine that because God is not a great deceiver (deception is an attribute of imperfection not consistent with perfection), then extension is the third substance. There are some discussions regarding the ability of the two substances, thought and extension, to interact. Since effect can be caused by only the same kind of substance, having it of some connotation for being causally then seems impossible for thought and effectual of the body. However, Descartes asserts that at the smallest levels interaction does occur.
Spinoza criticizes Descartes for not following through on his assertions about an infinite God. If God is infinite, then he must be absolutely infinite, that is "substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” Because God is also perfect in his divine nature, everything that is, is by that perfection and is only exactly as it can be. God, thought and extensions are not separate substances, but rather thought and extension are simply attributes of God, expressed through an infinite amount of finite modalities. The order and connection between thoughts correspond and those for extended things (as they are the same) according to an infinite causal matrix determined by God, the only absolutely infinite substance.
Leibniz appeals to God as not only worthy of glory for his greatness and goodness, but his ability to create the most interesting reality from the simplest system. Leibniz proposes that God perpetuate this creation and by its infinite number in that of “monads.” Each monads are a singular substance that "expresses the whole universe in its own way, and that all events, with all their circumstances and the whole sequence of external things, is included in its notion.” There is a hierarchy of monads from the most simple and most confused, to the minds that are self-conscious and reflective, thus much less confused. When the perceptions of these infinite number of minds (monads) harmonize, the world arises as an emergent property based on well-founded phenomenons. Monads have no windows, that is, they do not interact. Nevertheless, again, they don't need to as each substance has within it a complete notion of itself. There is not a problem with the interaction of thought and extension, because there are only “monads.”
Knowledge for Locke is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. Ideas are the object of thinking, and come from sensation and reflection. It is the quality of a subject that has the power to produce ideas in one's mind. Experience provides the foundation for knowledge as observations about the sensible qualities of the external physical world are perceived through the senses and understanding of the internal operations of one's mind are operations of the mind. Both processes can be reflected upon in one's mind. Ideas are only received via these two methods. The sensation that people are exposed too in a lifetime will affect their ability to both sense and reflect, that is, if they are not exposed they can neither sense nor reflect on sensation they never received, and some people will remain more confused than others about their sense experience and reflection due to their (lack of) focussed and attentively purposed. Further, because reflection requires attention, ideas resulting from reflection only surface later, and, again, to different degrees among different people based on their varied perspective, focus and attention.
Simple ideas can be conceived by means of only one sense, more than one sense, by reflection only, or by all ways of sensation and reflection. Often these simple ideas don't even have a name. The mind is as an "empty cabinet" ready for the passive reception of simple ideas. These simple ideas are neither created nor destroyed by the mind, but rather gathered into the mind through the senses or operations as such.
Leibniz believed the intelligible world of ultimate knowables, the problems raised by the skeptic Hume coming after him. He has some words to say to Descartes, who came before Leibniz, was of his concern of whether the world is knowable, but proving that knowledge of the external world is possible so, he foregoes the thrust of his philosophy. He focussed so much on what he believed must be true that stripped-down ideas that leave no point unquestioned, ultimately to prove knowledge impossible, or justify it only after the most extreme doubt possible, was not with what he was concerned. This sector will rather focus on Leibniz's rationalism -his idea that our main apparatus for discovering and understanding the nature of the world comes from pure reason, and not through the senses.
First, Leibniz believed it may have turned out that we did not know necessary truths such as "All green things are green." How is it that I know this proposition holds, even in some galaxy other than ours, on the other side of the universe? It was akin to a divine sort of magic to Leibniz that we should know any proposition that holds true under all circumstances and locations. He called it "an inborn light within us," which lets us cross the wide cosmos in one stroke of thought, and know beyond all doubt that all green things have always been green, no matter where on the earth or in the heavens, from the beginning of time to the end of the cosmos.
So let us examine just how we know that all green things are green. We know it because we know if a green thing is not green, it was an error to call it a green thing in the subject, and it is not in fact green. On the other hand, we know that if a thing is green, it is green. Ultimately to deny the proposition would involve us in a contradiction. Let us not forget, that if it is thus to suppose that all examined emeralds have been green. Uniformity would lead us to expect that future emeralds will be green as well. However, now we can define a predicate grue: ‘x’ is gruing if and only if ‘x’ is examined before time ’t’ and is green, or ‘x’ is examined after time ‘t’ and is blue. Let ‘t’ refers to some time around the present. Then if newly examined emeralds are like previous ones in respect of being grue, they will be blue. We prefer blueness as a basis of prediction to glueyness, but why? An interrogative sentence, by its appearing involvements as a reference to a difference, this is just a parochial or language-relative judgement, there brings no language-independent standard of similarity to which to appeal. Other philosophers have not been convinced by this degree of linguistic relativism. What remains clear is that the possibility of these “bent” predicates puts a decisive obstacle in face of purely logical and syntactical approaches to problems of “confirmation.” So we know now as well of the place that given to respect may not otherwise be true, or that there are such things as true contradictions. Nevertheless, we know there are no such things as true contradictions, and so we know that all green things are green.
Consequently the interrogative sentence comes to the boiling point from which its availabilities to answer of “how” do we know there are no trued contradictions? We cannot prove this is true without assuming its truth in the first place, for any demonstration of any proposition is valid only if there are no true contradictions -the very things we are trying to prove. So to avoid begging the question, we cannot reason at all. That there are no true contradictions, then, cannot be demonstrated.
How do we know there are no true contradictions? That is, would we know it if it were merely a quirk of our minds that we cannot comprehend a true contradiction, some arbitrary way our brains developed, that has nothing to do with objective reality? Could it be that we cannot simply conceive of a true contradiction in the way that our bodies cannot be sustained by eating stones? Is it merely an arbitrary aspect of the human organism that we cannot conceive of a true contradiction, than this being due to the nature of the world itself?
One would never know this if it were so. We would go on reasoning and making rules of deductive logic that have nothing to do with what is true and false in nature itself, and only reflect arbitrary quirks of our psychological biology, so to speak, and what it can and cannot process as an organism that thinks.
Nevertheless, most philosophers do not think there is much fruit to be had in thinking like this. To question the rule of non-contradictorily, that is, to deny its truth, rests upon assuming its truth as much as asserting its truth does. Aristotle solved the problem by saying if a man doubts that there are no true contradictions, if he speaks and reasons, he is assuming the principle's truth; so if he questions it let him remain silent, but if he speaks and argues he must assume there are no true contradictions to do so, and thus undermines his doubt of the principle. Put another way: we have no choice but to assume there is no true contradiction if we are to philosophize at all; for whether we use reason to deny the rule of non-contradiction or to assert its truth we are all asserting its truth as a prerequisite. This very discussion of the problem assumes the rule's truth, and so where I question its validity here, ironically, I assert its veracity, by the mere fact that I am using reason.
So let us do what we must, and assume that it is complementary for the sake as drawn upon that we who infer that nature has some consistency of things. In themselves, we have in ruling of non-contradiction, for which case, are we to know of its truth? We, on the other hand, cannot explain in how we know it, only that we cannot conceive throughout in other respects. This is the "inborn light within us" that allows us to cross time and space and know the nature of the other side of the cosmos, which Leibniz found so fascinating. Assuming the rule of non-contradiction is commentary on the true nature of things, it is certainly astounding that we should find a single principle that should apply to all places, times, dimensions and modes of being, from a mere act of thought. Certainly were the empiricist correct, but they would have a very difficult time explaining just how this “inborn light" is possible. To say, that we have evolved as such as that we have become rationally ingested as to arrange by coordinative orders a set of communicative combinations that once had been lacking the ability to conceive of a true contradiction, into which realms are arbitrarily biological quirks, that place the origin set to a certain position that positioned by its growth was held steadfast within the strangest formalities as set through causality, least of mention, that, in so doing, its resulting consequent from arbitrary displacement drew nothing but a marginal peripheral infraction of nature. To do so would be to question the objective veracity of the principle; perhaps we can just survive and leave more offspring if we believed there were no true contradictions, though it is not in fact true that there are none. Certainly to call it a result of evolution is to deny the very veracity of the principle, something impossible in philosophy if it is to be philosophy. Evolution works by preserving the ones who leave the most offspring, not preserving the ones who know the most truth.
Before Kant, philosophy had two categories of knowledge: those propositions we know whose contrary implies a contradiction in terms, and those whose contrary didn't. "This apple is yellow" doesn't have a contrary that implies a contradiction, while "All apples are apples" does. Leibniz naturally found it more incredible that we could know the latter rather than the former; the former has no bearing on anything but that particular apple; it does not signify anything beyond the particular circumstance it describes. "All apples are apples," however, hold true from the foundation of the cosmos to its end, in every time and place there is. This was substantive knowledge to Leibniz. According to Leibniz it is the principle found in such universal knowledge that allowed us to use the senses, rather than the senses being the source of our knowledge. Without pure reason, to Leibniz, sense experience would be worthless; we could never progress in knowledge without the eternal principles of analytic reason, with which we analyse and process this sensory data. The senses are subject to doubt as well; they may all be dreams and fictions, while whether I am dreaming or awake if I think to myself "All apples are apples" the proposition yet holds true, and I know it to be so, whether it occurs to me as I am dreaming, or hallucinating or whatever.
Sometimes a philosopher like Hume will propound a skepticism that makes us doubt whether we can even know what the philosopher himself is arguing, if he is right and we really know that little. But equally, empiricist like Hume betray the veracity of rationalism: Hume, after all, did not show us movies to teach us, he wrote books. If pure reason is worthless, and, least of mention, matters of the sense are only the avenues of our understanding, how is it we are to learn just by following Hume's path of reason? Wouldn't he do better to show us pictures and images? After all, all reasoning, Hume's reasoning even, comes in logical form, comes in words and not images, the stuff of thought. Hume's very enterprise of reasoning his way into showing reason worthless itself betrays the value of reason. Never mind that it was mostly inductive reason; if logic and pure reason were worthless, wherefore does Hume write, filling hundreds of pages of logical processes? We might say to him that he has an awful lot to say about what must be true, for someone who believes we cannot know the truth. In addition he employs logic and reasons quite extensively, for someone who believes pure reason can give us no substantive truth.
Leibniz saw quite correctly that, though sense experience is probably essential to human nature, and necessary for us to mature our minds in the first place, it is reason that gives us the perspective and principles to use such experiential sense-data. If I should know that a particular apple is green, and a thousand other data of the daily sights and sounds, without logic, reason and mathematics, by which I process and analyse and organize such data, none of our sciences would be possible, least of all philosophy, but the physical sciences of nature also. Sense-data contains the raw facts of the world, and, nonetheless, its found knowledge comes about when the principles in universal rules of reason are used to process such facts into knowing what we do not perceive, are they things like the centre of the Earth or the nature of the infant cosmos. Without universal principles, are they creative inductions like scientific theories, or the deductive rules of logic, sense data would get us nowhere—add fact to fact all one's life, without rational analysis, without using the tools of the "inborn light within us," and knowledge would be impossible. I am not so much arguing that was there no sense data there would be in fact knowledge, but only that both are required, that reason conductively deduces through sense-data and sense-data bears its fruit by means of reason, in a two-way process, both sides of which are often essential.
Psychologists today would no doubt insist that psychology be a discipline separate and distinct from that of philosophy. The mere fact that psychology is thought of as a science sets it apart from philosophy and, at times, makes it quite incompatible with philosophy. Yet psychology and philosophy are bound by history in that it is from philosophy that psychology receives the methods that psychology employs in analysing and evaluating the mind and all that it entails. Psychology owes its existence to most philosophical thinkers including Aristotle, Plato, John Locke, and David Hume. Here, our immediate focus on the particular influences of Rationalism, is specifically focussing on the work of René Descartes and the counterarguments of Emmanuel Kant.
René Descartes was a very private man and the details of his life are only vaguely known. Born in 1596, he was an intellectually bright child and was enrolled in the College at la Flèche at the age of 10. Some time after graduating at the age of sixteen, Descartes took up residence in the Paris suburb of St. Germain. Here, between periods of seclusion, Descartes observed the workings of a set of mechanical fountain statues built for the Queen. Watching these, he developed an idea that real bodies, animal and human, operate much like these automatautilizing a system of hydraulics and fluids to animate the body and its processes. This would be the basic idea involved in his later physiological theories of the brain and visual perceptivity (Fancher, 1979).
After moving and becomingly reclusive again, Descartes found himself dissatisfied with the uncertainties of much of the information he had learned in school and afterward. He was pleased with the certainties that mathematics offered, but as of yet there were not many ways to apply math to other disciplines. One morning during these frustrations, Descartes found himself watching a fly on the wall (or so the story goes) and suddenly discovered that he could define the fly’s position using only three numbers: the perpendicular distance of the fly from each wall and from the ceiling. Generalizing from this realization, he discovered that any point in space could be defined in a similar way by measuring their distances from perpendicular lines or planes. These numbers have commonly become known as “Cartesian coordinates” and the perpendicular lines as the x -and y-axes. That discovery led to the development of analytical geometry, the first mathematical blending of algebra and geometry. The discovery of the coordinate plane, alone, is a huge contribution to psychology, for without it, defining the relationship between independent and dependent variables, calculating correlations, doing tests of significance, and other quantitative analysis would not be possible (Fancher, 1979)
After this discovery, Descartes began to wonder if there were other knowledge areas that could give answers or facts that provide the same amount of certainty as their results made to mathematics. Able to think of none, he proceeded with enumerating the faults of then-current scholarship and ultimately concluded that the best course for him to follow would be to disregard everything he had learned and only accept as “truth” those things that he could determine were correct or valid through his own systematic reasoning. To this end, Descartes formed a method for such reasoning that he believed would offer other disciplines the same amount of certainty afforded by mathematics. This method consisted of four rules, stated briefly they are: (1) To proceed by means of doubt, to take nothing for granted, to avoid bias and prejudgment; (2) its distributive subject matter for which the argument becomes that which are the simplest parts; (3) as to the total proceeding in each related stage soon becomes the simple, and, of course, leading to the more complex; (4) To “enumerate” and review to make sure nothing is missed in the argument, and that as many sources for the correct conclusion as possible may be collated.
Descartes was sure that this method would provide the mathematical elements needed to produce valid and reliable results in scholarly thinking. The first rule of this method, however, was especially troubling to Descartes. Already plagued with doubt about many other supposed truths, Descartes began to doubt everything until he even doubted that he existed. After a long process of doubting and reasoning, he doubted his existence until he realized the only thing he could no longer doubt was that he doubted. He reasoned that because he could not doubt that he was presently doubting, he must at least exist to be doubting. It is from this doubting, and subsequent realization and affirmation of existence we obtain the oft-quoted “I think, therefore I am,” or “Cogito, ergo sum” (Balz, 1952.) By proving that he existed, Descartes reasoned that he could also prove other things to be logically and rationally true by using the method he created.
Like the development of analytical geometry, the ideas contained in his methodology constitute a large contribution to the future of psychology in that it is precisely from the principles Descartes laid out in his method that deductive and inductive reasoning developed. What is more important, the introduction of methodology for the precise and systematic evaluation and verification if ideas or supposition was crucial to the development of the field of science, to an over-all picture, for much had been attributed to psychology? Descartes’ method provides the fundamental building blocks of the scientific method that modern science heralds as the marrow core in of all procedural guidelines. We, like Descartes, are satisfied that if all of the rules of the scientific method are followed exactly, the results should be valid and dependable.
Descartes made yet another important contribution to the future field of psychology immediately after his realization that he did exist. As he made this realization, he also realized that he could be sure that the mind and body were separate from one to conclude, in that I was a thing or substance whose whole essence or nature was only to think, and, to exist does not need space nor of any material thing or body. Thus, it follows that this ego, this mind, this soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and am easier to know than the latter, and that even if the body were not, the soul would not cease to be all that it now is.
This was an important distinction at this time, for most of the discourse had concerned the workings of the soul with the assumption that the soul controlled most aspects of the body. It had been supposed that the soul was the seat of all reasoning, thought, memory, and so on, and the animating force within the body. It is not until Descartes that the mind is ascribed with the powers of reasoning, knowledge, and emotion separate from the functioning of the rest of the body. For Descartes, the body functions independently from the mind, however the mind and body can interact to produce varying results in behaviour. Although he does still discuss his mind as part of the soul, what is important is that Descartes uses and continues to develop the concept of the rational, thinking mind for being separate and distinct from the body. This mind-body distinction is obviously an important one for psychology, allowing for the development of much of physiological psychology with cognitive and perceptual psychology, among others.
This mind/body split led Descartes to make further conclusions about how the brain functioned. His primary concerns was the workings of vision and visual perception. Descartes concluded that, based on a previously discovered “truth” that everything is in motion, light and objects give off tiny vibrations and these vibrations press upon various areas of the eye. This then causes the vibrations to move through the eye to stimulate a series of hollow nerves through which essential brain fluids flow. Much like the automata from St. Germain, Descartes envisioned that these brain fluids flowed through the nerves stimulated to constrict or expand by the vibrations of the objects being viewed so that a sort of stamp was of what was seen was created in the brain. Reasoning that because we have two eyes but only seem to perceive any object we are viewing as singular, he further concluded that there must be a centre in the brain in which the vibrations from both eyes meet to create a singular image. For Descartes, this area was the Pineal gland because it entered the brain and not lateralized like the rest of the brain. It was also here, he concluded, that the soul resided.
Although much of how Descartes reasoned, the mind to work was incorrect, some basic ideas were fundamental for future work on perception and physiological psychology. Among the important ideas is Descartes’ graphing of the visual field of perception that showed that each eye not only perceives what is directly in front of it, but also receives sense information from the outer field of the opposite eye (essentially that we see much in the left side of our visual field with our right eye and vice versa). Also, though he was wrong about the vibrations and hollow nerve tubes, he was correct in reasoning that there must be some centre in the brain where the images from both eyes are combined into a singular image to be consciously dealt with by the mind.
Descartes evidently had a profound impact on ways of thinking about the world and that this impact is still seen in much of modern psychology. However, these ideas in and of themselves did little to further the cause of Psychology, for Descartes’ method of ascertaining the truth by reason alone left out an entire realm of discussion that dealt not with how the senses perceived, but what the senses perceived. Indeed, the tenets of rationalism stated that sensory information was likely to be false and unreliable and summarily dismissed it from further discussion. There was a second group of thinkers, however, who viewed sensory information and experiences as the only accurate measurements of and indicators of “truth,” as this group was called the empiricist.
Basic rationalism teaches of: (1) Don’t trust senses, since they sometimes mislead, knowingly; since the “knowledge” they provide is inferior (because it changes; (2). Reason alone can provide knowledge. Math is the paradigm of real knowledge. (3) There are innate ideas, e.g., Plato’s Forms, or Descartes’ concepts of self, substance, and identity. (4) The self is real and discernable through immediate intellectual intuition (Cogito ergo sum). (5) Moral notions are comfortably grounded in an objective standard external to self -in God, or Form. Basic empirics’ precepts were as of (A) senses is the primary, or only, a source of knowledge of the world. Psychological atomism. (B). Mathematics deals only with relations of ideas (tautologies); gives no knowledge of the world. © No innate ideas (though Berkeley accepts Cartesian self). General or complex ideas are derived by abstraction from simple ones (conceptualism). (D). Hume -there’s no immediate intellectual intuition of self. The concept of “Self” is not supported by sensations either. (E) Hume -no sensations support the notion of necessary connections between causes and effects, or the notion that the future will resemble the past. (F) Hume -“is,” that does not imply to “ought” for each their source of morality is feeling.
Although both of thee schools of thought believed that truth was attainable, they disagreed about the role that the senses played in discovering this truth. The rationalists employed deductive reasoning, reasoning that does not depend on experience to inform it (for example concepts and constructs such as bachelor or death that do not require certain experiences to be understood) to attain truths. The empiricist utilized empirical reasoning, reasoning that depends upon experience or contingent events in the world to inform it (that George Bush, Jr. is president in 2004 cannot be determined by examining the concepts of “president” and “George Bush”). This disagreement over which type of reasoning was superior continued until the 1780’s when Emmanuel Kant, a German philosopher, began publishing his most influential works.
Kant’s work was primarily a reaction against the work of the empiricist David Hume. He found problems with both the empiricist and the rationalists, however. Essentially Kant proposed that neither rationalism nor empiricism were sufficient, or correct, in determining absolute truths for there were truths that neither of these two schools could prove as such by only using inductively and theoretical reasoning. Moreover, both modes of thought contained flaws that allowed two contradictory statements, or autonomies, to both be accepted as true and valid.
Kant argues that while both rationalism and empiricism assume that obtaining knowledge of how things really are is possible, as opposed to how they seem to us, they overlook the fact that the human mind is limited. The human can experience and imagine only within certain constraints; the human mind has a hand in constructing and shaping our reality as we perceive and think about it. Specifically, these constraints are synthetic and deductively. Synthetic deductive truths, which include location in space and time, causality, experiencing self, thing-ness, and identity, does not depend on experience to be realized but also cannot be arrived at by the same kind of logical reasoning used by the rationalists. Neither of the two schools of thought was equipped to deal with these kinds of truths.
The solution to this problem, Kant argued, was to understand that the world we experience must be distinguished into two categories -the noumenal, or external world, and the phenomenal, or an internal world. The noumenal world consists of “things-in-themselves,” objects, as they exist in their pure and unfiltered form. However, Kant warns, the noumenal world can never be known directly because once it is perceived by the human mind it passes into the phenomenal world. What humans experience is not the actual world, but a re-creation, an interactive experience, of the world (Fancher, 1979) In this way, Kant argues that the mind is an active agent in how we perceive and interact with the world; it creates reality just as much as it perceives it.
Through this argument, Kant creates a melding of the two schools of thought-rationalism and empiricism. He verifies the methods of the empiricists, in his agreement that of all that we perceive, think about, and thus know, is filtered through our senses and experience. Empiricism is complicated however, when Kant also insists that our mind create and interprets experience and “reality” as it perceives it, and therefore rational reasoning must also be employed to ascertain several truths. It is only through combining these two methods that most truths may eventually be realized.
The extensive contributions of Descartes and the rationalists provided many ideas and distinctions that necessarily predicated Kant’s philosophical works. Especially important was the mind/body distinction and the development of the idea that mind and body could interact with one another. Kant, by arguing that a cohesive and valid science would not be possible unless the conditions of his synthetic deductive reasoning were met, encouraged, if not forced, the melding of the rationalist and empiricist modes of thought into one that allowed for both sensory experiences and reasoning, together, to provide the basis of “truth.” However, perhaps the most important contribution to psychology is that all of this culminated in the new idea that the mind creates reality just as much as it perceives it. This idea paved the way for, indeed, created the need for a more exact study of the mind. With these new ideas in hand, and the previous obstacles to thinking removed, it would be less than a hundred years later that the first experimental psychology labs would be established and psychology would begin to flourish as a science.
Friedrich Nietzsche is not only one of the most influential philosophers the world has seen, but he is also one of the most controversial. He has influenced the twentieth century thought more than almost any other thinker. In his numerous works, Nietzsche constantly criticizes and restructures the strongly held philosophical and religious beliefs of his time. One such principle that he refutes belongs to his predecessor Rene' Descartes, and concerns the apparent distinction and significance of the human mind over the body. Descartes explains this elaborate theory in his Meditations on First Philosophy, claiming that the mind (the conscious) is the lone essential part of the human essence. On the other hand, Nietzsche stated via his manifestation through which all dynamic contributes are functionally of his distributive order as set further ahead by his work, On the Genealogy of Morality, his beliefs that the body (the unconscious) is key to the human essence. One may find it difficult to decide between these two ideas, for both philosophers pose good arguments on the contradicting sides of this famous dilemma.
However, by analysing them further, I realize that the qualities of their arguments are only as good as the foundations upon which they are based; one cannot have an understanding of the mind or the body without first having knowledge of the essence of human existence. Consequently, I will prove that the body is superior to the mind by showing that the centre for Nietzsche's ideas, the human essence, is more valid than that of Descartes.
Descartes' idea of the human essence is based solely on his formed concept of "radical doubt." He believes the essence of human existence to be simply "a thinking thing.” We must now analyse how he arrived at this conclusion. Descartes is famous for radical doubt, a concept that questions everything, and assumes nothing to be true unless it can be proved so with his idea of "clear and distinct perception." From this he states that the only thing he can clearly and distinctively perceive is that "I exist.” He concludes that since he ceases to exist when he ceases to think, he can then clearly and distinctively call himself a "thinking thing.” Descartes explains this train of thought when he says: From the fact that I know that I exist, and that while I judge that obviously nothing else belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists entirely in my being a thinking thing. Although perhaps I have a body that is very closely joined to me, nevertheless, because on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, insofar as I am merely a thinking thing and not an extended thing, and because on the other hand I have a distinct idea of a body, insofar as it is merely an extended thing and not a thinking thing, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
Descartes’ arrival of the human essence as a “thinking thing” in this way is obviously fully based on his beliefs of radical doubt and clear and distinct perception. He bases all of his inferences on other inferences.
Descartes also devaluates the human body and places the mind at the essence of the human existence based on his concept. Due to his radical doubt, Descartes quickly omits the body and the entire physical world as having any significance because of the simple fact that they can be doubted. He establishes a strong sense of doubt in his senses, because, according to Descartes, one cannot know clearly and distinctly that they are not being deceived into their physical sensations. Descartes thus condemns the significance of the body when he proclaims that it is "not a substance endowed with understanding.” He places the body into the physical, unintelligible realm of his concept of dualism, opposite from the thinking, knowledgeable realm. Descartes now acknowledges the body for being useful only within the limits of "moving from one place to another, of taking on various shapes, and so on.” It is from this condemnation of the body into the physical, unintelligible realm that Descartes further places the mind on a pedestal, and at the essence of human existence. To him the mind is superior because it thinks, which is our essence. He explains this in the indented quote I have already cited, saying that the mind can exist without the body. Analysing things with radical doubt clearly finalizes all of Descartes' ideas.
Therefore, Descartes' argument is not valid because of the fact that it is solely derived from assumptions. His idea of the superiority of the mind is based on the assumption that humans are thinking things, which it is based on the assumption of clear and distinct perception, which is further based on the assumption that radical doubt is valid. Descartes' entire argument includes the use of clear and distinct perception, a concept that he concocted, to evaluate what is true and what is false. Dubbing something valid when it is absurd based on an assumption, let alone many assumptions. Subsequently, it is false to grant Descartes' ideas any relevance because they are derived by judging things on his basis. Steven J. Wagner, in his essay "Descartes's Arguments for Mind-Body Distinctness," lends us support, at which this point becomes of us, as of when we are to believe of its good or the contrarieties of bad, that the proponents as gestured by our understanding were by him to say of: "Descartes's procedure only makes good sense once we see it as a product of his system. Too much in Descartes depends on things that are far too wrong." He explains that Cartesian (Descartes' thinking) dualism and the Cartesian mind can only be supported along Cartesian lines. It requires little intelligence to prove a point when one bases their argument for it on invalid theories of their own fabrication. The superiority of the mind in the human essence, therefore, has not been clearly proven because its ideal is based on Descartes' numerous assumptions.
Nietzsche's idea of the human essence, on the other hand, clearly holds more validity than Descartes' because it is not based on assumed principles. Nietzsche believes the human essence to be one of the competition, survival and a will to power. Unlike Descartes, Nietzsche's ideal is based on a foundation of facts. He concocts his ideal mostly by observing nature and the world around him. Bertram M. Laing, in his essay "The Metaphysics of Nietzsche's Immoralism," explains Nietzsche's belief called the "organic process," whereas the world is "a continual distribution and redistribution of force or power.” Nietzsche, like Freud, attempts to account for the function of consciousness considering the new understanding of unconscious mental functioning. Nietzsche distinguishes between himself and “older philosophers” who do not appreciate the significance of unconscious metal functioning, while Freud distinguishes between the unconscious of philosophers and the unconscious of psychoanalysis. What is missing if the acknowledgement of Nietzsche as philosopher and psychologist whose ideas on unconscious mental functioning have very strong affinities with psychoanalysis, as Freud himself on a number of other occasions, come to acknowledging in a specific and detailed manner an important forerunner of psychoanalysis? Although Freud has stated that Nietzsche’s insights are close to psychoanalysis, very rarely will he state any details regarding the similarities.
At its present state as a specific individual science the awakening of moral observation has become necessary, and people can no longer be spared the cruel sight of the moral dissecting table and its knives and forceps. For here thee rules that science that asks after the origin and history of the so-called moral sensations. Freud “who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skilfully as possible.” [However it] the unconscious must be assumed to be the general basis of psychical life. The unconscious is the true psychical reality, which in its innermost nature it is very much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs, . . . that apart from conscious there are also unconscious psychical processes.
Nietzsche goes on to discuss a number of unconscious thoughts, feelings and motivations that are involved I the feeling of pity. Such unconscious motivations are clearly repressed (inadmissible to consciousness), although the analogy of the foot slipping points to what is unconscious but would be admissible to consciousness. As this example to Nietzsche does not make the specific distinction, but his work is filled with explorations of our emotional states that are commonly regarded as selfless and highly moral but which he demonstrate are involved in our self-enjoyment and self-gratification. Our disguised expressions of sexuality and will to power, while unconsciously denying that this is so and assuaging conscience. Nietzsche was interested in “the diverse operations of the conscious and the instinctive.” In a note from 1870 or 1871, he also wrote, though in a different sense than Freud, that “all growth in our knowledge arises out of the making conscious of the unconscious.”
Other than the specific distinction between these systems, every major point of Freud’s, both along with and beyond Lipps, had been explicitly discussed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche was aware of the distinction between unconscious processes that were and were not “inadmissible to consciousness.” It is true that he doesn’t always specifically make the distinction, though he is clearly aware of it.
Nietzsche goes on to a number of unconscious thoughts, feelings and motivations that are involved in the feeling of pity. Such anconeous motivations are clearly repressed (inadmissible to consciousness), least of mention, Nietzsche does not make the distinction, but he writes of both kinds of conscious processes. We call also change one’s mind to that by some early age Nietzsche was interested in “the diverse operations of the conscious and the instinctive,” up to this point he regards conscious and unconscious for their possessives as, “subject to different laws of development.”
He certainly did not believe that there was a realm of “the things-in-themselves” as “a metaphor for the chaotic and unknowable true world that lay beyond perception.” The real world is process and change for Nietzsche, as in his later works there is no “unknowable true world.” For one thing, Nietzsche was attempting to get across the point that there is only one world, not two. And that for Nietzsche, if there is anything we contribute to the world, it is the idea of a “thing,” and in Nietzsche’s words, the psychological origin of the belief in things forbids us to speak of “things-in-themselves,” yet points out that in regard to the distinction between “appearance” and “reality,” and what he repudiates is the distinction between and separation of a merely apparent world and a world of “true being.”
Once, again, we can consider that Nietzsche clearly thought he uncovered some truths regarding the areas into which he had inquired, whether it be the origin of bad conscience or the psychological motivations of the Apostle Paul. Truth is not illusory but it does unavoidably entail perspectivity. For Nietzsche, the apparent world is not cut off from a world of absolute truth. While Nietzsche is quite willing as in his psychological exploration, to draw destinations between “deeper” realities in relation to “surface” appearances, he also argues that on a fundamental level one cannot draw a distinction between a merely apparent world and a perspective-free factual world. The “deeper” realities he discovered cannot be regarded as facts-in-themselves or anything else of the kind that would be free of embeddedness in human schemes, practices, theories, and interpretations, of sortal perspectives seeing and knowing.
Although Nietzsche calls into question the absolute value of truth, values the illusions (the truthful illusions) of art that ae a stimulant to life, values masks, veils and even the creative lie, he also answers the call of truth. Truth calls to us, tempts us to unveil her. If we have integrity we will say “Yes” to the hardest service, surrounding much that we hold dear, including our wishes “not to see . . . [what] . . . one does see. When the unveiling takes place to recognize as not truth (or women) in-itself but an appearance that is reality by way of a particular perspective, as one might regard this situation as, among other possibilities an opportunity for the creative play of our interpretive capacities, fo the creating and destroying of play, for a creative sublimation of the will to power. But none of this obviates our capacity to sometimes reach what can be reasonably regarded as truth. What it does involve, is for Nietzsche “neither a noumenal realm of adjudication for competing truth claims, and perhaps what is most important, Nietzsche introduces the notion that truth is a kind of human practice. This entails “local pragmatic truth, truths as good as though Nietzsche does posit transhistorical truth claims given as his claim regarding the will to power. Nietzsche is concerned with what corresponds to or fits the facts, but such facts are not established without a human contribution, without interpretation. Of course, for those for whom the tern “fact” should entail a “halt before the factum brutum,” there may be an objection to the use of such terms as “fact, reality,” and so forth, in such a context.
Nietzsche observes society as a barbaric, predatory world that he separates it into two groups: one having "slave morality," and the other "master morality.” Those who possess master morality, or noble morality, are the ones who live their lives instinctively by trying to achieve heightened power, often at the expense of others. These people, according to Nietzsche, he, are the active and productive members of society. They exude power and confidence, and prioritize success over popularity. They are the ones who gain the power in the "organic process." Nietzsche preaches for people to have this kind of morality, for he sees this as "good.” On the other hand, those who possess slave morality are the ones who do not act instinctively and thus are weak. Their weakness is apparent by observing their lack of productivity and success. They became clever to compensate for not being powerful, doing things like congregating for chances of greater defence. These people, according to Nietzsche, developed "resentment" toward their superiors' power. Nietzsche thus calls them "the regression of humankind," because their morality develops out of hatred and a denial of our bodily instincts. The human essence, therefore, is one of some desires for power and success. Nietzsche cleverly legitimizes this claim by comparing it with the `survival of the fittest' aspects of nature. "Beasts of Prey" hold the qualities of master morality, for they achieve their goals instinctively at the expense of their prey. They do what is needed for them to survive. Lambs, the prey, are equal to those included in Nietzsche's slave morality because they are weak, and congregate in herds for protection. The Beasts of Prey are obviously the ones who survive, so Nietzsche believes that we should strive to act instinctively like them. Rather than following the intimate steps that gaiting from Descartes' would lead by some trivial reason, it is clear that Nietzsche based his concoction of the human essence mostly on irrefutable observations. In this way his idea surpasses Descartes' in relevance and validity, thus giving him clear ground to employ this ideal in proving the superiority of the body.
Finally, Nietzsche uses this valid assertion of the human essence to prove that the body is essential to the human existence than the mind. Nietzsche argues that since the human essence is based on a predatory competition necessary in the "organic process" of the world, the body is more important than the mind. Instinct, he says, is rooted in the body that we are given. Thus our bodies define who we are because they determine to what morality, masters or slave, we cohere. Nietzsche believes that one's placement within these categories is decided at birth as an unalterable "assignment" determined by the genealogy of a person's morals. Our bodies determine whether we act according to our natural instincts for success and the will of power (master morality), or if we turn away from them (mutualist morality). These bodily instincts are the key element to our existence, for they completely govern our personalities. By analysing the Beasts of Prey argument again, it is clear that the lambs were born into their existence as preemptively instinctual, and as well as, primitively defensive from which is in as much as ado about its own obviousness for only being duly given to the physically structured consistency. The bodies of birds have also held to an estranged dissimulation, as of their unmannered instinct. It is likewise that this substantiates the body and is therefore the principal element of our existence. It is the difference between eating, and getting eaten, that Bertram M. Laing describes Nietzsche's "body" when she calls it "the source of all inspiration; the power that breathes or speaks through one is not an alien deity, but the self, the man as he really is.” The body, then, is superior to the mind, because it holds our natural instincts that fully determine who we are and how we will fare in the "organic process" of our existence.
Nietzsche writes: “The evidence of the body reveals itself of a tremendous multiplicity,” Also, “Suppose all unity were unity only as an organization? But the thing in which we believe was only invented as a foundation for the various attributes. Similarly: “The “subject” is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum.” Also, for Nietzsche there is no “I” which thinks as a separate entity from the relations which persons have to the world in general. Nietzsche denies that one can suppose any inner thing are from its expressions in relationships. Unity can be attained to a degree, and such unity is highly valued by Nietzsche. But there is no perfect unity through self-creation nor one fixed true self, conscious or unconscious, waiting to be uncovered. And the structure of any ruling unity may at the same time be open to creative self-conflict and possible transformation -: If we are to “become who will open ourselves to “unremitting transformation -: you must, within a short space of time, pass though and throughout many individuals. The means are unremitting struggles.” If we allow ourselves to have access to, and develop and utilize, more affects and more eyes, different eyes, we may be on the way to passing though and throughout many individuals. Such possibilities may be both potentially enriching and dangerous.
Had Wittgenstein ever had at any time feel to have to do with to write about himself, this apparently most “intellectuals” of philosophers might have said: I have always thought with my whole body and my whole life. I do not know what purely intellectual problems are. You know these things by way of thinking, yet your thought is not your experience but the reverberation of the experience of others, as your room trembles when a carriage passes. I am sitting in that carriage, and as often, I am the carriage.
Although written by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein’s work is none the less suffused with authentic pathos, and it will be seen as an integral pat of the tragically self-destructive design of European thought.
In the First Meditation, Rene Descartes is to bring of a certain state, the question what he knows. He convinces himself that his senses cannot be trusted and that all his experiences may be nothing more than mere dreams. Descartes finally concludes that he may not know anything, not even the fact that he has a physical body
His Second Meditation focuses on the finding, in at least, of a single truth, or the intuitive certainty under which he can hold onto. In his quest for this certainty, Descartes rejects "whatever admits of the least doubt, just as if [he] found it to be wholly false." He even concedes perhaps "that nothing is." But Descartes is not so easily defeated. He convinces himself that he exists as a thing that thinks, in other words, a ‘thinking thing.’
How does Descartes reach such an unyielding conclusion? He first proves that despite all his uncertainties, he actually exists. His notion that all physical objects do not exist precludes him from having a body to prove his existence. Instead, Descartes argues that due to the very fact that he has these notions prove that ‘I’ exist. "But if I did convince myself of anything, I must have existed." He argues that even if deceived by and all-power being then he must also exist because, "[the deceiver] will never bring it about that, at the time of thinking that I am something, I am in fact nothing." Thus Descartes concludes that ‘I am’, ‘I exist’ is necessarily true whenever he conceives it in his head.
But what does Descartes mean by his expressing gesture of ‘I-ness’, of course, as might be expected, it was meant for himself. It certainly cannot be a body since he believes all physical objects to be mere illusions. Without the body, there can be no such things as nutrition, location motion or sensation. The only immovable attribute he can find that does not require his physical body is his consciousness or experience. He goes far to say that "maybe, if I wholly ceased from experiencing, I should at once wholly ceases to be." Furthermore, he says that "‘I am’ precisely taken refers only to a conscious being; that is a mind, a soul, an intellect, a reason." It is this consciousness that allows him see what is necessarily true. He argues that physical objects and attributes are not really perceived by the senses, but only by intellect and by being understood. Descartes concludes his argument by suggesting that it be as obviously perceived by his own mind through intellect and understanding. Thus he proves he knows that he exists of a thinking thing that experiences.
There are many different points in Descartes’ arguments. Some are more powerful than others but I believe his construct of an all-powerful deceiver is a pervasive one. He uses the evil spirit argument quite well to prove his own existence. I think where he fails adequately to defend his argument is proving that he is a being of consciousness and thus being able to think. For the remainder of this report, I will assume the existence of an evil spirit that deceives him.
He successfully defends that even if an evil spirit were deceiving him, he must undoubtedly exists. I agree with Descartes because if he did not exist, there would be nothing to deceive. So, if there is an evil spirit out to deceive him, he must exist. I agree that he has proven that he is at least a ‘thing’ but not yet of a ‘thinking thing.’
This brings us to the question of what does it mean to think? Descartes firmly believes that he is "a being that doubts, understands, asserts, denies, is willing, is unwilling; further that has sense and imagination." He asks the following rhetorical questions to build support his argument: "How can any of these things be less of a fact than my existence? Are there any in these of something distinct from consciousness? Can any of them be called a separate thing from myself?" What Descartes fails to address is that perhaps the evil spirit tricks him into thinking that he has doubts, of which he understands and so forth. What and then? Does he still know he exists? Yes. Is he still a being with consciousness? Perhaps. Is he a thinking thing? Definitely not.
We already know that we can defend existence with the presence of the evil spirit as described earlier in this paper. He may or may not be a being of consciousness because he may be deceived of the thoughts that lead him to believe that he is conscious. But one might argue that even if he has been deceived that he is conscious then he is. Consequently, I will continue within a framed mind that any assumption that he is conscious being of, sets, least of mention, onto their indirective crystallized assumptions, as sharply as not for a thinking thing. To be the thinking thing that he claims at the end of the meditation would imply that he can perceive by intellect and understanding. However, the evil spirit has deceived him on those matters. He has neither the intellect nor the capacity to understand and thus to perceive. Furthermore, by inverting his argument "that nothing is more easily or manifestly perceptible to me than my own mind" we can suggest that since he cannot perceive his own mind, he cannot exist.
But this raises a contradiction, has already been stated that his existence has been defended in the presence of an evil spirit. So is my last assertion invalid? Indeed it is because I have assumed that the mind and therefore existence can only be perceived through intellect and understanding as Descartes described. However, the mind need not be perceived by intellect nor understanding, it may be perceived due to deception caused by the evil spirit, thereby solving the contradiction. So, Descartes perception that he has intellect and understanding is caused by the evil spirit therefore he does not think.
What of consciousness? I have to reassume, if not for the moment through which time is an essential fraction for being humanly conscious. Some may argue that consciousness itself leads to thinking for consciousness cannot be without thinking. But just as I eluded sooner than expected, the reasons for believing he is conscious may be caused by the evil spirit. By Descartes’ own definition, a conscious being is one who doubts, understands and so on. However, if those doubts and understanding are not his own, but rather caused by an evil spirit, he does not really have those thoughts and feelings. And without those thoughts and feelings, he cannot be a conscious being. If he is not a conscious being, then he obviously cannot be a thinking thing. In short, the evil spirit can deceive Descartes into thinking he has consciousness when in fact he does not therefore he does not think.
So although we agree that Descartes can convince himself that ‘I am’, ‘I exist’, I do not agree that he has adequately shown that he is a thinking thing. I have shown that if the evil spirit deceives Descartes’ on perceived notion that he doubts, understands and so on, then Descartes has a false impression that he is conscious and therefore has a false impression about his ability to think. If the evil sprit does exist, Descartes can prove he exists but not as a thinking thing.
Descartes' human commitment to innate ideas places him in a rationalist tradition tracing back to Plato. Knowledge of the nature of reality derives from ideas of the intellect, not the senses. An important part of metaphysical inquiry therefore involves learning to think with the intellect. The allegory of the cave portrays this rationalist theme about epistemically distinct worlds. Plato likens what the senses reveal to shadowy imagery on the wall of a poorly lit cave -to brain images of mere figurine beings; he likens what the intellect reveals to a world of fully real beings illuminated by mental capacities. The metaphor aptly depicts our epistemic predicament, on Descartes' own doctrines. An important function of his methods is to help would-be Knowers redirect their attention from the confused imagery of the senses, to the luminous world of the intellect's clear and distinct ideas.
Further comparisons arise with Plato's doctrine of recollection. The Fifth Meditation comments of occupying -of having applied Cartesian methodology, thereby discovering innate truths within: “on first discovering them it seems that I am not so much learning something new as remembering before what I knew. Elsewhere Descartes adds, of innate truths: We come to know them by the power of our own native intelligence, without any sensory-data to go through. All geometrical truths are of this sort -not just the most obvious ones, but all the others, however abstruse they may appear. Hence, according to Plato, Socrates asks a slave boy about the elements of geometry and thereby makes the boy able to dig out certain truths from his own mind that he had not previously recognized were there, thus attempting to establish the doctrine of reminiscence. Our knowledge of God is of this sort.
The famous wax thought experiment of the Second Meditation is supposed to illustrate (among other things) of a procedural layout, from which it gives by saying it has underlying implications for being innate. The thought experiment purports to help the mediator achieve a purely mental recapitulation. Much more of an easily apprehending mode for it is the innate idea of body. According to Descartes, our minds come stocked with a variety of intellectual concepts -ideas whose content derives solely from the nature of the mind. This storehouse includes ideas in mathematics (e.g., number, line, a triangle), logic (e.g., contradiction, necessity), and metaphysics (e.g., identity, substance, causality). Interestingly, Descartes holds that even our sensory ideas involve innate content. On his understanding of the new mechanical physics, bodies have no real properties resembling our sensory ideas of colours, sounds, tastes, and the like, thus implying that the contentual ideas are drawn to bear out in the mind. Unlike purely intellectual concepts, however, the formation of these sensory ideas depends on sensory stimulation. I suggest that on Descartes' official doctrine, ideas are innate insofar as their content derives from the nature of the mind alone, as opposed to deriving from sense experience. This characterization allows that both intellectual and sensory concepts draw on native resources, though not to the same extent.
Though the subject of rationalism in Descartes' epistemology deserves careful attention, the present essay generally focuses on Descartes' efforts to achieve indefeasible Knowledge. Relatively little attention is given to his interesting doctrines of innateness, or, more generally, his ontology of thought.
Scholars have established many relations of Descartes' philosophy to medieval sources, as antidote to the supposition that the history of philosophy begins de novo with Descartes, though sometimes obscuring the difference between Cartesian, hence modern, philosophy and earlier thought. From the first appearance of the Cartesian philosophy, there was noted a remarkable similarity, especially respecting the Cogito, between Descartes and Augustine, and Arnauld then began a controversy in the fourth set of Objections to the Meditations 1, on which much has been written, especially in the twentieth century, the question whether Descartes' Cogito is or is not original to him. Nothing needs to be added to the side of kinship, nor to the side of difference in this controversy, than the two sides need to be drawn together to shed some light on the logic of the Cogito in both St. Augustine and Descartes, and the movement in thought from one to the other.
As any fair reading to the texts would show, both Descartes and Augustine find in the Cogito a deliverance from skepticism, then a movement from the Cogito to the spirituality of the soul, finally to an argument for God's existence. Yet there are also important differences, on the face of it, but as you are aware, it is, especially in the movement from the Cogito that knowledge of God's existence. Though both Augustine and Descartes required that we enter of ourselves into knowing that God exists, Augustine moves through eternal, immutable truths, such as the truths of mathematics, for him the standard whereby the human mind judges and higher than the temporal, changing human subject, to the unchangeable substance, God. There is present in Descartes, opposing such a proof, a theological presupposition of God's freedom and omnipotence extending as well to essences or "eternal truths" as to existence, to the possibility as to reality, to truth as to being. This is the remarkable doctrine of the "creation of eternal truths,” revealed by him directly in correspondence with Mersenne, later in the replies to the fifth and sixth set of objections to the Meditations, which appears obliquely in his published treatises in the extension of methodic doubt to the truths of mathematics and in the rejection of final causes. The Augustinian proof, since it moves through eternal truths in themselves dubitable acquired of a guarantee of the Divine veracity, would not for Descartes be valid.
Descartes' movement to the knowledge of God from the Cogito is through the idea of God, eternal, Infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, Creator of all things, also to have been regarded for being that whose celestial totality exists of itself in reasons that speak for saying, “just as it should be.” The Law Maker, the idea, is, perhaps, more than is less or fewer than should be, is not, for which is born the thoughts that have power of neither additional nor supplementary attributions. That its essential essence of an idea is born infinitely contentual of its thought and is addressed through one who is imperfect, limited yet dependent. It is the only idea that is not by his attained upright position, so to speak, and is not brought forth through himself. For all other ideas are not very content by its superior realms to his thoughts. Yet he knows this idea not by a via negative, but positively, clearly and distinctly. That the Cartesian philosophy may come upon in the Cogito movement in this manner to knowledge of the existence of God, whether as in the Meditations to the cause of such an idea of God, or as in the Principles of Philosophy through an ontological argument, is foreign to the Augustinian philosophy. Though it is true that for Augustine as for Descartes the soul does have within itself an idea of God, still because of its weak and fallen nature, its mutability and finitude, it is by faith that it initially grasps the true idea of God as Trinity. The first admonition of Augustine, credo ut intelligas, is violated in the Cartesian procedure that begins solely with the "natural light" of reason.
Scholars have established many relations of Descartes' philosophy to medieval sources, as antidote to the supposition that the history of philosophy begins de novo with Descartes, though sometimes obscuring the difference between Cartesian, hence modern, philosophy and earlier thought. From the first appearance of the Cartesian philosophy, there was noted a remarkable similarity, especially respecting the Cogito, between Descartes and Augustine, and Arnauld then began a controversy in the fourth set of Objections to the Meditations 1, on which much has been written, especially in the twentieth century, the question whether Descartes' Cogito is or is not original to him. Nothing needs to be added to the side of kinship, nor to the side of difference in this controversy; rather the two sides need to be drawn together to shed some light on the logic of the Cogito in both St. Augustine and Descartes, and the movement in thought from one to the other. There is then this important difference in the Augustinian and Cartesian Cogito detected in the movement to the existence of God: in Augustine, it is a finding of exemplary ideas having a universality at variances with their being of a particular subject, a movement from a changeable subject to its underlying universality; the Cogito of Descartes is already apart from change, finds itself with universal ideas of which it feels perfectly competent to be the cause. For Descartes, only the idea of a perfect being surpasses it and gives it pauses, whereas Augustine's Cogito is not competent even to the ideas of mathematical truths.
Both forms of the Cogito are contra Academicos, and both forms affirm to the spirituality of the soul: As two rely upon their relationships. It ought not to be thought that the Augustinian or Cartesian argument against skepticism is merely destructive, that si fallor, sum or ego sum si me fallit simply refutes the sceptical position. Rather, the Cogito shows what the real error of skepticism is: it assumes the separation of thinking from its object; and in the same act it both reveals the fundamental ground of certainty and gives to thought a content appropriately its own. Mind thus remaining true to itself knows itself as a spiritual being and the content appropriate to it also as immaterial or idea. In these two respects the Cartesian Cogito and the Augustinian are in the closest harmony. But to this it must be noted that whereas for Augustine the Cogito occurs as part of the movement to scientia of matters revealed and held absolutely by faith, a movement that begins with a presupposition, the absolute standpoint of revealed truth, for Descartes the Cogito occurs as the absolute beginning. The Cartesian Cogito is more than a refutation of skepticism and an assertion of the pure spirituality of the soul; it is further the affirmation that nothing is acceptable to think which is not as clear and distinct as thought itself. As such, the Cartesian Cogito can ably give to the movement through which are the ontological arguments for God's existence, justly caused for only a Cogito is without a presupposition that makes possible the ultimate demand of argumentively conducted deductions, and, within the mind, appealing to nothing external. Finding within thought an idea of God to which necessary existence pertains just as clearly and distinctly as existence pertains to the thinking subject, its demand is fulfilled.
Certain differences in the philosophical standpoints of Descartes and St. Augustine are exemplified and take their origin in this difference in the Cogito as it occurs in the one and in the other. For both, knowledge through the senses is dubitable: in St. Augustine, because it is not immediate, for Descartes because its falsity is conceivable. Again in both there is a knowledge that is absolutely certain: For St. Augustine, it is because it is immediate, not by representation, for Descartes because its falsity is inconceivable. Thus, for Augustine "eternal truths,” since unchangeable and immutable, are indubitable, whereas for Descartes, their truth is not immediate, but mediated through the knowledge of God's existence, and hence thought cannot by its own measure derive the truth of God's existence from them, their truth from God's existence.
It would be wrong to think of the Cartesian beginning with no other presupposition than thought alone as apart from all relation to the theology given more comprehensively in St. Augustine. It is rather the beginning of the philosophical reconstruction of that theology in finite subjectivity, that is, from the human standpoint. The Divine Revelations that must, with Augustine, be explicated at the outset, that the doctrine of the Trinity might be grasped as the fundamental doctrine of Christian faith, has by the seventeenth century informed human reason itself, the purgatio mentis has been effected. Modern philosophy, after the Christianization of those one thousand years has had its effect, takes into the finding that any presupposition superfluous and unworthy of the Divine Revelation itself, not through pride, but that the truth might reveal itself now as true.
Descartes' doctrine of the "creation of eternal truths,” to which attention has been drawn, is a direct consequence of theological wisdom endeavouring to take seriously in its conception of Nature the Christian doctrine of Creation and the Divine Incarnation. Not content simply to grasp the ideal exemplars of nature, and their relation to God in the Divine Word, there is found in modern philosophy at least implicitly the need to know the activity of God in Creation. If at first this appears in Descartes as an unbalanced stress on God's freedom as purely volitional activity, as might be said of his first enunciation of the position in 1630 (this was the criticism of Mersenne), the position was tempered in the Meditations where the pure volitional activity of the genius malignus gives way to the idea of God, infinite power, infinite thought, infinite goodness.
An ontological argument, which is not found in Augustine, cannot fittingly be found there, where there is a Cogito and hence a grasp of a finite thinking about God, and yet a prior presupposition that cannot allow the Cogito its ultimate development. As the ontological argument occurs in Anselm, it occurs without a Cogito and hence admits of the further criticism of St. Thomas that the finite subjective element is an impediment and an element of which the concept of God must be divested, lest the concept be something merely in thought. Yet it is the most Trinitarian of arguments, as Anselm knew. A long development in making the belief in God one's own must occur from the thirteenth century to the dawn of modern philosophy before an ontological argument can be grasped as properly one's own. There is then this importantDifference in the Augustinian and Cartesian Cogito detected in the movement to the existence of God: in Augustine, it is a finding of exemplary ideas having a universality at variances with their being of a particular subject, a movement from a changeable subject to its underlying
Universality, the Cogito of Descartes is already apart from change, finds itself with universal ideas of which it feels perfectly competent to be the cause. For Descartes, only the idea of a perfect being surpasses it and gives it pauses, whereas Augustine's Cogito is not competent even to the ideas of mathematical truths.
May it not to be thought that the Augustinian or Cartesian argument against skepticism is merely destructive, that si fallor, sum or ego sum si me fallit simply refutes the sceptical position. Rather, the Cogito shows what the real error of skepticism is: it assumes the separation of thinking from its object, and in the same act it both reveals the fundamental ground of certainty and gives to thought a content appropriately its own. Mind thus remaining true to itself knows itself as a spiritual being and the content appropriate to it also as immaterial or idea.
Certain differences in the philosophical standpoints of Descartes and St. Augustine are exemplified and take their origin in this difference in the Cogito as it occurs in the one and in the other. For both, knowledge through the senses is dubitable: in St. Augustine, because it is not immediate, for Descartes because its falsity is conceivable. Again in both there is a knowledge that is absolutely certain: for St. Augustine, it is because it is immediate and not by representation, for Descartes because its falsity is inconceivable. Thus, for Augustine "eternal truths,” since unchangeable and immutable, are indubitable, whereas for Descartes, their truth is not immediate, but mediated through the knowledge of God's existence, and hence thought cannot by its own measure derive the truth of God's existence from them, than their truth from God's existence.
It would be wrong to think of the Cartesian beginning with no other presupposition than thought alone as apart from all relation to the theology given more comprehensively in St. Augustine. It is rather the beginning of the philosophical reconstruction of that theology from in the finite subjectivity, that is, from the human standpoint. The Divine Revelation that must, with Augustine, be explicated at the outset, that the doctrine of the Trinity might be grasped as the fundamental doctrine of Christian faith, has by the seventeenth century informed human reason itself; the purgatio mentis has been effected. Modern philosophy, after the Christianization of those one thousand years has had its effect, next to its forgiving truth, finding any presupposition superfluous and unworthy of the Divine Revelation itself, not through pride, but that the truth might reveal itself now as true.
Descartes' doctrine of the "creation of eternal truths,” to which attention has been drawn, is a direct consequence of theological wisdom endeavouring to take seriously in its conception of Nature the Christian doctrine of Creation and the Divine Incarnation. Not content simply to grasp the ideal exemplars of nature, and their relation to God in the Divine Word, there is found in modern philosophy at least implicitly the need to know the activity of God in Creation. If at first this appears in Descartes as an unbalanced stress on God's freedom as purely volitional activity, as might be said of his first enunciation of the position in 1630, the position was temper in the Meditations where the pure volitional activeness of the “sense datum maleficent” that gives the ways upon which we view, as in principle to the idea of God, infinite power, infinite thought, infinite goodness.
An ontological argument, which is not found in Augustine, cannot fittingly be found there, where there is a Cogito and hence a grasp of a finite thinking about God, and yet a prior presupposition that cannot allow the Cogito its ultimate development. As the ontological argument occurs in Anselm, it occurs without a Cogito and hence admits of the further criticism of St. Thomas that the finite subjective element is an impediment and an element of which the concept of God must be divested, least the concepts be something merely in thought. Yet it is the most Trinitarian of arguments, as Anselm knew. A long development in making the belief in God one's own must occur from the thirteenth century to the dawn of modern philosophy before an ontological argument can be grasped as properly one's own.
Descartes' movement to the knowledge of God from the Cogito is through the idea of God, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, Creator of all things, an idea to which thought has power of neither to any additional substantive attributions. As to an idea, from which is infinitely to surpass all contentual implications that are representationally obtainable of their thoughts are inclined of being ingested for oneself, imperfect, limited, dependent. It is the only idea that is not his by right, so to speak, not begotten by himself, for all other ideas are not contentually superior to his thought. Yet he knows this idea not by a via negative, but positively, clearly and distinctly. That the Cartesian philosophy can in finding the Cogito movement in this manner, the knowledge sustained through the existence of God, whether as in the Meditations to the cause of such an idea of God, or as in the Principles of Philosophy through an ontological argument, is foreign to the Augustinian philosophy. Though it is true that for Augustine as for Descartes the soul does have within itself an idea of God, still because of its weak and fallen nature, its mutability and finitude, it is by faith that it initially grasps the true idea of God as Trinity. The first admonition of Augustine, credo ut intelligas, may be violated in the Cartesian procedure that begins solely with the "natural light" of reason.
There is then this important difference in the Augustinian and Cartesian Cogito detected in the movement to the existence of God: in Augustine, it is a finding of exemplary ideas having a universality at variances with their being of a particular subject, a movement from a changeable subject to its underlying universality; the Cogito of Descartes is already apart from change, finds itself with universal ideas of which it feels perfectly competent to be the cause. For Descartes, only the idea of a perfect being surpasses it and gives it pauses, whereas Augustine's Cogito is not competent even to the ideas of mathematical truths.
It would be wrong to think of the Cartesian beginning with no other presupposition than thought alone as apart from all relation to the theology given more comprehensively in St. Augustine. It is rather the beginning of the philosophical reconstruction of that theology in finite subjectivity, that is, from the human standpoint. The Divine Revelations that must, with Augustine, be explicated upon the onset, that the doctrine of the Trinity might be grasped as the fundamental doctrine of Christian faith, and has by the seventeenth century has let known to human reason, that the purgatio mentis has been cause to occur. Modern philosophy, after the Christianization of those of one thousand years has by its effect, that without there be to proceeding issue that for the chance of subjectivity, it might now be completely in the finding, among other things, the needed location for any given presumptuous excessiveness and the actualized contemptibility of the Divine Reevaluations, not through any congratulatory pride, but that the truth might reveal itself as a possible presents, and every bit as necessarily true.
An ontological argument, which is not found in Augustine, cannot fittingly be found there, where there is a Cogito and hence a grasp of a finite thinking about God, and yet a prior presupposition that cannot allow the Cogito its ultimate development. As the ontological argument occurs in Anselm, it occurs without a Cogito and hence admits of the further criticism of St. Thomas that the finite subjective element is an impediment and an element of which the concept of God must be divested, lest the concept be something merely in thought. Yet it is the most Trinitarian of arguments, as Anselm knew. A long development in making the belief in God one's own must occur from the thirteenth century to the dawn of modern philosophy before an ontological argument can be grasped as properly one's own.
As the 19th century progressed, the problem of the relationship of mind to brain became ever more pressing. Indeed, so deep was the concern with mind/brain relations that it is difficult to find a systematic text written after 1860 that does not contain a discussion of this issue. Usually, this directly reflected two major developments that converged to impress philosophers and psychologists with the centrality of the mind/brain problem. The first of these involved progress in understanding the localization of cerebral function, based on the idea that the brain serves as the organ of mind. The second involved a growing familiarity with the thesis that mental events -beliefs, mental suggestions, mesmeric trance states, psychic traumas and the like -sometimes cause radical alterations in the state of the body. This change occurred as progress was made in understanding the nature of functional nervous disorders. Before proceeding further, we will briefly describe some major mind/brain perspectives articulated in response to these trends.
Although the theories of mind/brain relationship prevalent in the 19th century -epiphenomenalism, interactionism, dual-aspect monism, and mind stuff -were formulated in science, they, like their predecessors, were attempts to deal with the metaphysical complexities of the Cartesian impasse. It is not surprising, therefore, that these views evolved for the most part as variations on themes already addressed.
Prince was born in Boston and educated at Boston Latin, Harvard College, and Harvard Medical School. Inspired by the work of Chariot and Janet on hysteria, Liébeault and Bernheim on suggestion, Gurney on the hypnotic induction of dissociation, and James on automatic writing, Prince entered early upon the study of conscious and unconscious mental phenomena that was to become his life's work. Indeed, while he was still a medical student, he won the Boylston Prize for his graduation thesis, a treatise that eventually formed the core of The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism.
Like Mind and Human Automatism, Prince concerned himself with justifying the intuitive belief that our thoughts have something to do with the production of our actions. "No amount of reasoning," he wrote, "can argue me out of the belief that I drink this water because I am thirsty.” After rejecting parallelism for being at variances with this intuition, Prince presented the classic formulation of the mind-stuff metaphysic: "instead of there being one substance with two properties or 'aspects,' -mind and motion, -there is one substance, mind; and the other apparent property, motion, is only the way in which this real substance, mind, is apprehended by a second organism: only the sensations of, or effect upon, the second organism, when acted upon (ideally) by the real substance, mind.” For Prince, in other words, the psychical monism of mind-stuff constituted a modern form of immaterialism.
Like Prince, William James could never shake his conviction in the efficacy of mind, yet, is there to be some parallelled efficaciousness with Hodgson. Who during an early stage, exerted an influence over the development of James's thought. Even so, is there of any case that neither by him, who couldn’t escape from his belief in the reality and the efficacy of the brain. In 1890, when The Principles of Psychology was finally published, James devoted two chapters to the analysis and critique of contemporary mind/brain views, one to the automaton theory and another to the mind-stuff theory. Both chapters present extensive discussions of reasons for and against the views under analysis. The reader proceeding through the systematic dismantling of each of these views expects James, at any moment, to produce his own brilliant synthesis. Instead, however, even the redoubtable James, like many of those who had preceded him, found him confounded by the Cartesian impasse: "What shall we do? Many would find relief at this point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the 'awe' which we should feel at having such a principle to take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice that the finite and separatist view of things with which we started with had, at last developed its contradictions, and was more or less to lead us dialectically upwards to some 'higher synthesis' in which inconsistencies cease from troubling and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual chloroform. Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever"
James's "solution" is to opt for a provisional and pragmatic empirical parallelism of the sort to which many psychologists still subscribe. The "simplest psycho-physic formula," he writes, "and the last word of a psychology that contents itself with verifiable laws, and seeks only to be clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses" would be a "blank unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness with the succession of total brain processes. . . ." Beyond that, James suggests that we are unable to go at present without leaving the precincts of empirical science.
As the 19th century progressed, the problem of the relationship of mind to brain became especially acute as physiologists and psychologists began to focus on the nature and localization of cerebral function. In a diffuse and general way, the idea of functional localization had been available since antiquity. A notion of "soul" globally related to the brain, for example, can be found in the work of Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Plato, Erisistratus, and Galen, among others. The pneumatic physiologists of the middle ages thought that mental capacities were located in the fluid of the ventricles. As belief in animal spirits died, however, so also did we give verification about any contradictory ventricularistic findings that would supplement each hypothesis made, and by 1784, when Jiri Prochaska published his de functionibus systematic nervosi, interest had shifted to the brain stem and cerebrum.
Despite these early views, the doctrine of functional localization proper, that the notion that specific mental processes are correlated with discrete regions of the brain and the attempt to establish localization by means of empirical observations were essentially 19th century achievement. The first critical steps toward those ends can be traced to the work of Franz Josef Gall (1758 -1828). Gall was born in Baden and studied medicine at Strasbourg and Vienna, where he received his degree in 1785. Impressed as a child by apparent correlations between unusual talents in his friends and striking variations in facial or cranial appearance, Gall set out to evolve a new cranioscopic method of localizing mental faculties. His first public lectures on a cranioscopy date from around 1796. Unfortunately, his lectures almost immediately aroused opposition on the grounds of his presumed materialism, and in 1805, he was forced to leave Vienna. After two years of travel, he arrived in Paris accompanied by his colleague, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832). In 1810, Gall and Spurzheim published the first volume of the Anatomie et Physiologie du système nerveux en général, Gall's most important contribution to neuroanatomy and the first major statement of his cranioscopy.
The essence of Gall's method of localization lay in correlating variations in character with variations in external craniological signs. The validity of this approach depended on three critical assumptions: that the size and shape of the cranium reflected the size and shape of the underlying portions of the cerebrum that mental abilities were innate and fixed, and that the relative level of development of an innate ability was a reflection of the inherited size of its cerebral organ. On these assumptions, an observed correlation between a particularly well developed ability and a particularly prominent area of the cranium could be interpreted as evidence of the functional localization of that ability in the correlative portion of the cerebrum.
While Gall's correlational approach was eventually abandoned in favour of experiment, his conception of fixed, innate faculties replaced by a dynamic, evolutionary view of mental development, and his pivotal assumption concerning the relationship of brain to cranial conformation rejected, it would be a serious error to underestimate his importance in the history of functional localization. Gall's assumptions may have been flawed and his followers may have taken his ideas to dogmatic extremes, as, it is nonetheless a problem that nothing is wrong with his scientific logic or with the rigorous empiricism of his attempt to correlate observable talents with what he believed to be observable indices of the brain.
Indeed, it was Gall who lay the foundations for the biologically based, functional psychology that was soon to follow. In postulating a set of innate, mental traits inherited through the form of the cerebral organ, he moved away from the extreme tabula rasa view of sensationalists such as Condillac. For the normative and exclusively intellectual faculties of the sensationalists, Gall attempted to substitute faculties defined about everyday activities of daily life that were adaptive in the surrounding environment and that varied between individuals and between species. For speculation concerning both the classification of functions and appropriate anatomical units, he substituted objective observation.
Even Gall's most persistent opponent, Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens (1794 -1867), was willing to admit that it was Gall who, by virtue of marshalling detailed evidence of correlation between variation in function and presumed variation in the brain, first fully established the view that brain serves as the organ of mind. In most other respects, however, Flourens was highly critical of Gall. Something of a child prodigy, Flourens enrolled at the famed Faculté de Médecine at Montpellier when he was only 15 years old and received his medical degree before he had turned. Shortly thereafter, while Gall was at the height of his career in Paris, Flourens himself moved to the capital. Based on his 1824 Recherches expérimentales sur les propriétés et les fonctions du système nerveux, he was elected to membership and eventually to the office of Perpetual Secretary of the Académie des Sciences, rising to become one of France's most influential scientific figures.
In Recherches expérimentales, Flourens provided the first experimental demonstration of localization of function in the brain. While previous researchers had lesioned the brain through a trephined aperture that made it impossible to localize damage or to track haemorrhage with any accuracy, Flourens completely uncovered and isolated that portion of the brain to be removed. Taking care to minimize operative trauma and post-operative complications, he employed ablation to localize a motor centre in the medulla oblongata and stability and motor coordination in the cerebellum. Although his treatment of sensation was still rather confused in 1824, by the time the second edition of the Recherches expérimentales (1842) appeared, Flourens had articulated a clear distinction between sensation and perception (treating perception as the appreciation of the meaning of a sensation) and localized sensory function in several related sub-cortical structures.
With respect to the cerebrum, however, the results were quite different. A successive order through which the hemispheres produced diffusing damage to all of the higher mental functions -to perception, intellect, and will -with the damage varying only with the extent and not the location of the lesion. If adequate tissue remained, function might be restored, but total ablation led to a permanent loss of function. From these results, Flourens concluded that while sensory-motor functions are differentiated and localized sub-cortically, higher mental functions such as perception, volition, and intellect are spread throughout the cerebrum, operating together as a single factor with the entire cerebrum functioning in a unitary fashion as their "exclusive seat."
Unfortunately, however, as Gall (1822-1825) himself observed, Flourens's procedure "mutilates all the organs at once, weakens them all, extirpates them all while.” Excision by some successively given order, might arise of a method that is well in accord with the discovery of cortical localisation. Joined to a strongly held philosophical belief in a unitary soul and an indivisible mind and an uncritical willingness to generalize results from lower organisms to humans, Flourens results led him to attack Gall's efforts at localization and to formulate a theory of cerebral homogeneity that, in effect, anticipated Lashley's (1929) much later concept of mass-action and cortical equipotentiality. Having extended the sensory-motor distinction up the neuraxis from the spinal roots of Bell and Magendie, Flourens stopped short of the cerebral hemispheres. From his perspective, the cerebrum was the organ of a unitary mind, and, by implication, it could not therefore be functionally differentiated.
Before the cortex could be construed in sensory-motor terms, the intellectual ground had to be prepared and the technical means developed. The intellectual requirements for this achievement involved the abandonment of a fixed faculty approach to mind in favour of a balanced sensory-motor, evolutionary associationism and an appreciation of the functional implications of brain disease. The technical requirement was the development of a technique for electrical exploration of the surface of the cortex. The intellectual advances came through the respective psychologies of Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer and the neuropathological discoveries of Pierre Paul Broca. The technical advance, involving development and use of electrical stimulation, was first employed by Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig.
Alexander Bain (1818-1903) was born, educated, and died in Aberdeen, Scotland. After receiving the MA degree from Marischal College in 1840, he joined the faculty in mental and moral philosophy. In 1860 he was elected to the chair of logic at the newly created University of Aberdeen where he remained until his retirement. During these years, Bain wrote a rare read but interesting critiques of phrenology, On the Study of Character, Including an Estimate of Phrenology (1861), and a valuable survey of mind/body views, Mind and Body. The Theories of Their Relation (1873). It is, however, to his general psychology that we must look for his most important contribution to the intellectual climate from which the first specific demonstrations of the cortical localization of sensory-motor function arose. This contribution consisted of the sensory-motor associationism that he worked out in “The Senses and the Intellect” and “The Emotions and Will” was first published in 1855 and 1859 respectively and revised in four editions through 1894/1899.
Bain's work marked a turning point in the history of associationist psychology. Before Bain, the associationists' empiricist commitment to experience as the primary or only source of knowledge led to the neglect of movement and action in favour of the analysis of sensation. Even when motion was explicitly included in associationist accounts, as for example for Thomas Brown, it was the sensory side of movement, the "muscle sense," rather than adaptive action that claimed attention. Bain, drawing heavily on Müller, brought the new physiology of movement into conjunction with an associationist account of mind. As Young (1970) has summarized Bain's view: "Action is more intimate and has to some inseparable property, for which is based upon our constituent components that bring the composite formulations that seal us to the inseparability with the universe, and likewise our conscious selves are to realize that the universe are conscious of us, because this constitutes to any sensation and in fact, enters as the composite part into every part that we can by enacting of any senses give by them, that, only by virtue of our characterological infractions, that put forward of exaggerations, and that only we can be by the uniting the totalities to elaborate upon their flowing components. Some the spontaneity of movements, that feature of nervous activity before any evidence of independent of sensation. The acquired linkages of spontaneous movements with the pleasure and pains consequent upon them, educate the organism so that its formerly random movements . . . (are) adapted to ends or purposes. Bain defines volition as this compound of spontaneous movements and feelings. The coordination of motor impulses into definite purposive movements results from the association of ideas with them.”
Within association psychology, these were revolutionary ideas. With the evolutionary conceptions of Spencer, they paved the way for the later functionalist psychology of adaptive behaviour. As we will see, they provided the intellectual context for a sensory-motor account of the physiological basis of higher mental functions. Ironically, however, this was a step that Bain himself was completely unable to take. Impressed, as those before he had been, with the lack of irritability exhibited by the cortex when pricked or cut, Bain drew the traditionally sharp distinction "between the hemispheres and the whole of the ganglia and centres lying beneath them.” Whatever the function of the cerebrum, it was clear to Bain that it could not be sensory-motor.
In 1855, the same year in which Bain published The Senses and the Intellect, another even more revolutionary work appeared in England. The Principles of Psychology by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) offered students of the brain an evolutionary associationism and a related concept of cerebral localization that gave impetus and direction to the work of John Hughlings Jackson and through Jackson to that of David Ferrier.
Spencer was born in Derby, England and was largely self-taught. At the age of 17, he took up railway engineering but left that occupation in 1848 to work first as an editor and then as a free-lance writer and reviewer. In an Autobiography (1904), Spencer tells us that, at age 11 or 12, he attended lectures by Spurzheim that for many years made him a believer in phrenology. Indeed, as late as 1846, before his growing scepticism regarding phrenology led him to abandon the project, Spencer had designed a cephalograph for achieving more reliable cranial measurement.
In 1850, because of a burgeoning friendship with George Henry Lewes, Spencer began to read Lewes's “A Biographical History of Philosophy,” (1845/1846). Within a short time, he found himself so absorbed in the topic that he decided to make a contribution of his own to philosophy as an introduction to psychology. In 1855, Spencer's Principles of Psychology appeared. It is a complex and difficult book, hardly an introduction to the topic. Like Bain's work shows in “The Senses and the Intellect,” it too marked a turning point in the history of psychology. While Bain had married movement to the sensations of the associationism and arrived at the first fully balanced sensory-motor associational view, Spencer went further to explicate upon the reasoning through which psychology is inferred too for being connected to evolutionary biology.
In particular, Spencer stressed three basic evolutionary principles that transformed his view of mind and brain into one to which the cortical localization of function was a simple logical corollary. In so doing, he lay the groundwork for Hughlings Jackson's evolutionary conception of the nervous system and extension of the sensory-motor organizational hypothesis to the cerebrum. Spencer's key principles were adaptation, continuity, and development.
Like Gall, Spencer viewed psychology as a biological science of adaptation. "All those activities, bodily and mental, which constitute our ordinary idea of life . . . (and) those processes of growth by which the organism is brought into general fitness for those activities" consist simply of "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.” Neither the associations among internal ideas, for example, nor the relations among external events, but the increasing adjustment of inner to outer relations must lie at the heart of psychology. Indeed, for Spencer, mental phenomena are adaptations, "incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its environment.”
Like adaptation, continuity and development were also focal ideas for Spencer. Development consists of a change from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from relative unity and indivisibility to differentiation and complexity. According to the principle of continuity, life and its circumstances exist at all levels of complexity and correspondence. How much life varies continuously with the correspondence? ; no radical demarcations separate one level from the next. Thus, mental and physical life are simply species of life in general, and that which we call mind evolves continuously from physical life -reflexes from irritations, instincts from compounded reflexes, and conscious life and higher mental processes from instincts -co-existing at varied levels of complexity.
The implications of these evolutionary conceptions for the hypothesis of cortical localization of function are clear. The brain is the most highly developed physical system we know and the cortex is the most developed level of the brain. As such, it must be heterogeneous, differentiated, and complex. Furthermore, if the cortex is a continuous development from sub-cortical structures, the sensory-motor principles that govern sub-cortical localization must hold in the cortex as well. Finally, if higher mental processes are the product of a continuous process of development from the simplest irritation through reflexes and instincts, there is no justification for drawing a sharp distinction between mind and body. The mind/body dichotomy that for two centuries had supported the notion that the cerebrum, functioning as the seat of higher mental processes, must function according to principles radically different from those descriptive of sub-cerebral nervous function, had to be abandoned.
While these ideas were to be worked out more fully by Hughlings Jackson, it is quite clear that even in 1855 Spencer was well aware of the implications of his concepts of continuity and development for cerebral localization. In the Principles, he wrote that "no physiologist who calmly considers the question concerning the general truths of his science, can long resist the conviction that different parts of the cerebrum subserve different kinds of mental action. Localisation of a dynamic function is the law of which all coordinate system that are affiliated organizations, . . . that every packet of nerve-fibres and every ganglion, have a different and differentiated duty, can it be, then, that in the greatest of hemispheric ganglions is exclusively specializing by its particular duty that suits but for no other purpose than not to hold.
With the ground prepared by the sensory-motor associationism of Bain and the evolutionary psychophysiology of Spencer, all needed to overcome the last obstacle to extension of the sensory-motor view to the cortex was the impetus provided by striking research findings and new experimental techniques. In the period between 1861 and 1876, Broca, and Fritsch and Hitzig, provided the first critical findings and techniques, as Jackson was persuasively unduly of influencing Spencer and Bain, thus providing the extension of the sensory-motor paradigm to the cortex. As Ferrier, unduly influenced by Bain and Jackson, provided the experimental capstone to the classical doctrine of cortical localization.
Paul Broca (1824-1880) was born in the township of Sainte-Foy-La-Grande in the Dordogne region of France and studied medicine at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris. A lifelong interest in physical anthropology led to his becoming in the original membership of the Société d'Anthropologie and the founder of the Revue d’Anthropologie and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Paris. On the 4th of April 1861, at a meeting of the Société d'Anthropologie, Broca sat in the audience as Ernest Aubertin presented a paper citing several striking case studies to argue the craniological case for cerebral localization of articulate language.
Aubertin was the student and son-in-law of Jean Baptiste Bouillaud, a powerful and distinguished figure in Parisian scientific circles, himself a student of Gall and founding member of the Société Phrénologique. As early as 1825, Bouillaud had published a paper that employed clinical evidence to support Gall's view that the faculty of articulate language resides in the anterior lobes of the brain. For almost 40 years, in the face of considerable opposition, Bouillaud had succeeded in keeping the cerebral localization hypothesis alive. Thus, Aubertin was merely carrying on in his father-in-law's tradition when he promised to give up his belief in cerebral localization if even a single case of speech loss could be produced without a frontal lesion.
Intrigued, Broca decided to take up Aubertin's challenge. Within a week, an M. Leborgne ("Tan"), a speechless, hemiplegic patient died of gangrene on Broca's surgical ward. In the "Remarques sur le siége de la Faculté du langage articulé, suivies d'une observation d'aphemie (perte de la parole)," published in 1861 in the Bulletins de la société anatomique de Paris, Broca presented a detailed account of his postmortem examination of Tan's brain. What he had found, of course, was a superficial lesion in the left frontal lobe, a finding confirmed a few weeks later by another case in which postmortem examination revealed a similar lesion.
While neither is represented by the contentual representation of a faculty articulated by language nor even the notion of its localization in the anterior portion of the brain were especially novel in 1861, what Broca provided was a research finding that galvanized scientific opinion on the localization hypothesis. The detail of Broca's account, the fact that he had gone specifically in search of evidence for the patients' speech loss rather than employing case’s post hoc as support for localization, his use of the pathological rather than the craniological method, his focus on the convolutional topography of the cerebral hemispheres, and, perhaps what is most important, the fact that the time was ripe for such a demonstration, all contributed to the instantaneous sensation created by Broca's findings. Now all needed was a technique for the experimental exploration of the surface of the hemispheres, and this technique was contributed jointly by Gustav Theodor Fritsch (1838-1927) and Eduard Hitzig (1838-1907).
In 1870, Archie’s für Anatomie, Physiologie, und wissenschaftliche Medicin, Fritsch and Hitzig published a classic paper that not only provided the first experimental evidence of cortical localization of function but, at a single stroke, swept away the age-old objection to localization based on the idea that the hemispheres fail to exhibit irritability. Employing galvanic stimulation of the cerebrum in the dog, Fritsch and Hitzig provided conclusive evidence that circumscribed areas of the cortex are involved in movements of the contralateral limbs and that ablation of these same areas leads to weakness in these limbs. Their findings established electrophysiology as a preferred method for the experimental exploration of cortical localization of function and demonstrated the participation of the hemispheres in motor function.
At approximately the same time in England, John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) was converging from a different direction on a sensory-motor view of hemispheric function. Hughlings Jackson was born in Providence Green, Green Hammerton, Yorkshire, England. He began the study of medicine as an apprentice in York and completed his education at the Medical School of St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London and the University of St. Andrews. Among several hospital appointments, perhaps his most important was as physician to the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen Square. His contributions to neurology and psychology are scattered throughout papers appearing in a variety of journals between 1861 and 1909. Many more important papers have been gathered in the two volumes Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson, edited by James Taylor (1931/1932).
While Jackson's specific contributions to our understanding of the etiology, course, and treatment of neurological disorders ranging from aphasia and chorea to epilepsy and vertigo were very important, it is his evolutionary conception of the localization of sensory-motor function in the cerebrum that was most influential for psychology. This conception was, of course, developed under the inspiration of Spencer. As Young (1970) describes it, "Spencer's principles of continuity and evolution gave Jackson a single, consistent set of variables for specifying the physiological and psychological elements of which experience, thought, and behaviour are composed: sensations (or impressions) and motions. All complex mental phenomena are made up of these simple elements --from the simplest reflex to the most sublime thoughts and emotions. All functions and faculties can be explained in these terms.”
Jackson's paper, "On the anatomical and physiological localisation of movements in the brain," serialized in the Lancet in 1873, represents a series of papers during this period that reflect the sensory-motor conception. In an interesting and revealing preface to a 1875 pamphlet, Clinical and Physiological Researches on the Nervous System [17], which reprints the 1873 paper, Jackson describes the background for the hypothesis as it developed in his own work, almost as though he is endeavouring to establish his priority. Fond as always of quoting himself, Jackson reprints a footnote from a 1870 paper, "The study of convulsions," that summarizes his views: "It is asserted by some that the cerebrum is the organ of mind, and that it is not a motor organ. Some think the cerebrum is to be likened to an instrumentalist, and the motor centres to the instrument. One part is for ideas, and the other for movements. It may, then, be asked, How can it discharge the part that assumes to other mental states, in that, of a mental organ might produce motor symptoms only? But of what substantiated results can each in substances embark upon that which is considered for the organ of mind, unless of specified processes representing movements and impressions . . . ? Are we to believe that the hemisphere is constructed of the plan that presses upon its fundamental frequency of differences, in that, its judging gauge of which an immeasurable quality of dissimilar values may yet come from that of the motor tract? . . . Surely the conclusion is irresistible that 'mental' symptoms . . . must all be due to lack, or to disorderly development, of sensor-motor processes.
Thus, by the early 1870s, Jackson had fully articulated a general conception of the functional organization of the nervous system. In the words of Young (1970), this layed the groundwork for the last stage in the integration of the association psychology with sensory-motor physiology . . . (and) involved an explicit rejection of . . . work that had hindered a unified view: the faculty formulation of Broca, and the unwillingness of Flourens, Magendie, Müller, and others to treat the organ of mind -the highest centres -on consistently physiological terms. In Jackson's work, the theoretical analysis of cerebral localization reached the full extent of its 19th century development. In the systematic, experimental investigations of his friend and colleague, David Ferrier (1843-1928), this analysis was strikingly confirmed.
Ferrier was born and educated in Aberdeen, Scotland where he studied under Alexander Bain. At Bain's urging, he journeyed to Heidelberg in 1864 to study psychology. During that period, Heidelberg was home to both Helmholtz and Wundt. Indeed Wundt had only recently (1862) completed the Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung that contains the first programmatic statement of his physiological psychology and Ferrier must certainly have encountered Wundt's views.
On his return, Ferrier completed his medical training at the University of Edinburgh and served, for a short time, as assistant to Thomas Laycock, who had been the first to articulate the concept of "unconscious cerebration." Among other appointments, Ferrier, like Jackson, served as physician to the National Hospital, Queen Square. Influenced as Jackson had been by Bain and Spencer, Ferrier set out to test Jackson's notion that sensory-motor functions must be represented through some orderly coordinative vectors systemized, since they are an organization that proudly fashions in the cortex to extend by Fritsch and Hitzig's experimental localization of motor cortices in the cervixes of the dog. Employing very carefully controlled ablations and faradic stimulation of the brain, an advance over the galvanic techniques available to Fritsch and Hitzig, Ferrier succeeded in mapping sensory and motor areas across a wide range of species. His first paper, "Experimental researches in cerebral physiology and pathology," appeared in 1873 in the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports. Although, it was the impact of the cumulated cross-species research that brought into all of their priorities in 1876 in The Functions of the Brain that served to confirm the installation of sensory-motor analysis as the dominant paradigm for explanation in both physiology and psychology.
While the debate raged between Nancy and the Salpêtrière, Pierre Janet (1859-1947) was at work at Le Havre gathering clinical observations on which to base his dissertation. Born in Paris, Janet entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1879, placing second in the extremely competitive examinations of the agrégation. Shortly thereafter he took up a professorial position in philosophy at the Lyceum in Le Havre where he remained until the acceptance of his dissertation. Upon receipt of the degree, he moved to Paris to study medicine and pursue clinical research under Chariot at the Salpêtrière.
Janet's dissertation, L'automatisme psychologique brought together a wealth of related clinical information on a variety of abnormal mental states related to hysteria and psychosis. Dividing such states into total (involving the whole personality) and partial (part of the personality split from awareness and following its own psychological existence) automatisms, Janet employed automatic writing and hypnosis to identify the traumatic origins and explore the nature of automatism. Syncope, catalepsy, and artificial somnambulism with post-hypnotic amnesia and memory for prior hypnotic states were analysed as total automatisms. Multiple personalities, which Janet called "successive existence," partial catalepsy, absent-mindedness, phenomena of automatic writing, post-hypnotic suggestion, the use of the divining rod, mediumistic trance, obsessions, fixed ideas, and the experience of possession were treated as partial automatisms.
What is most important, Janet brought these phenomena together within an analytic framework that emphasized the ideomotor relationship between consciousness and action, employed a dynamic metaphor of psychic force and weakness, and stressed the concept of "field of consciousness" and its narrowing because of depletion of psychic force? Within this framework, Janet analysed the peculiar fixation of the patient on the therapist in rapport about the distortion of the patient's perception, and related hysterical symptomatology to the autonomous power of "idées fixes" split from the conscious personality and submerged in the subconscious. Although careful to avoid direct discussion of the therapeutic implications of his work draws from a substantiating medical dissertation, Janet laid the foundations for his own and Freud's later therapeutic approaches through his demonstration of the origins of splitting in psychic traumas in the patient's history.
Indeed, it was but a short leap from the work of Chariot, Bernheim, and Janet to that of Josef Breuer (1842-1925) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In 1893, Breuer and Freud published a short preliminary communication, "Ueber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterische Phänomene" in the Neurologische Centralblatt. The origin of the Breuer and Freud paper lay in Breuer's work with the famous patient Anna O.
Although actual details of the case of Anna O. as described by Bremer, who undoubtedly took pains to disguise his patient, and many years later by Jones (1953/1957) are at considerable variances with one another and probably with the facts of the case, it is known that the alleviation of Anna O's symptoms occurred only as the patient, under hypnosis, provided Bremer in reverse chronological order with an account of the exact circumstances under which each symptom appeared. Only when she had traced the final symptom back to the traumatic circumstances of its occurrence was she cured. Anna O's cure by this "cathartic" method, which involved bringing the trauma to consciousness and allowing it to discharge through effect, words, and guided associations, has often been seen, and was thought by Freud, to be the starting point for psychoanalysis.
In the seminal work of Janet and in the critical transitional paper of Bremer and Freud, we see the culmination of developments that had begun with Puységur's elaboration of the doctrines of Mesmer. In a little more than a hundred years, a huge corpus of evidence and relational neurological functions and psychological theories that are dynamically irrevokable, least of mention, there is to believe that the related mental states, or their events -mesmeric trance states, rapport, the therapist's will to cure, the concentration of attention, mental suggestion, psychic trauma, the dissociation of consciousness, and catharsis -could affect radical alterations in the state of the body. No psychologist writing in the 1890s could afford to ignore this rich material and its implications for conceptualization of the nature of the mind/body relationship. William James, as we will see, was no exception. According to the received view (Boring, 1950), scientific psychology began in Germany as a physiological psychology born of a marriage between the philosophy of mind, on the one hand, and the experimental phenomenology that arose within sensory physiology on the other. Philosophical psychology, concerned with the epistemological problem of the nature of knowing mind in relationship to the world as known, contributed fundamental questions and explanatory constructs; sensory physiology and to a certain extent physics contributed experimental methods and a growing body of phenomenological facts.
In one version of this story that can be traced back at least to Ribot (1879), the epistemology of the 17th and 18th centuries culminated in the work of Kant, who denied the possibility that psychology could become an empirical science on two grounds. First, since psychological processes vary in only one dimension, time, they could not be described mathematically. Second, since psychological processes are internal and subjective, Kant also asserted that they could not be laid open to measurement. Herbart, so the tale goes, answered the first of Kant's objections by conceiving of mental entities as varying both in time and in intensity and showing that the change in intensity over time could be mathematically represented. Fechner then answered the second objection by developing psychophysical procedures that allowed the strength of a sensation to be scaled. Wundt combined these notions, joined them to the methods of sensory physiology and experimental phenomenology and, in 1879, created the Leipzig laboratory.
While there is undoubted truth in the received history, like all rationalizing reconstructions, it tends greatly to oversimplify what is an exceptionally complex story. Within the past 20 years, as primary resource materials have become more widely available and as larger numbers of historians have entered the arena, the received view has been amended often. Within the context of this exhibit catalogue, it will not, of course, be possible to address this complexity. The reader who is interested, however, is referred to the Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences and to Bringmann and Tweney (1980), Danziger (1990), Rieber (1980), and Woodward and Ash (1982) among others.
Because so many psychologists are at least broadly familiar with the lines of Boring's story of the rise of experimental psychology, because the story has been so frequently retold in the many other textbook histories, and because it is a much more complex tale that it at first appears, this section and the two to follow will sketch only the barest outlines of the intellectual developments that led from Locke to Kant, from Bell to Müller, and from Fechner to Wundt. Psychologists who have not read Boring are strongly encouraged to do so. Despite its limitations, it is still the point of origin from which much of contemporary scholarship proceeds. Perhaps even more important, it is the history of psychology that has become part and parcel of American psychology's view of itself.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born, lived, and died at Königsberg, in East Prussia. It is said that in the entire course of his life, he never travelled more than forty miles from the place of his birth. The suggestion from Ribot that 18th century philosophy culminated in the work of Kant was probably not an unreasonable one; although it might be an even fairer appraisal of Kant's influence to say that 19th and 20th century philosophy followed Kant much as the earlier philosophy had followed Descartes. Kant's indirect influence on scientific psychology was therefore enormous. His direct contributions, although admittedly more circumscribed, were also very important
One such contribution, as we have already noted, was Kant's defining the prerequisites that would need to be met for psychology to become an empirical science. Another consisted of a bonafide psychological treatise, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, published in 1798. Long ignored, probably in part because of its pronounced sympathy for as soon as to be a discredited physiognomy, the Anthropologie is, nonetheless, a fascinating little book. Here Kant analyses the nature of the cognitive powers, feelings of pleasure and displeasure, affects, passions, and character in a denial of the possibility of an empirical science of conscious process. The Anthropologie went through two editions during Kant's lifetime and several later printings and helped to define the context within which not only Herbart and Fechner but phenomenologically oriented physiologists such as Purkyne, Weber, and Müller worked to establish the science of conscious phenomena that Kant was unable to envision.
Boring (1950) has pointed out that between the years remembered through about the 1800s and well through to bout 1850, when several discoveries in physiology helped lay the foundation for the eventual rise of experimental psychology. The events’ particularity of interest are: (a) the first elaboration of a distinction between sensory and motor nerves; (b) the emergence of a sensory phenomenology of vision and of touch; and © the articulation of the doctrine of specific nerve energies, including the related view that the nervous system mediates between the mind and the world. While these discoveries were being made, two major developments in philosophical psychology were also occurring: the elaboration of secondary laws of association and the first attempt at a quantitative description of the parameters affecting the movement of ideas above and below a threshold.
Johannes Müller (1801-1858) was born in Coblenz and educated at the University of Bonn. He received his medical degree in 1822 and, after a year in Berlin, was habilitated as privatdozent at Bonn, where he rose eventually to the professoriate. In 1833, he left Bonn to assume the prestigious Chair of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Berlin. His most important contributions to the history of experimental psychology were the personal influence that he exerted upon younger colleagues and students, including Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Brücke, Carl Ludwig, and Emil DuBois-Reymond, and the systematic form he gave to the doctrine of the specific energies of nerves in the Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen, published between 1834 and 1840.
Although Müller had enunciated the doctrine of specific nerve energies as early as 1826, his presentation in the Handbuch was more extensive and systematic. Fundamentally, the doctrine involved two cardinal principles. The first of these principles was that the mind is directly aware not of objects in the physical world but of states of the nervous system. The nervous system, in other words, serves as an intermediary between the world and the mind and thus imposes its own nature on mental processes. The second was that the qualities of the sensory nerves of which the mind receives knowledge in sensation are specific to the various senses, the nerve of vision being normally as insensible to sound as the nerve of an audition is to light.
As Boring (1950) pointed out, there was nothing in this view that was completely original with Müller. Not only was much of the doctrine contained in the work of Charles Bell, the first of Müller's two most fundamental principles was implicit in Locke's idea of "secondary qualities" and the second incorporated an idea concerning the senses that had long been generally accepted. What was important in Müller was his systematization of these principles in a handbook of physiology that served a generation of students as the standard reference on the subject and the legitimacy he lent the overall doctrine through the weight of his personal prestige.
After Müller, the two problems of mind and body, the relationship of mind to brain and nervous system and the relationship of mind to a world were inextricably linked. Although Müller did not himself explore the implications of his doctrine for the possibility that the ultimate correlates of sensory qualities might lie in specialized centres of the cerebral cortex or develop some sensory psychophysics, his principle of specificity lay the groundwork for the eventual localization of cortical function and his view of the epistemological function of the nervous system helped define the context within which techniques for the quantitative measurement of the mind/world relationship emerged in Fechner's psychophysics.
It is in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) that we find the formal beginning of experimental psychology. Before Fechner, as Boring (1950) tells us, there was only psychological physiology and philosophical psychology. It was Fechner "who performed with scientific rigour those first experiments which laid the foundations for the new psychology and still lie at the basis of its methodology"
On the 24th of March 1879, however, Wundt submitted a petition to the Royal Saxon Ministry of Education in which he formally requested a regular financial allocation for the establishment and support of a collection of psychophysical apparatus. Although his request was denied, Wundt seems as early as the Winter of 1879/1880 to have nonetheless allowed two students, G. Stanley Hall and Max Friedrich, "to occupy themselves with research investigations.” This research took place in a small classroom in the Konvict Building that had earlier been assigned to Wundt for use as a storage area. Humble though it may have been, this small space constituted the first laboratory in the world devoted to original psychological research.
Experimental psychology, born with Fechner, nurtured by Helmholtz and Donders, was to be raised by Wundt. Over the years until his retirement in 1917, Wundt served as the de facto parent of the "new" psychology. Students from all over the world, especially from the United States, journeyed to Leipzig to learn experimental technique and to return to their home institutions imbued with the spirit of scientific psychology.
To occupy oneself with history is not a matter of simple curiosity. It would be so if history were a simple science of the past. But: (1) History is not a simple science. (2). One does not make one’s home the singularity that can only to grasp into its self that one can be the accompaniment within the past, inasmuch as it no longer exists. History is not a simple science, but rather there exists a historical reality. Historicity, in fact, is a dimension of the real being we call 'man'.
And this historicity does not arise exclusively or primarily because of the fact that the past advances toward a present, and pushes it on toward the future. This later is a positive interpretation of history that is completely inadequate. It presupposes, in fact, that the present is just something that passes, and that the passing means what once was no longer is. The truth on the contrary is that an existing reality, and hence one that is present, man, finds himself constituted partially through a possession of himself in such a form that when he turns in upon himself, he discovers himself being what he is because he had a past and is being formed for a future. The "present" is that marvellous unity of these three moments whose successive unfolding constitutes the historical trajectory, the point at which man, a temporal being, paradoxically becomes the tangent to eternity. Since Boethius, in fact, the classical definition of eternity has involved not just “an inter-mirabilis vita,” as a never-ending life, but “tota simul et perfecta possessio.” Furthermore, the reality of man present is constituted among other things by that concrete point of tangency whose geometric locus is termed the situation. Upon entering into ourselves, we discover that we are in a situation that pertains to us constitutively, and in which our individual destiny is inscribed, a destiny elected by us sometimes, imposed on us others. And while the situation does not ineluctably predetermine either the content of our life or that of its problems, it clearly circumscribes the general nature of those problems, and above all limits the possibilities for their solution. Hence, history as a science is much more a science of the present than a science of the past. In respect to philosophy, this is even truer than it could be for any other intellectual occupation, because the character of philosophical knowledge makes of it something constitutively problematic. Zetoumene episteme, the sought after science, Aristotle usually termed it. Therefore it is pot at all strange that to profane eyes, the problem has an atmosphere of discord.
In history we encounter three distinct conceptions of philosophy, emerging ultimately from three dimensions of man: (1) Philosophy as a knowledge about things (2) Philosophy as a direction for the world and for life. (3) Philosophy as a way of life and therefore as something that happens.
In reality, these three conceptions of philosophy, corresponding to three different conceptions of the intellect, lead to three completely different forms of intellectuality. The world has continued to nourish itself on them, simultaneously and successively, at times even in the person of one thinker. The three converge in a special way in our situation, and again keenly and urgently pose the problem of philosophy (and of intellect itself). These three dimensions of the intellect have reached us, perhaps somewhat dislocated, through the channels of history. The intellect has itself begun to pay for its own deformation. In trying to reform itself, it seems readily sure, in that the future new forms of intellectuality. All of the earlier ones, they will be defective, or rather limited. However that does not disqualify them, because man is always what he is, but thanks are by his restrictive nature, as too, are the limitations, for which permit of him of choice, for which he can be. And if, by his perceptivity that their own limitations are the intellectuals of that lived of that time, perhaps, a returning source from which they can depart, just as we see ourselves referred to identify the place of which we depart. And this is history: a situation that implies another previous one, as something real making possible our own situation. Thus, to occupy oneself with history is not a simple matter of curiosity; it is the very movement to which the intellect sees itself subjected when it embarks on the enormous task of setting itself in motion starting from its ultimate source. Therefore the history of philosophy is not extrinsic to philosophy itself, as the history of mechanics could be to mechanics. Philosophy is not its history, but the history of philosophy is philosophy, because the turning in of the intellect upon itself, in the concrete and radical situation in which it finds itself placed, is the origin take-off point for philosophy. The problem of philosophy is nothing but the problem of the intellect. With this affirmation, which ultimately goes back to old Parmenides, philosophy began to exist on the earth. And Plato used to tell us, moreover, that philosophy is a silent dialogue of the soul with itself concerning all things in being.
Still, the practising scientist will only with difficulty succeed in freeing himself from the notion that philosophy becomes lost in an abyss of discord, if not throughout its domain, at least insofar as it involves knowledge about things.
It is undeniable that throughout its history, philosophy has understood its own definition as a knowledge about things in quite diverse ways. But the first responsibility of the philosopher must be that of guarding himself against two antagonistic tendencies that spontaneously arise in a beginning spirit: That of losing oneself in skepticism and that of deciding to fit tightly polemically, as having a difference of opinion across one system instead of another, even if it is that we are as oriented differently of our position in life, only that if we could be formulated. We will renounce these attitudes. And if we now review the rich collection of definitions, we cannot fail to be overwhelmed by the impression that a very serious matter is at the heart of this diversity. If the conceptions of philosophy as a theoretical form of knowledge are truly so diverse, it is clear that this diversity means that not only the content of its solutions, but the very idea of philosophy continues to be problematic. The diversity of definitions manifest the problem of philosophy itself as a true form of knowledge about things. But to think that the existence of such a problem could disqualify philosophy as its theoretical knowledge is to condemn the paradigms by which of science has given by oneself the perpetual persistence, which, perhaps, leaves its shoes outside its vestibule. The problems of philosophy are not, at bottom, other than the problem of philosophy.
But perhaps the question will resurface with new urgency when we try to pin down the nature of this theoretical knowledge. Nor is the problem even new. For quite some time, several centuries in fact, this question has been formulated another way: Does philosophy have scientific character? However, this manner of presenting the problem is not quite the same. According to it, "knowledge about things" acquires its complete and exemplary expression in what is termed "a scientific form of knowledge." And this supposition has been decisive while philosophy the modernity of times due, stood very still.
In diverse ways, in fact, it has been repeatedly observed that philosophy is quite far from being a science, that in most of its hypotheses it does not go beyond an attempt to be scientific. And this may lead either to skepticism about philosophy, or to maximum optimism about it, as occurred in Hegel when in the opening pages of the Phenomenology of the Spirit he roundly affirms that he proposes to "help to bring philosophy nearer to the form of science, . . . show that the time process does raise philosophy to the level of scientific system . . ." And he also affirms that it is necessary for philosophy to abandon, its character of love and of wisdom to be converted into some activated wisdom. (For Hegel, "science" does not mean science in the usual sense.)
With a different objective, but with less energy, Kant begins the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason by saying:
Whether the treatment of knowledge lies within the province of reasons served or does not follow the secure path of a science, is easily to be determined from the outcome. For if after elaborate preparations, frequently renewed, it is brought to a stop immediately it nears its goal; if often it is compelled to retrace its steps and strike into some new line of approach; or again, if the various participants are unable to agree in any common plan of procedure, then we may rest assured that it is very far from entering upon the secure path of a science, and is indeed a mere random groping.
And in contrast to what occurs in logic, mathematics, physics, etc., with respect to metaphysics we see that . . . though it is older than all other sciences, and would survive even if all the rest were swallowed up in the abyss of an all-destroying barbarism, it has not yet had the good fortune to enter upon the secure path of a science.
A quarter of a century ago Husserl published a vibrant study in the periodical Logos, entitled "Philosophy as a Strict and Rigorous Science." In it, after having shown that it would be nonsense, for example, to discuss a problem of physics or mathematics so the participants injected into the discussion their own points of view, their opinions, preferences, or Weltanschauung, Husserl boldly proposes the necessity of making philosophy likewise into a science of apodeitic and absolute evidence. But in him last analysis, he merely refers to the work of Descartes. Descartes, very cautiously but at bottom saying the same thing, begins his Principles of Philosophy as follows: As we were at once children, and as we formed various judgements regarding the objects presented to us, when yet we had not the entire use of our reason, numerous prejudices stand in the way of our arriving at the knowledge of truth. Of these it seems impossible for us to rid ourselves, unless we undertake, once in our lifetime, to doubt of all these things in which we may discover even the smallest suspicion of uncertainty.
From this exposition of the question we may draw several important conclusions: 1. Descartes, Kant, and Husserl compare philosophy to the other sciences from the point of view of the type of knowledge that they yield: Does philosophy or does it not possess a type of apodeitic evidence comparable to that of mathematics or theoretical physics? 2. This comparison later reverts to the method that leads to such evidence: Does philosophy or does it not possess a method that leads securely, through internal necessity and not merely by chance, to types of evidence analogous to those obtain by the other sciences? 3. Finally it leads to a criterion: insofar as philosophy does not possess this type of knowledge and this secure method of the other sciences, its defect in that regard becomes an objection to its scientific character.
Now, faced with this statement of the question we must energetically affirm: 1. That the difference that Husserl, Kant and Descartes point out between science and philosophy, though very important, is not in the end sufficiently radical. 2. That the difference between science and philosophy is not an objection to the character of philosophy as a strict form of knowledge about things.
And this is so because, in the last analysis, their objection to philosophy derives from a certain conception of science that, without prior discussion, is assumed applicable to all strict and rigorous knowledge
The radical difference separating philosophy and the sciences does not arise from the scientific or philosophical state of knowledge. It seems, listening to Kant, that the only thing that matters is that, relative to its object, philosophy (in contrast to science) has not yet managed to give us a single reliable step leading to that state of knowledge. And we affirm that said difference is not sufficiently radical, because frankly it presupposes that the object of philosophy is there, in the world, and that all we need do is find the secure road leading to it.
The situation would be much more serious if what were problematic turned out to be the object of philosophy: Does the object of philosophy exist? This question is what radically separates philosophy from the other sciences. Whereas these latter starts from the possession of their object, and then simply study it, philosophy must begin by actively justifying the existence of its object, the possession of which is in fact the end, not the presupposition of its study. And philosophy can only be an on-going concern by constantly recovering the existence of its object. When Aristotle termed it Zetoumene episteme, he understood that what men sought was not only the method, but the very object of philosophy as well.
What does it mean to say that the existence of the object of philosophy is problematic?
If this meant simply that we were ignorant of what that object is, the problem, though serious, would ultimately be quite simple. It would be a question of saying either that humanity has not yet discovered that object, or that it is so complicated that its apprehension is still obscure. To be sure, the former is what happened for many centuries with each science and therefore their respective object: were not simultaneously discovered during history? ; some sciences were born later than others. On the other hand, if it were true that the object of philosophy were excessively complicated, the question would be that of trying to show it only to those minds who had acquired sufficient maturity. This would be analogous to the difficulty encountered by someone who tried to explain the object of differential geometry to a student of mathematics in elementary school. In either of these cases, owing to historical vicissitudes or didactic difficulties, we would be dealing with a deictic problem, with an individual or collective effort to point out (deixis) what that object is which goes about here lost among the other objects of the world.
Everything leads us to suspect that this is not so.
The problematicism surrounding the object of philosophy stems not only from a de facto failure to come upon it, but moreover from the nature of that object, which, in contrast to all others, is constitutively latent. Here we understand by "object" the real or ideal thing with which science or any other human activity deals. Here, it is clear that: (1). This latent object is in no way comparable to any other object. Therefore, in as much as we what wish of saying, the object of philosophy, may, perhaps, find as a propounding asset, that we will move as if on the axial plane of thought, afar and above, that once removed we begin to participate of the other sciences. If each science deals with an object, either real, fictitious, or ideal, the object of philosophy is neither real, fictitious, nor ideal; it is something else, so much so, that it is not a thing at all. (2) We thus understand that this peculiar object cannot be found separated from any other object, be it real, fictitious, or ideal. Nonetheless, may it be, that it is included in all of them, without being identified with any particular one. This is what we mean when we affirm that it is constitutively latent, latent beneath every object. Since man finds himself constitutively directed toward real, fictitious, or ideal objects, with which he must create his life and elaborate his sciences, it follows that this constitutively latent object is because of its own nature essentially fleeting. 3. What this object flees from is none other than the simple glance of the mind. In contrast, then, to what Descartes maintained, the object of philosophy can never be formally discovered through a simplex mentis inspectio. Rather, after the objects beneath which it lies have been understood, a new mental act reworking the previous ones is necessary to position the object in a new dimension to make this other new dimension not transparent, but visible. The act by which the object of philosophy is made patent is not an apprehension, nor an intuition, but a reflection, a reflection that does not, as such, discover a new object among the others, but a new dimension of each object, whatever it may be. It is not an act that enriches our understanding of what things are. One must not anticipate that philosophy will tell us, for example, anything about physical forces, organisms, or triangles that is inaccessible to mathematics, physics, or biology. It enriches us simply by carrying us to another type of consideration.
To avoid misunderstandings, we should observe that the word 'reflection' is employed here in its most ingenuous and common meaning: an act or series of acts that, in one form or another return to an object of a previous act through this latter act. 'Reflection' here does not mean simply an act of meditation, nor an act of introspection, as when one speaks of reflective consciousness, as opposed to direct consciousness. The reflection here described consists of a series of acts through which the entire world of our life is placed in a new perspective, including the objects therein and all the scientific knowledge we may have acquired about them.
Secondly, note that though reflection and what it discovers to us cannot be reduced to a natural attitude and what it discovers to us. This does not mean that in one fashion or another, in one degree or another, reflection is not just as primitive and inborn as any natural attitude.
It follows then that the radical difference between science and philosophy does not fall upon philosophy as an objection. It does not mean that philosophy is not a rigorous form of knowledge, but only that it is a different type of knowledge. Whereas science is a knowledge that studies an object that is there, philosophy, since it deals with an object that because of its own nature hides, which is evanescent, will accordingly be knowledge that must pursue its object and detain it before a human gaze, which must conquer it. Philosophy is nothing but the active constitution of its own object; it is the actual carrying out of this act of reflection. Hegel's fatal error was just the opposite of Kant's. Whereas Kant, in short, divorced philosophy from any object of its own, thus making it refer to our mode of knowing. Hegel reifies about the object of philosophy, speaking as if only all of which is to every other object, there emerges of some dialectical awareness for which each one is sustained dialectically.
For the present it is unnecessary to further clarify the nature of the object of philosophy or its formal method. Here the only thing I wish to emphasize is that irrationalism not withstanding, the object of philosophy is strictly an object of knowledge, but this object is radically different from the rest. Whereas any science or any human activity considers things that are and such as they are (hos estin), philosophy considers them inasmuch as they are (hei estin, Metaphysics 1064). In other words, the object of philosophy is transcendental, and as such accessible only to a reflection. The "scandal of science" not only isn't an objection to philosophy that must be resolved, but a positive dimension that it is necessary to conserve. Therefore Hegel said that philosophy was the world in reverse. The explanation of this scandal is the problem, content, and destiny of philosophy. Hence (although not quite what Kant said) "one does not learn philosophy, one learns to philosophize." And it is absolute certain that one only learns philosophy by starting to philosophize.
Every science, whether history or physics or theology (and likewise every natural attitude of life) refers too more than or less determinate of objects, with which man has already come into contact. The scientist may, then, direct himself to it, and set himself one or more problems about it the attempted solutions of which constitute the reality of science. If the presumed science does not yet enjoy a clear conception of what it pursues, then it is not yet a science. Any wavering on this point is an unequivocal sign of imperfection. That does not mean the science is immutable, but what changes in it is the concrete content of the solutions given to the one or more problems it has set out to solve. The problem itself, may be that of an unaltered remission that goes beyond the remains as such. The physical view of the universe has profoundly changed from Galileo to Einstein and quantum mechanics, however, in all these changes that have occurred within the scope of a general endeavour known and defined all along, viz., measurement of the universe. Sometimes perhaps the very formulation of the problem may change. But this occurs extremely rarely and across long spans of time. When it does happen it is owing to a new formulation of the problem that is as clear and determinate as the previous one, so that one may ask, indeed, whether ultimately the science has not ceased to be what it used to be, and become something else, a different science. Thus, in the Middle Ages physics studied the principles of the physical theories that were achievable. After Galileo it was measurement of the material universe. In both cases’ physics was a science when it had begun to tell itself what it sought to do.
Very different is the course of philosophy. In fact, philosophy begins by not knowing whether it has a proper object; at least, it does not start formally from the possession of an object. Philosophy presents itself, above all, as an effort, as a "pretension.” And this, not because of any simple ignorance de facto or a simple lack of knowledge, but because of the constitutively latent nature of that object. Hence it follows that the strict separation between a problem that clearly differentiates in advance of its later solution, which is basic to all science and to all natural attitudes of life, loses its primary meaning about philosophy. Hence philosophy must be, first, a perennial revindication of its object (let us call it that), an energetic illumination of it and a constant and constitutive "making room." From Parmenides' entity (on), Plato's Ideas, and Aristotle's analogical being as such, up to Kant's transcendental conditions of experience and the absolute of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, passing through all the theological strata of medieval thought and the first centuries of the modern era, philosophy has been primarily a justification of or demonstrative effort for the existence (“sit venia verbo”) of its object. Whereas science deals with an object that it already clearly possesses, philosophy is the effort directed toward a progressive intellectual constitution of its own object, the violence of yanking it from its constitutive latency and clearly revealing it. Nonetheless, philosophy might exist for the revindicating of itself, and in one of its formal dimensions consists in "opening paths." Consequently, philosophy cannot have what is the greater ascendancy than fixed by the intellectual narrowness which de facto oppresses the philosopher.
In virtue of this, it is only clear to the philosopher after he finds himself philosophizing what a mighty labour he carried out to reach the point where he could begin to philosophize. And this is true whether one deals with obtaining rigorous evidence or rising to transcendental intuitions. In this labour of opening a path one sketches and outlines the figure of the problem. It is possible for the philosopher to have begun with a certain subjective intellectual purpose. But this does not mean that such a beginning is formally the origin of his philosophy. And if we agree that the nature of the problem is the origin of principles, we must say that, in philosophy, the origin is the end, moreover in its first original and radical "step" all of philosophy is already there. Throughout this process philosophy properly speaking does not evolve, is not enriched with new characteristics; rather, the characteristics become more explicit, they continually appear as aspects of a self-constitution. Whereas an immature science is imperfect, philosophy is the very process of its own maturity. The rest is dead academic and scholarly philosophy. Hence, in contrast to what happens in science, philosophy must mature in each philosopher. And therefore that which properly constitutes its history is the history of the idea of philosophy. Hence the original relationship existing between philosophy and its history must be clarified.
It may occasionally happen that the philosopher begins with an already existing concept of philosophy. But, what meaning or function does such a concept have within philosophy? It is, obviously, a concept that he, the philosopher has created and therefore is his possession or property. But, once things are underway, because philosophy consists of the "opening a path," it follows that therein the idea of philosophy is constituted. The definition of physics is not the work of physical science, whereas the work of philosophy is the conquest of its idea of itself. On this point, that initial movement has no bearing whatsoever; philosophy has achieved its own consistency, and with it an adequate concept, the concept which philosophy has created for itself. Nor is it any longer the philosopher who bears the concept of philosophy, as happened at the beginning; rather, philosophy and its concept are what bear the philosopher. In that apprehension or conception that the concept is, it is no longer the mind that apprehends or conceives philosophy, but philosophy is that what apprehends and conceives in the mind. The concept is not the property of the philosopher, but rather the philosopher is the property of the concept, because these latter springs from what philosophy is in it. Philosophy is not the work of the philosopher; the philosopher is the work of philosophy.
From where, before and only before a mature philosophy do we see that it is not only possible but necessary to ask how far and in what way does that philosophy answer its own concept. A typical case, to speak only of recent history, is shown to us by German Idealism, from Kant to Hegel. It makes perfect sense to scrutinize this entire current of transcendental idealism, and determine with each philosopher an original philosophy, absolutely compatible with the common root of all of their thought, and even with Kant's singular merit of being the first to discover the root and bear the first fruits.
Rene Descartes was a famous French mathematician, scientist and philosopher. He was arguably the first major philosopher in the modern era to try to defeat skepticism. His views about knowledge and certainty, and his views about the relationship between mind and body have been very influential over the last three centuries.
One source of this interest in method was ancient mathematics. The thirteen books of Euclid's Elements were some models of knowledge and deductive method. But how had all this been achieved? Archimedes had made many remarkable discoveries. How had he come to make these discoveries? The method in which the results were presented (sometimes called the method of synthesis) was clearly not the method by which these results were discovered. So, the search was on for the method used by the ancient mathematicians to make their discoveries (the method of analysis). Descartes is clearly convinced that the discovery of the proper method is the key to scientific advance. For more extended purposes and detailed discussion of these methods.
In November 1628 Descartes was in Paris, where he made himself famous in a confrontation with Chandoux. Chandoux claimed that science could only be based on probabilities. This view reflected the dominance in French intellectual circles of Renaissance skepticism. This skptical view was rooted in the religious crisis in Europe resulting from the Protestant Reformation and had been deepened by the publication of the works of Sextus Empiricus and reflections on disagreements between classical authors. It was strengthened again by considerations about the differences in culture between New World cultures and that of Europe, and by the debates over the new Copernican system. All of this had been eloquently formulated by Montaigne in his Apology for Raymond Sebond and developed by his followers. Descartes attacked this view, claiming only that certainty could serve as a basis for knowledge, and that he himself had a method for attaining such certainty. In the same year Descartes moved to Holland where he remained with only brief interruptions until 1649.
In Holland Descartes produced a scientific work called Le Monde or The World that he was about to publish in 1634. At the point, however, he learned that Galileo had been condemned by the Church for teaching Copernicanism. Descartes’s book was Copernican to the core, and he therefore had it suppressed. In 1638 Descartes published a book containing three essays on mathematical and scientific subjects and the Discourse on Method. These works were written in French (rather than Latin) and were aimed at the educated world rather than simply academics. In 1641 Descartes followed this with the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy). This short work is more metaphysical than scientific, and aims to establish the certain foundations for the sciences that Descartes had announced in his confrontation with Chandoux in 1628. (For a more detailed account of this work see Structure of the Meditations. The work was published with Objections and Replies from a six and then seven philosophers and theologians, including Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi and Antoine Arnauld.
After the Meditations, Descartes produced The Principles of Philosophy in 1644, the most comprehensive statement of his mature philosophy and of the Cartesian system in general. Part (1) explains Descartes metaphysical views. Part (2) gives a detailed exposition of the principles of Cartesian physics. Part (3) applies those principles of physics to explain the universe, and Part (4) deals with a variety of terrestrial phenomena. Two more parts were planned, to deal with plants and animals and man, but were not completed. In 1648 Descartes published "Notes against a Program" -a response to a pamphlet published anonymously by Henricus Regius, Professor of Medecine at the University of Utrecht. Regius had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of Descartes. Yet, once Regius published his Foundations of Physics Descartes complained that Regius had shamelessly used unpublished papers of Descartes to which he had access and had distorted Descartes' ideas. The "Notes" both illustrate the kind of academic controversy in which Descartes was involved during this decade, but also provides some insight into his views about mind and his doctrine of innate ideas.
Descartes last work Les Passions de l'áme was written because of the correspondence that Descartes carried on with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. The work was written in French, and published in Amsterdam and Paris in 1649. This work (like the Principles) is composed of many short articles. Princess Elisabeth had raised the question of how the soul could interact with the body in 1643. In response to Elisabeth's questions, Descartes wrote short works that developed into the “Passions of the Soul.” The work is a combination of psychology, physiology and ethics, and contains Descartes' theory of two way causal interactions via the pineal gland.
Two months before the publication of the Passions Descartes set sail for Stockholm, Sweden, at the invitation of Queen Christina of Sweden. Descartes' death in Stockholm of pneumonia, has regularly been attributed to the rigours of the Swedish climate and the fact that Descartes (no early riser) was sometimes required to give the Queen lessons as early as five in the morning. However unpleasant these conditions may have been, it seems plain that Descartes acquired his fatal malady because of nursing his friend the French ambassador (who had pneumonia) back to health.
Most academics are familiar with a comforting fable, subject to minor variations, about René Descartes and modern philosophy. Around 1640, Descartes philosophically crystallized a key transformation latent in Renaissance views of humanity. He moved the foundation of knowledge from humans fully embedded within and suited to nature to inside each individual. Descartes made knowledge and truth rest upon the individual subject and that subject's knowledge of his or her own capacities. This move permitted profoundly new and unconditional skepticism, than undermining universal knowledge by positing a uniformity of human subjects, this move ultimately guaranteed intersubjective knowledge. Knowledge became subjective and objective. Not content merely to make man himself the ground of knowledge, Descartes went further to make the human mind alone the source for knowledge, knowledge that modelled after pure mathematics. The new Cartesian subject ignored the manifold contributions of the body, and Descartes assumed all real knowledge could come only from a reason common to all humans. The universality of the knowing things and processes of knowing and not-knowing, are we to make of this causal event the Cartesian subject as one that is transcendental. Above all, mathematics, with its proof techniques, and formal thought, modelled on mathematics, exemplified those things that can be intersubjectively known by individual but importantly similar subjects.
Versions of this fable appear in numerous analyses, some quite sophisticated and textually based, some crude and dismissive. These versions provide grounds for praising or dismissing Descartes and the philosophical modernity he wrought. Rather than surveying or evaluating these appraisals, here I want merely to clarify and anchor historically the subject Descartes hoped his philosophy would help produce. This essay examines one set of exercises Descartes highlighted as propaedeutics to a better life and better knowledge: Becoming famous, for which it might be that if it were as little known through his geometry. Critics and supporters have too often stressed Descartes's dependence on or reduction of knowledge to a mathematical model without inquiring into the rather odd mathematics he actually set forth as this model. His geometry, neither Euclidean nor algebraic, has its own standards, its own rigour, and its own limitations.3. These characteristics ought radically to modify our view of Descartes's envisioned subject. Although the technical details of his geometry might seem interesting and comprehensible only to historians of mathematics, the essential features grounding Descartes's program can be made readily comprehensible. Descartes did far more than theoretically (if implicitly) invoke the knowing subject in his Meditations. To pursue his philosophy was nothing less than to cultivate and order oneself. He offered his revolutionary but peculiar mathematics as a fundamental practice in this philosophy pursued as a way of life. Let us move, then, from abstraction about Descartes to the historical quest for this way of life One way in which modern philosophy, roughly that beginning with Descartes, is supposed to be different from what came before it, is its emphasis on the problems of acquiring knowledge. This emphasis on knowledge likely has its origins in a variety of circumstances.
One of these is the Reformation crisis concerning religious knowledge and related events. Luther questioned the Catholic criterion of religious knowledge -the Rule of Faith as it is called -and thereby started a new religion with its own criterion of religious knowledge. The Rule of Faith says that religiously knowledged is determined by what Church fathers, Church Councils and the Popes say about any particular claim. Thus Church Councils have endorsed the doctrine of the trinity so anyone who claims that this doctrine is false is a heretic. Luther replaced the Rule of Faith with the claim that all Christians have the power 'of discerning what is right or wrong in matters of faith.' Luther finally made it clear that his new view amounted to this: What conscience is compelled to believe on reading scripture is true. This radical move changed Luther from just another reformer to the founder of a new religious sect. For many people it raised an enormous problem about religious knowledge. Which of the two criteria was the correct one? It was difficult for people to determine the answer to this question. For various reasons, which we will consider, this sceptical crisis about religious knowledge developed into a full blooded sceptical crisis about knowledge in general. So how does one acquire genuine knowledge?
One way to think about the problem of acquiring knowledge about the era we are discussing is to regard reason, the senses and faith as competing ways of getting at the truth about reality. One might hold, with Plato for example, that the senses will not get one to the truth about reality; that only reason will lead us to knowledge of reality and how to lead the best life and attain genuine happiness. Or one might argue that the senses provide knowledge of the world that is more basic than anything that reason tells us. Or, one might hold that both reason and the senses are poor guides and that only faith will reveal the way things really are.
Skepticism is the doctrine that knowledge is not possible. One can be either a universal skeptic who holds that no knowledge whatever is possible (Could this be true?) or simply a skeptic about one faculty, like the senses, or some particular branch of knowledge, such as religious knowledge or mathematical knowledge. Skepticism is intertwined in the competition among the faculties because an advocate of reason, for example, is likely to be sceptical of the ability of the other faculties to reach the truth. The Cambridge Platonists, for example, regarded the doctrine that the senses are more important than reason as the philosophy of beasts. For men share sense knowledge with the beasts, while reason sets man apart from the beasts. An advocate of faith, on the other hand, will be sceptical of the ability of reason and the senses to provide genuine knowledge. The great French essayist Michel de Montaigne is an able and interesting advocate of this last view.
There are philosophers with discriminate views, who hold that there is a place and legitimate sphere for each faculty, and one must figure out what the limits are to each. Rene Descartes holds that reason is considerably more important than the senses in that reason provides more basic knowledge than the senses. It tells us about the essences of things, which the senses do not. Nonetheless, Descartes holds that the senses have a place in our scientific attempts to understand the world. Descartes also holds that various truths can only be determined by faith. John Locke also, seeks to determine the limits of human understanding, what we can know and why, what role the senses and reason play, and what can only be believed or taken as an article of faith. For Locke, the senses and reflection provide the materials on which reason works. Faith operates beyond reason. Another strand that caused the interest in knowledge was the extraordinary advances made during this period in mathematics and natural philosophy or science as we now call it. European mathematicians were finally able to surpass the results of the Greek mathematicians of antiquity such as Euclid and Archimedes. Similarly natural philosophers were coming to reject Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic cosmology and geography. With the work of Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo and Kepler, placed astronomy and physics were new understructure. Surely, these extraordinary advances represented real knowledge. The struggle between sceptical arguments and scientific achievement, not to mention the claims of religion was a real one. One can see all, but these concern meeting in thinkers like Descartes and Pascal.
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