Test

1. Developments in modern science, combined with the decline in the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, signaled the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern worldview.

1. In philosophy, the result was a shift away from metaphysics toward epistemology.

1. Thus, began the Epistemological Turn in Western philosophy which began with Descartes and ended with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason a century and a-half later.

1. Rene Descartes was the first philosopher to study thinking itself.

1. Whereas earlier philosophers sought knowledge about the good life, nature, God and so forth, from Descartes forward modern philosophers increasingly devoted themselves to acquiring knowledge about knowledge.

1. The Problem of Authority

1. With scientific advances and more sophisticated math, scientists were able to move beyond metaphysical speculations to careful observations.

1. No authority could refute what the individual observer saw or the individual mind calculated for itself.

1. Descartes set aside the accumulated wisdom of the past and insisted that each person muse examine what is true and false afresh.

1. Descartes scientific interests led him to observe and experiment for himself and he soon discovered that Aristotle’s writings on nature contained many errors.

1. Rationalism

1. Rationalism is the epistemological position in which reason is said to be the primary source of all knowledge, superior to sense evidence.

1. Rationalists believe that abstract reasoning can produce absolute truths about nature, existence, and the whole of reality.

1. Many of these ultimate truths can be discovered without observation, experiment, or even experience.

1. These are called a priori or, sometimes innate ideas.

1. To the rationalist reason, not empirical observation, is the ultimate test of truth.

1. The coherence theory of truth says that new or unclear ideas are evaluated in terms of rational logical consistency and in relation to already established truths.

1. The ultimate criteria for basic truths are clarity and distinctness.

1. Once fundamental truths are established, the rationalist uses a deductive/mathematical logical method to test and establish other more complex ideas.

1. Against Disorganized Thinking

1. According to Descartes, once we have chosen a subject to study, we should confine ourselves to what we can clearly intuit and deduce with certainty for ourselves.

1. Referring to what the Scholastics did Descartes said that when we become to absorbed in the work of earlier thinkers we become infected with their errors.

1. When we accept views solely on the weight of authority and prestige of those who have them we become non rational, we become memorizers, not thinkers.

1. Descartes believed that we sometimes make things more complicated than they are because with think it makes us seem to be smarter.

1. According to Descartes we need a method for finding truth.

1. Method of Doubt

1. Descartes believed that a mathematically precise method was the only reliable way to discover the truth about the universe.

1. Descartes attacked earlier philosophy on grounds that it did not demand rational comprehension from the individual intellect.

1. To Descartes, common sense was the ability to think that is found in normal humans.

1. To Descartes good sense is the ability to distinguish what is true from what is false and is equal in all men.

1. Differences in what people thinks is true and what they think is false is due to differences in back ground and the fact that different people consider different aspects of the issue. e.g. some people think that Obamacare is good because under it more people have medical coverage while others think it is bad due to the cost.

1. Descartes believed that all reasoning individuals could apply his method to the basic questions concerning human nature, truth, and the existence of God.

1. All you needed was common sense and good sense to use his method.

1. Descartes believed that a person of average intelligence who used his method could reach the truth sooner than a brilliant person that didn’t use his method.

1. The Cartesian “I” and Methodic Doubt

1. Descartes wrote all of his works in the first person to describe both his conclusions and his thinking process.

1. Descartes wrote in French rather than Latin in order to reach beyond the university and to a wider audience of European intellectuals.

1. He wanted to call our attention to the actively reasoning mind itself, therefore, he wrote in the first person (I this, I that).

1. Descartes believed that he could apply a mathematically oriented method to the most fundamental problem of all: How can I know that I know anything.

1. Descartes’s method was to begin with self evident truths, such as a line is the shortest distance between two points such as is found in geometry. More complex theories are theorems based on these truths are then called upon to prove less evident truths.

1. He stated that we must not accept anything that we can doubt at all.

1. This was called methodic doubt.

1. Standard of Truth

1. According to Descartes, as a general rule, we might assume that things that we perceive clearly and distinctly are all true.

1. Clear is that which is apparent to an attentive mind.

1. Distinct is that which is so precise and different from all other objects that it contains within itself nothing but what is clear.

1. He also believed that certain basic prepositions only needed to be understood to be true.

1. Innate Ideas

1. A priori knowledge is knowledge derived from reason without reference to sense experience. e.g. All triangles contain 180 degrees.

1. A posteriori knowledge empirical knowledge derived from sense experience. It is not regarded a certain because the conditions under which it is required change. e.g. My shirt is white can be true today and false tomorrow.

1. A priori truths are considered truths of reason and a posteriori truths are called truths of fact.

1. Innate ideas are ideas implanted in us by God. (a priori ideas).e.g. we are borne with an idea of a triangle in our mind, therefore, when we see one we know what is.

1. The Cartesian Genesis

1. Methodic doubt was the starting point of Descartes philosophy.

1. Methodic doubt consists of deliberately doubting everything that we can possible doubt so that what remains will be known with absolute certainty.

1. Descartes tore down the Scholastic philosophy world of unquestioned belief and replaced it with a clearly conceived rational order.

1. In his book “Meditations” Descartes says that at first he will examine the origins and foundations of basic kinds of beliefs. He goes on to say that if there is any possibility that those beliefs may be mistaken he will reject them and every idea that depends on them.

1. Maybe It’s All a Dream?

1. Descartes rejects sense knowledge as a sufficient foundation for certainty since our senses sometimes deceive us. e.g. we think we see a bird when it’s really a plane.

1. In doing so, he rejects the primacy of the physical world because it is possible that the physical world is an elaborate mental construct.

1. The Evil Genius – God could be an evil genius that could bring us to believe that our world was a dream

1. This is possible because when we dream we experience sense experience which is unreliable

1. Cogito, Ergo Sum (I thing, therefore, I am)

1. Descartes wanted to find one thing he could be sure of so that he could know his life was not as dream.

1. Descartes says that he can definitely be sure he exists as long as he can think. (I think, therefore, I am.)

1. He says that if he didn’t exist he couldn’t mentally conceive that he existed.

1. This shows how Descartes philosophy is grounded in reason (the mind).

1. It may seem that bodily existence may seem more certain than ideas, however, mental existence is actually more certain.

1. We know everything, including bodily and material things, through the mind.

1. Therefore, the foundation of Descartes philosophy is the thinking self.

1. The Innate Idea of God

1. Now that Descartes has established his own existence he must establish the existence of the external world.

1. Descartes believed that since God gave human beings reason and they could use that they could reason to establish the external physical world by using science and method of logic such as his method.

1. If God is not a deceiver, he will have given Descartes the ability to distinguish the real from merely imagined.

1. Therefore, the existence of God is crucial to Descartes rationalistic enterprise.

1. The Perfect Idea of Perfection

1. Descartes cannot use Thomas Aquinas’ arguments to prove the existence of God because they presume the existence of the physical world and Descartes has not established the existence of the physical world yet.

1. Descartes by himself was incapable of having the idea of infinite perfection. That idea could only have been placed in him by a being of infinite perfection, which is God.

1. Since God placed the idea of infinite perfection in Descartes mind God must exist.

1. Since and all-powerful God gave us senses of reasons and perception they must be reliable.

1. XVIII Descartes’s Ontological Argument

1. We cannot comprehend God, but we can clearly and distinctly grasp the uniqueness of the idea of God, and in doing so we can understand that existence is part of God’s essence.

1. God is perfection and anything that is perfect has to exist. Anything that is perfect by definition has to exist.

1. Reconstructing the World

1. Now that Descartes has establish the existence of God he can establish the existence of the physical world (and his body) since God gave him the ability to reason and use that to establish it.

1. The idea of being both mind and body is neither innate nor known to be the truth with deductive certainty.

1. Therefore, the idea of the body must originate outside of Descartes’s mind.

1. Therefore, the idea of being both mind and body must originate outside Descartes mind, which means that it originated with God.

1. The Cartesian Bridge

1. A revolution was occurring in science that said that thinking and acting could be reduced to biochemical brain states and since the laws of physics were universal there was no such thing as free will.

1. This alarmed Descartes, who was a devout Catholic.

1. By showing that the mind was made of a different substance than the body Descartes hope to prove that the laws of physics posed no threat to the existence of free will and the incorporeal soul since the laws of physics only applied to matter.

1. Cartesian Dualism

1. Cartesian dualism is Descartes’ s conviction that human beings are a mysterious union of mind (soul) and body, of incorporeal substance and corporeal substance, with each operation according to separate sets of laws.

1. The mind follows the laws of reason but is otherwise free.

1. Descartes believed that thinking entered the brain through the pineal gland.

1. The body follows the laws of physics and falls under the rule of cause and effect.

1. The human body is no freer than any other material thing.

1. Cartesian dualism allows for the soul’s continued existence after the body’s death.

1. Descartes reaffirms the primacy of the soul over the body.

1. The Mind Body Problem

1. The official doctrine, which is the most influential part of Descartes’ philosophy regarding the mind and the body, is that that mind and body are together during life but at death the mind continues to exist and function.

1. Corollaries of the official doctrine are reincarnation and life after death.

1. These corollaries view the mind as something other than the brain.

1. The mingling of the mind and body during life occurs through the pineal gland.

1. From Cosmos to Machine

1. The ancient Greeks valued objectivity, logical consistency, and personal detachment.

1. These values are separate from maternal and caring qualities.

1. Feminist philosopher Susan Bordo linked Cartesian modernity with the repression of nature and women since it is motivated by the uneasiness that modernity has associated with the lives of women. e.g. childbirth, nursing, caring for others.

1. Bordo says that the Cartesian themes of starting anew without influence of other people and relying on reason alone meant that objectivity rather than meaning became the chief philosophical issue.

1. Bardo believe that Descartes genius was the way that he laid a philosophical foundation for transforming the initial experience of alienation that accompanied the Copernican Revolution with an optimistic method for dominating nature.

1. The modern vision of the universe is one of a complex machine not an organic whole.

1. Commentary

1. In its emphasis in an individual’s inquiry after truth rather than official answers, Cartesian rationalism seemed to pave the way for social and political democracy.

1. As the modern era develops, purity of method ultimately takes precedence over the search for wisdom.

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