Introduction to Philosophy Donna Chapman
Take Home Test December 2, 1999
Question 1: Explain how the new science emerged from the intellectual
domination of Church doctrine. How did Descartes and Locke take a new direction
in philosophy? In what sense were their philosophies scientific? Compare the
views of Descartes and Locke. Topics which may be covered: the method of doubt,
innate ideas, sense experience, substance, the relation between mind and body,
the possibilities of human knowledge, the structure and function of the mind,
etc.
Answer:
The Renaissance brought an era of cultural enrichment and learning. A breath
of fresh air after more then one thousand years of the Roman Catholic Church’s
total subjugation of independent thought. At this time in human development
science IS the church and the church IS science, all explanations come from
the Church and are not to be questioned or challenged. A wave of skepticism
is started as political control begins to move from the Church to the secular,
and Martin Luther arrives to challenge the Church’s corruption, and it’s
irrelevancy in and disregard for the lives of the people. The Church is no longer
providing a point of unity for spiritual and material life. In the winds of
these changes comes a new concept of humanity – the “Renaissance Man”
– the rise of Humanism. No longer an unworthy sinner, man is now a noble,
unique individual – the universal genius –the ideal gentleman –
a man of dignity. It is interesting to note that Humanism was started by secular
scholars rather than by scholar clerics, who had until this time dominated medieval
intellectual life. (Personal note: I am aware that everything about this period
concerns the advancement of MAN, women will take along time to begin to catch
up, however the advancements for human kind during this time period are phenomenal.)
The Church’s response to this is predictable: Heretic! Recant or die! The
philosopher Giordano Bruno put forth the concept that nature is divine because
of God’s presence in His creation. Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy.
Skepticism has caused the climate to be:
human knowledge is impossible, only theory is possible.
This instability and skepticism allows the emergent “science” to gain
a toehold. The scientists say, “this is not true and we’ll prove it.”
Church theology regarding the structure and operation of nature begin to be
challenged. Although the church is strongly resistant to this, once the wind
of change start, this energy of discovery will not be stopped.
Concepts emerge such as Copernicus’ view of the heliocentric movement of
the solar system, Galileo’s discovery of moons around Jupiter, Van Leeuwenhook
invents the microscope and observes for the first time bacterial life, Harvey
postulates about the human circulatory system, and Boyle formulates laws about
the behavior of gasses. This “New Science” culminates with the arrival
of English Physicist Sir Isaac Newton. In his brief tract “De Motu”
he introduces his concepts of planetary orbital dynamics. Later in the more
fully developed work, “Philosophae Naturalis Principia” he states
his Law of Universal Gravitation. This work sets the paradigm for natural science.
Newton shows that “profound natural mysteries:” (according to the
Church) are in fact predictable, repeatable, bound by universal laws and are
within the understanding of human beings. If men of science can answer questions
about nature heretofore thought of as “mysteries” then the faith cornerstone
of the church has been irreparably damaged, and the Church’s stronghold
on the faithful will never be the same.
Isaac Newton was born the same year that Rene Descartes’ “First Philosophy”
was published. Rene Descartes is called the first “modern” philosopher.
He had a degree in law and training in traditional Aristotelian Philosophy.
After a stint in the Dutch army, he begins to focus on mathematics. He goes
on to invent analytic geometry and introduces the concept of Cartesian curves.
He claims that his education gave him “little of substance”1
and that “only mathematics “1 had given him “certain
knowledge.”1
As the scientists of the Renaissance use “scientific method”
to approach and prove answers about nature, Descartes (along with a group of
philosophers called “Continental Rationalists”) decides that this
method can be applied to philosophy to make it an exact science and absolutely
answer with certainty the questions about “life, the universe, and everything”2
Descartes believes that truth is only knowable through reason and reason
is superior to and independent of the senses, experience, AND Church theology.
Descartes is a devout Catholic. The current winds of skepticism concerns him
deeply.
1: Rene Descartes, Oregon State University, Philosophy 302 Website
2: Douglas Adams, “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
What he really wants to do is bridge the ever widening gap between the
Church and the New Science. He has already stated that only mathematics has
given him confidence that he knows anything with certainty, so he determines
to apply the use of logic to prove universal questions, and he is confident
that in the process this “method of reason” will prove the Church
correct as well. (Personal note: and if it doesn’t, he will justify a path
to it on his own.) Sadly, the Church will ultimately reject him anyway. In fact,
Descartes will delay the publication of one of his most important works “The
World” because of fear of the Inquisition. “The World” will be
published posthumously.
Descartes’ philosophy distinctly separates the mind and body. The mind
controls the body through the pineal gland. The body is merely a machine. The
existence of a human – say one Rene Descartes, for example – is based
on the having and using of a mind – thinking – “cogito
ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am).3 He is not entirely sure
what exactly he is, however he most definitely IS. The fact that he thinks inherently
proves that he exists. He believes that this type of knowledge is known “a
priori” or without previous input of any kind. It is an innate idea that
we are born with pre- written into our minds. Other innate knowledge is knowledge
of God, and of logical and mathematical principles. Once again, without the
mind thinking, the body is just an automaton. Because he cannot know for certain
that animals think, Descartes decided that they do not, and therefore they are
just machines, ergo cruelty to animals is impossible. (Personal note: yet another
subject for another paper, however, this constitutes a major flaw in Descartes
reasoning.)
The mind has two parts: intuition and deduction. Intuition is the ability to
grasp logical and mathematical truths directly –with complete certainty
– without sensory input – so clearly that there can be no doubt of
the truthfulness of it. Deduction is the ability to follow a logical progression
to knowledge utilizing “known facts”. (Personal note: what exactly
constitutes “known facts” is the subject of another paper. Descartes’
“known facts” are often whatever he justifies or rationalizes to be
true.) Descartes believes that Method (mathematical proof) is the key to scientific
advance. I believe that this aspect of Descartes approach heavily influenced
the approach of the “New Scientists” such as Isaac Newton,
3: Descartes, Introduction to World Philosophies, Eliot Deutsh
toward finding the truth about natural occurrences such as the rising and setting
of the sun, or the tides.
For Descartes’ reasoning to pan out, “a priori” knowledge MUST
be true. Everything else is doubtful as truth and must stand up to Descartes
logic to be proved to exist. Descartes’ method of proof is called “the
Method of Doubt”. It goes like this: doubt everything, because you can’t
trust our senses, you could be asleep and dreaming. You can’t trust your
memory, you might be wrong. Then apply logical deductive reasoning to an idea
to prove it true with certainty. Boil everything down to clear and distinct
ideas, then the logical progression will be evident and will make sense. This
is where Descartes theory about animals being “machines and therefore there
is no such thing as animal cruelty” falls apart. Because observation and
logical process indicates that when you inflict pain on an animal, it responds.
This would further indicate that the animal is involved with it’s environment
and actively participates in the space that it occupies in the world, therefore,
although an animal may not “think” in the way that Descartes implies,
animals are definitely animate, and as such moral and ethical consideration
must be given to them. What Descartes really does, particularly in his attempts
to prove the existence of God, is this: he take us up to the point of a leap
of faith in a soundly logical fashion, then he rationalizes the leap, because
he can’t prove it.
Descartes “Method of Doubt” utilizes two definitions of substance:
material and spiritual. Material substance has one attribute: extension. Extension
is length, width, height, number –measurable qualities – mathematically
quantifiable qualities – beyond question. Spiritual things are the attributes
of material things subject to and influenced by the mind of the perceiver, such
as: willing, thinking, perceiving.
About 25 years after the death of Rene Descartes, John Locke leaves England
for France. While here he is introduced to Descartes’ philosophy. After
many many years he returned to England where he lived a politically, socially
and intellectually prominent life. One of the many influential visitors that
he received was one Sir Isaac Newton. The “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”
is one of the classical documents of British empiricist philosophy. In it Locke
concludes that the main focus of philosophy must be to study the extent of the
minds ability to know. He tries to “examine our abilities and to see what
objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with.”4
His essay is the definitive statement of empiricism and in it he tries to come
up with an explanation for the processes of human knowledge based upon Newtonian
science.
Locke agrees with Descartes’ thoughts about the discernment of knowledge
but only up to a point. He agrees that knowledge is based on certain known facts,
that reason must be checked against fact, and that the senses are unreliable,
BUT, according to Locke, because the senses are all we have for gaining input,
we cannot really know anything for certain, we can only know the ideas that
objects cause our senses to generate through experience. Locke says that we
must accept that substance exists even though we cannot truly sense it. We cannot
truly know an object, we can only experience the qualities of it – texture,
shape, temperature, color.
Experience is broken down into two parts: sensation and inner reflection. Sensation
being the actual information derived from sensory input – color, sharpness,
cold, shape. Inner Reflection accounts for our minds compounding the sensory
input deciding further attributes about the original sense input – reasoning,
doubting, believing.
The result of the experience is an idea. There are simple ideas with primary
qualities and complex ideas with secondary qualities. The mind tends to group
qualities in an effort to further define an object. Simple ideas are passive
basic input – the information that our senses are caused to generate from
the intervention of an object, their primary quality is extension: measurability.
Complex ideas are secondary qualities of an idea, that is attributes such as
hot, cold, color, smell, taste. They are a construct of the mind using the base
data (simple idea) to create a new compound object, for example: a rose IS red
and IS fragrant and HAS thorns...all of these =ROSE, the attributes themselves
red, fragrance, thorn, mean nothing in particular.
Locke disagrees with Descartes about “a priori” knowledge. His grounds
for this
4: Geocities.com/Grolier Encyclopedia
disagreement are: 1: because children aren’t born knowing things, 2: because
people
disagree about things, and 3: because if there were “a priori” knowledge,
everyone would know it equally. Locke goes on to describe the mind as a “Tabula
Rasa” or blank slate. Everything must be input and processed starting with
simple ideas. For example: if I kick a rock barefooted, I will experience pain
and maybe cold, but first I will experience an irregularly shaped thing that
is very hard. The Simple idea is the irregular shape, the complex ideas are:
pain, cold, gray-ish, hard. The inner reflection says: that hurts, I don’t
think I’ll do that again. The rock exists because it takes up space (I
could weigh it) and it has initiated inner reflection (ouch!).
Locke agrees with Descartes regarding “the self” or his own existence.
“As for our own existence, we perceive it so plainly that it needs nor
is capable of any proof.”5 Locke actually considers our knowledge
of our selves to be innate in spite of his “tabula rasa” theory. He
places God in this argument as well. (Personal note: seems to be a bit of a
skate to me, at least Descartes tried to prove God. Locke basically says
that the existence of me is innate, true, and unprovable anyway. So based on
this “truth” we can logically deduce that some greater mind must have
created me = God.)
Locke has determined that there are three types of knowledge: intuitive, demonstrative,
and sensitive. Intuition, or intuitive knowledge is composed of the compounded
simple ideas and a comparison of them such as: an apple is not a banana. Demonstration
or demonstrative knowledge is knowledge received from logical mathematical deduction
such as 2 +2=4. Sensation or sensitive knowledge is input based on sensory stimulus
from objects that are not us. This input is not particularly reliable because
there is such a thing as “phantom limb pain” pain where there is no
object causing injury.
Locke’s definitions of knowledge becomes known as Representative Realism
– objects are real, they produce ideas which resemble the objects. This
is the only way that humans can know. We can never know for absolute certainty
what an object is. We only have our sense representation of it.
5: John Locke, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
To conclude I would like to briefly mention a couple of main points of difference
and similarity between Descartes and Locke.
In spite of the fact that Descartes insists that knowledge must be based on
provable knowns, his philosophy was given to him in a dream.
Both Locke and Descartes want philosophy to be scientific. both believe in the
self as innate and intuitive knowledge.
Both believe that God exists, However Descartes tweeks his philosophy to prove
God. Locke believes that since you can intuitively know that you exist, then
by logical progression you can prove God.
Descartes says that we can KNOW an object by sensory input and logical progression.
Locke says we cannot know the REALITY of objects, but we can know the representation
of them through our senses.
In Locke’s view knowledge depends on the existence of objects independent
of minds or ideas.
Bibliography
Renaissance, Britannica.com
Renaissance, Encyclopedia.com
Sir Isaac Newton, Britannica.com
Rene Descartes, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Rene Descartes, Oregon State University, Philosophy 302 website
Rene Descartes, Geocities.com, Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia
John Locke, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
John Locke, Geocities.com, Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia
Introduction to World Philosophy, Eliot Deutsh