Central Works of Philosophy v2

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

John Shand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317494386
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Central Works of Philosophy is a major multi-volume collection of essays on the core texts of the Western philosophical tradition. From Plato's Republic to Quine's Word and Object, the five volumes range over 2, 500 years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of some of our greatest philosophers, each of them primary texts studied at undergraduate level. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an overview of the work, clear and authoritative exposition of its central ideas, and an assessment of the work's importance then and now. Each essay equips the reader with the resources and confidence to go on to read the works themselves. Together these books provide an unrivaled companion for studying and reading philosophy, one that introduces the reader to the masterpleces of the western philosophical canon and some of the greatest minds that have ever lived talking about the profoundest most exciting problems there are. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a brilliant outpouring of philosophical thought unprecedented in human history. Together philosophy and science pushed medieval and Renaissance scholasticism aside to lay the foundations of the modern world. Beginning with Descartes' Meditations, the contributors examine some of the period's most seminal philosophical texts: Spinoza's Ethics, which presents a complete picture of reality that has at its heart how we can be good, the Monadology, in which Leibniz describes what must underpin reality if it is to be fully explained, Hobbes' Leviathan, which reminds us of the dangers of the unchecked brutality of humanity; Rousseau's Social Contract, a vision of how human nature can be changed for the better in a new society, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding which wishes us to grasp that we must make knowledge our own through experience not authority, Berkeley's attack on materialism in his Treatise and Hume's search for rational justification for our most basic beliefs about the world in his Treatise of Human Nature. Together these essays offer students a remarkable survey of the key texts and core ideas that make up the age of rationalism and empiricism.

1
René Descartes

Meditations on First Philosophy

Janet Broughton

You are an educated person of good common sense who has a healthy dose of curiosity Imagine yourself as just such a person living in the middle of the seventeenth century, and imagine that you were turning to the most learned people of your day, asking questions about the world around you. Their answers would leave your head spinning. The cutting-edge scientists would be telling you that lemons are not yellow and sugar is not sweet, and that the sun moving across the sky is still but the still earth beneath your feet is moving. The sceptical freethinkers would be hammering you with a battery of persuasive arguments that always force you to the same conclusion: we can never have rational support for believing either that the world is as it seems, or that it is not as it seems. The scholastic philosophers - the Aristotelians who dominated Europe's universities would at least be claiming that we have a rational understanding of the world, and that things really are much as they seem to be, but they would be nesting those comfortable claims in a prickly snarl of metaphysical theology about which they endlessly quarrelled among themselves. Faced with these fundamental disagreements, what would it make sense for a person like you to do?

Overview of the Meditations

In 1641, René Descartes published a short work intended to show readers how to find their way out of this bind. Meditations on First Philosophy narrates the sequence of reflections by which anyone might arrive at the correct basic picture of the world. By the end of these meditations, readers will have given up some of their most cherished beliefs, and they will have learned exactly how and why they can defend others. They will see that the worldview of the new science is correct, and that they must give up their common-sense belief that our senses tell us what the world is like. They will also see that the scepticism of the freethinkers is incorrect, and that we really can find a rational basis for beliefs about every aspect of reality. And, finally, readers will see that the scholastic philosophers have been quarrelling over the details of a fundamentally mistaken metaphysics, and they will see how to replace the mistaken theory with a proper understanding of the nature of reality.

The book is thus a sort of recipe for revolution. The book's readers are to be transformed by working their way through the same series of meditations as the narrator. If we do this, Descartes believes, we shall no longer be baffled by the sceptics and the scholastics; we shall jettison the confused aspects of our ordinary thinking; and we shall see why we can and must accept the philosophical framework within which we can defend the new science.

First Meditation

Descartes's ambitions in the Meditations are large, and to carry them out, he invents a remarkable strategy for the meditator to use. The meditator takes nothing for granted, and the way he takes nothing for granted is to take as seriously as possible the most radical grounds for doubt. He ostentatiously refuses to accept any presuppositions: he will not embrace any claim, no matter how seemingly obvious, if there is any way at all to raise even the slightest doubt about it. That way, if any of his beliefs survive this demanding procedure, he will be able to defend them against all comers, including sceptical free-thinkers and scholastic professors. He will be able to show that he can be absolutely certain his beliefs are true, because he will have shown that he cannot raise doubts about them no matter how hard he tries.

Thus, at the outset of his meditations Descartes proposes to withhold his assent to any proposition for which he can find even the slightest reason for doubt. Now, a person of common sense might think that there is no way at all for us to doubt something when we see with our own eyes that it is so, or perceive it by using our other senses. Of course sometimes we are mistaken - for example, when we are looking at something very small or far away - but that does not cast doubt on all of what our senses tell us. For example, if you are now reading this essay in a book that you are holding, your mistakes about small or distant things do not cast doubt on your belief that you have a book in your hands. It seems that when it comes to beliefs like this, we are immune to sceptical worries.

But Descartes gives a reason for doubting even your belief that you have a book in your hands. Consider the hypothesis that you are at this moment fast asleep with nothing in your hands, and that you are dreaming that you have a book in your hands. If this hypothesis were true, then here is what would be going on: you would really be lying in bed having a dream in which you believe you have a book in your hands, but your belief would be false. There would be no book in your hands. Now, if you see a way to rule out this hypothesis as incorrect, then of course it does not give you any reason for doubting your present belief. But the meditator finds to his surprise that he does not see any way to rule out this hypothesis. He may try to assure himself that he is wide awake and looking at a book by thumping the book or pinching himself, but he realizes that, for all he knows, he is fast asleep and simply dreaming that he is thumping a book or pinching himself. So now he has two ways of thinking about his present belief. One is his normal way of thinking, according to which his belief about a book in hand is true. The other is his sceptical hypothesis, according to which his belief is false. He cannot tell which of these ways of thinking is correct, but if he has no way to choose between them, then even though the sceptical hypothesis strikes him as far-fetched, he must treat it as giving him a reason for doubting whether his belief about the book is true.

Although the dream argument is a very radical one, it does seem to leave intact at least some of our beliefs, for example, the belief that the sum of two and three is five. But Descartes now considers an even more radical sceptical hypothesis: the hypothesis that his mind has been designed by an omnipotent but deceptive creator so that he gets things systematically wrong. On this hypothesis, even the things that the meditator's mind will find completely and transparently true will, in fact, be false. On his normal way of thinking, whenever he finds something to be very simple and obvious, such as "2 + 3 = 5," then his belief is true. There is no room for confusion; there is no obscurity; it does not even matter whether he is awake or asleep. But on this new sceptical hypothesis, his creator deceives him by designing his mind so that he thinks that "2 -I- 3 = 5" is obviously true when in fact it is false. As with the dream argument, the meditator realizes that he cannot tell which is correct: his normal way of thinking, or the radical sceptical hypothesis. The deceiving creator argument, then, is an argument that leaves the meditator with doubt of seemingly universal scope; it calls into doubt not just his beliefs about the world around him, but also his basic mathematical beliefs.

But exactly what is the scope of each of these sceptical arguments? Descartes clearly intends the dream argument to call into doubt any fairly specific belief that I hold about the things I take myself to be experiencing here and now: for example, that I am sitting down. But we might wonder whether the dream argument can call into doubt my general beliefs about what I am currently experiencing: that I have a physical body of some sort, and that it is in the vicinity of other physical objects of some sort. By the end of the First Meditation, Descartes clearly is withholding assent from the proposition that there is anything physical at all; the deceiving creator argument brings that proposition into doubt. But it is not clear how close the dream argument by itself comes to giving him grounds for this sweeping scepticism about the physical world.

There is an important question about the scope of the deceiving creator argument as well. If Descartes thinks it can call into doubt our simplest beliefs in arithmetic, then wouldn't he have to agree that it also calls into doubt our beliefs about other things we regard as transparently true, such as our simplest beliefs about the logical principles that guide our reasoning? Take, for example, the principle of modus ponens. This principle says that if some proposition p is true, and if the complex proposition "If p, then q" is also true, then q is true. We all have the basic belief that what this principle says is true. Does the deceiving creator argument call basic logical beliefs into doubt in addition to basic mathematical beliefs? It is not easy to think of a reason for drawing a line between the two kinds of basic beliefs and saying that the mathematical ones are dubitable while the logical ones are not. And yet it seems that Descartes had better be able to draw such a line, because otherwise he seems to have doomed his meditations from the start. If he must withhold his assent from the principles of basic reasoning, then he will not have any way to move his own reasoning forwards through rational meditation.

How real are Descartes's radical doubts? Many of us find that when we think about these sceptical hypotheses "from the inside", we agree with the meditator that we cannot really tell whether the sceptical hypotheses are true or false. Yet when we relax our attention and go about our everyday lives, we may find it hard to take the sceptical hypotheses seriously. They seem either exaggerated and far-fetched or part of some sort of intellectual trick. Descartes thought that the sceptical hypotheses are certainly exaggerated and far-fetched, but he did not think this showed that we can dismiss them. Perhaps we take them seriously only when we are giving our full attention to philosophical enquiry, but the doubts they generate are no less real for that.

Whether Descartes was right about this is one of the most debated questions in epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. Some philosophers argue that he is wrong; they think that when he says we do not "know" that there is a physical world, or that we do not "know" that two plus three equals five, he is illegitimately smuggling in his own idiosyncratic and overly demanding conception of knowledge. If I can claim to know that there is a tall round tower on that distant hill, then most philosophers would agree that there are some hypotheses I must be able to rule out: that it is a square tower, for example, or that it is short and fairly close. But (some philosophers would argue) I do not have to rule out the dream hypothesis in order to claim to know something. Think how odd it would be to say that a witness in a criminal trial didn't really know something say, that there was a gouge on the table at the crime scene - simply because he couldn't rule out the dream hypothesis. Arguably, we are entitled to claim we know things based on our senses even if we cannot rule out the dream hypothesis. To this, defenders of Descartes might reply that just because raising the dream hypothesis in the middle of a cross-examination would be odd doesn't show that the dream hypothesis is an illegitimate challenge to knowledge claims. For practical reasons there are many remote possibilities we do not concern ourselves with in daily life; we open the refrigerator without wondering whether it is filled with snakes. But, as Descartes himself insisted, if we are not concerned with what to do but are instead concerned with what we really know, then we must take seriously even the most far-fetched possibilities. If this is right, then there may be nothing idiosyncratic about Descartes's conception of knowledge.

Second Meditation

Descartes takes his first step forwards out of the swamp of radical doubt by claiming certainty for his belief that at least he himself exists. "Cogito, ergo sum", he wrote in the Principles of Philosophy: "I think, therefore I am." As it happens, that wording does not appear in the Meditations, but Descartes's reasoning about his own existence in the Meditations is often called the "cogito" reasoning anyway. The intuitive appeal of his claim is obvious, but exactly how to understand it is not. Let us consider several interpretative options.

One is to see Descartes's insight as expressing an inference, one that starts with "I think" and draws from that the conclusion "I exist". But saying that much is not saying enough. After all, if we start with "I walk" we can draw from that the conclusion "I exist", but if we are doubting whether anything physical exists, and if we are asserting only what we cannot doubt, then we are not entitled to start by asserting "I walk". My belief that I am walking is vulnerable to the dream argument and to the deceiving creator argument; it is no more certain than my belief that I have a book in my hands. So part of Descartes's insight here would have to be that somehow I can be certain of "I think" or, in other words, that "I think" is different from "I walk".

Descartes clearly does believe that we can be certain about "I think", even in the face of the radical sceptical doubts. But what is not clear is whether he intends this to be a basic starting-point for his reasoning about his own existence, or whether he thinks that his certainty about "I think" is itself a conclusion from some other sort of starting-point. This is not easy to say, but in his argument for his certainty about his existence, he does not give explicit reasons for saying that we can be certain of "I think", nor does he begin by explaining what would count as "thinking". Those are both points he turns to later in the Second Meditation. Partly for this reason, some readers think that in the cogito reasoning, Descartes was not treating certainty about "I think" as a starting-point but was instead trying to bring out some other aspect of our knowledge of our own existence.

One possibility is that there is something peculiarly self-verifying about the thought "I exist". Consider an analogy. If you say out loud, "I am not speaking out loud", then what you say must be false. By the same token, if you say out loud, "I am speaking out loud", then what you say must be true. The fact that you are saying it makes what you are saying true. Perhaps Descartes is pointing out, in somewhat similar fashion, that if you say or even think, "I do not exist", then what you say or think must be false, and that, by the same token, when you say or think "I do exist", what you say or think must be true. This is often called the "performative" interpretation of the cogito argument. One shortcoming of this interpretation, though, is that it does not explain why one of Descartes's key claims in the cogito passage is that if he is being deceived by his creator, then undoubtedly he exists. Descartes seems to draw some tight connection between his efforts to doubt as much as possible and his claim to know that he exists. But on the performative interpretation, the effort to offer reasons for doubt is irrelevant to the insight Descartes is expressing in the cogito argument.

A different way to interpret Descartes would be to see him as suggesting that he cannot doubt his own existence because his own existence is a condition of the possibility of raising radical doubts about anything. Suppose, for example, that in order to raise a radical doubt about a given belief, we must be able to construct a sceptical hypothesis about it. Well, what does Descartes think has to go into a sceptical hypothesis? If we think about the dream argument and the deceiving creator argument, then it looks as though he thinks a sceptical hypothesis will have to offer a scenario in which I am having the belief in question and yet for some reason it is false. (I am believing I have a book in my hands in my sleep; I am being systematically deceived by my creator.) But then one sceptical hypothesis I cannot coherently construct is a sceptical hypothesis about my belief that I exist. I cannot coherently construct such a hypothesis because I cannot include in it both myself having the belief in question and that belief's being false. But if I cannot raise a radical doubt about "I exist", then I can be absolutely certain that I exist.

Once Descartes has found his first absolutely certain belief, he goes on to ask himself exactly what sort of thing this "I" is, if he can be absolutely certain it exists. In other words, how is he conceiving this "I" when he is conceiving it as something he can be certain exists? He starts his answer to this question by considering his former conception of himself and stripping away any element of it that involves something dubitable. His former conception was of himself as an organism endowed with life or a soul that enabled him to do the things that organisms can do, like be nourished and move around, and that also enabled him to see, hear and so forth, and to reason. From that, he must strip away anything to do with the existence of physical things: his radical doubts of the First Meditation require him to do so. Thus he cannot include in his conception of himself the idea of a human body, or of functions like eating and moving around. He also cannot include seeing, hearing and so forth, because as he has understood sensing, seeing requires eyes, and hearing ears. That leaves only reason, or intellect. There is no obvious reason why he would have to strip away this aspect of himself from his conception of himself.

But Descartes is not satisfied to leave things there. He seeks a more precise understanding of what it is that stays in his self-conception, and why it stays. Is it just purely intellectual activity that stays, for example, doing mathematical proofs? His answer is "no". He argues that there is a way to understand even sensation so that sensation can stay in his self-conception. The trick is to pare the conception of sensation down. Instead of thinking of seeing a light as something that requires eyes (and a light), he proposes that we think of "seeing" in a new way: as what is happening both when people really see (with their eyes) and when they seem to themselves to be seeing (for example, in dreams). One way to put this is to say that Descartes is claiming that the old notion of seeing had two parts all along: one part involving physical things, the light source and the eyes; the other part a distinctive sort of conscious experience. What he now wants to do is to strip away the part involving the light source and the eyes but retain the other part, the distinctive conscious experience. That part, he claims, we cannot doubt; whether I am awake or asleep, I am having that particular "like seeing a light" type of experience.

So the conception of himself as something of whose existence he can be certain is a conception that includes all the kinds of conscious states he can have, as long as he carefully subtracts any physical concomitants. He conceives of himself...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Philosophy Introduction
• René Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy
• Baruch Spinoza Ethics
• G. W. Leibniz Monadology
• Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
• John Locke An Essay concerning Human Understanding
• George Berkeley A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
• David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract
• Index