I thank Alan Nelson for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this entry, and I thank Andrew Pessin for his original entry on this material, which helped set the stage for this one. Ideas Understood as Modes of Thinking 2. Primary Ideas and a Principle of Representation 5. He writes: …[C]onsiderations of order appear to dictate that I now classify my thoughts into definite kinds, and ask which of them can properly be said to be the bearers of truth and falsity.
Other thoughts have various additional forms: thus when I will, or am afraid, or affirm, or deny, there is always a particular thing which I take as the object of my thought, but my thought includes something more than the likeness of that thing. Some thoughts in this category are called volitions or emotions, while others are called judgements.
Ideas and The Formal-Objective Reality Distinction When speaking of an existent mode—in this case, an actually occurring idea—Descartes will say that it possesses formal reality.
For where, I ask, could the effect get its reality from, if not from the cause? And how could the cause give it to the effect unless it possessed it? It follows from this both that something cannot arise from nothing, and also that what is more perfect — that is, contains in itself more reality — cannot arise from what is less perfect. And this is transparently true not only in the case of effects which possess what the philosophers call actual or formal reality, but also in the case of ideas, where one is considering only what they call objective reality.
A stone, for example, which previously did not exist, cannot begin to exist unless it is produced by something which contains, either formally or eminently everything to be found in the stone; similarly, heat cannot be produced in an object which was not previously hot, except by something of at least the same order degree or kind of perfection as heat, and so on.
But it is also true that the idea of heat, or of a stone, cannot exist in me unless it is put there by some cause which contains at least as much reality as I conceive to be in the heat or in the stone. For although this cause does not transfer any of its actual or formal reality to my idea, it should not on that account be supposed that it must be less real.
The nature of an idea is such that of itself it requires no formal reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode. But in order for a given idea to contain such and such objective reality, it must surely derive it from some cause which contains at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality in the idea.
For if we suppose that an idea contains something which was not in its cause, it must have got this from nothing; yet the mode of being by which a thing exists objectively or representatively in the intellect by way of an idea, imperfect though it may be, is certainly not nothing, and so it cannot come from nothing.
Alternatively, it can be taken objectively, as the thing represented by that operation; and this thing, even if it is not regarded as existing outside the intellect, can still, in virtue of its essence, be more perfect than myself. Three Kinds of Idea In the Meditations , after Descartes casts ideas as modes that represent or exhibit objects to the mind, he divides ideas into kinds. He says: Among my ideas, some appear to be innate, some to be adventitious, and others to have been invented by me.
My understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, and what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature. But my hearing a noise, as I do now, or seeing the sun, or feeling the fire, comes from things which are located outside me, or so I have hitherto judged.
Lastly, sirens, hippogriffs and the like are my own invention. This principle of representation PR can be expressed as follows: PR Primary idea A represents object B only if the objective reality of idea A has its origin in the formal reality of object B. He writes that the procedure: …is carried over from one subject to another solely by means of comparison, which enables us to state that the thing we are seeking is in this or that respect similar to, or identical with, or equal to, some given thing.
Accordingly, in all reasoning it is only by means of comparison that we attain an exact knowledge of the truth. Vrin, References are to volume and page number. I, II , transl. Cottingham, R. Murdoch, and v. III , transl. Stoothoff, D. Kenny Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , , Secondary Sources Adams, Marilyn, William Ockham. Adams, Robert, Descartes vs.
Alanen, Lilli, Aquila, Richard, Ayers, Michael, Bennett, Jonathan, Rorty ed. Brown, Gregory, Butler, R. Cartesian Studies , Oxford: Blackwell. Chappell, Vere, Chignell, Andrew, Clark, Desmond, Clatterbaugh, Kenneth, Cook, Monte, Costa, Michael, Cronin, T. Cummins, Phillip, and Guenter Zoeller eds. Cunning, David, De Rosa, Raffaella, Doyle, John, Garber, Daniel, Fallon, Stephen, Garber, Daniel and Michael Ayers eds.
Garrod, Raphaele and Alexander Marr eds. Gaukroger, Stephen ed. Gorham, Geoffrey, Grene, Marjorie, Descartes , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hatfield, Gary, Hoffman, Paul, Jolley, Nicholas, Kenny, Anthony, King, Peter, Lagerlund, Henrik ed. Lennon, Thomas, MacKenzie, Ann, Marion, Jean-Luc, McRae, Robert, Butler ed. Nadler, Steven, Gaukroger , 86— Nadler, Steven, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut eds. In Book 2, Chapter 21 of the Essay Locke explores the topic of the will.
One of the things which separates people from rocks and billiard balls is our ability to make decisions and control our actions. We feel that we are free in certain respects and that we have the power to choose certain thoughts and actions. Locke calls this power the will. But there are tricky questions about what this power consists in and about what it takes to freely or voluntarily choose something.
Locke first begins with questions of freedom and then proceeds to a discussion of the will. For example, if I wish to jump into a lake and have no physical maladies which prevent it, then I am free to jump into the lake. By contrast, if I do not wish to jump into the lake, but a friend pushes me in, I did not act freely when I entered the water.
Or, if I wish to jump into the lake, but have a spinal injury and cannot move my body, then I do not act freely when I stay on the shore. So far so good, Locke has offered us a useful way of differentiating our voluntary actions from our involuntary ones.
But there is still a pressing question about freedom and the will: that of whether the will is itself free. When I am deciding whether or not to jump into the water, is the will determined by outside factors to choose one or the other? Or can it, so to speak, make up its own mind and choose either option? But in later sections he offers a qualification of sorts.
That is that which successively determines the Will , and sets us upon those Actions, we perform. The uneasiness is caused by the absence of something that is perceived as good. The perception of the thing as good gives rise to a desire for that thing. Suppose I choose to eat a slice of pizza.
Locke would say I must have made this choice because the absence of the pizza was troubling me somehow I was feeling hunger pains, or longing for something savory and this discomfort gave rise to a desire for food.
That desire in turn determined my will to choose to eat pizza. So even if, at this moment, my desire for pizza is the strongest desire, Locke thinks I can pause before I decide to eat the pizza and consider the decision.
I can consider other items in my desire set: my desire to lose weight, or to leave the pizza for my friend, or to keep a vegan diet. Careful consideration of these other possibilities might have the effect of changing my desire set. If I really focus on how important it is to stay fit and healthy by eating nutritious foods then my desire to leave the pizza might become stronger than my desire to eat it and my will may be determined to choose to not eat the pizza.
On this point Locke is somewhat vague. While most interpreters think our desires determine when judgment is suspended, some others disagree and argue that suspension of judgment offers Lockean agents a robust form of free will. Locke was one of the first philosophers to give serious attention to the question of personal identity.
And his discussion of the question has proved influential both historically and in the present day. At heart, the question is simple, what makes me the same person as the person who did certain things in the past and that will do certain things in the future?
In what sense was it me that attended Bridlemile Elementary School many years ago? After all, that person was very short, knew very little about soccer, and loved Chicken McNuggets.
I, on the other hand, am average height, know tons of soccer trivia, and get rather queasy at the thought of eating chicken, especially in nugget form. Nevertheless, it is true that I am identical to the boy who attended Bridlemile. Christian doctrine held that there was an afterlife in which virtuous people would be rewarded in heaven and sinful people would be punished in hell. This scheme provided motivation for individuals to behave morally.
But, for this to work, it was important that the person who is rewarded or punished is the same person as the one who lived virtuously or lived sinfully.
And this had to be true even though the person being rewarded or punished had died, had somehow continued to exist in an afterlife, and had somehow managed to be reunited with a body. So it was important to get the issue of personal identity right.
The negative project involves arguing against the view that personal identity consists in or requires the continued existence of a particular substance. And the positive project involves defending the view that personal identity consists in continuity of consciousness. We can begin with this positive view.
Locke suggests here that part of what makes a person the same through time is their ability to recognize past experiences as belonging to them. For me, part of what differentiates one little boy who attended Bridlemile Elementary from all the other children who went there is my realization that I share in his consciousness.
Put differently, my access to his lived experience at Bridlemile is very different from my access to the lived experiences of others there: it is first-personal and immediate.
I recognize his experiences there as part of a string of experiences that make up my life and join up to my current self and current experiences in a unified way. That is what makes him the same person as me. Locke believes that this account of personal identity as continuity of consciousness obviates the need for an account of personal identity given in terms of substances. A traditional view held that there was a metaphysical entity, the soul, which guaranteed personal identity through time; wherever there was the same soul, the same person would be there as well.
Locke offers a number of thought experiments to cast doubt on this belief and show that his account is superior. For example, if a soul was wiped clean of all its previous experiences and given new ones as might be the case if reincarnation were true , the same soul would not justify the claim that all of those who had had it were the same person. Or, we could imagine two souls who had their conscious experiences completely swapped.
In this case, we would want to say that the person went with the conscious experiences and did not remain with the soul. Most of these focus on the crucial role seemingly played by memory. Scholastic philosophers had held that the main goal of metaphysics and science was to learn about the essences of things: the key metaphysical components of things which explained all of their interesting features.
Locke thought this project was misguided. That sort of knowledge, knowledge of the real essences of beings, was unavailable to human beings. This led Locke to suggest an alternative way to understand and investigate nature; he recommends focusing on the nominal essences of things.
For proponents of the mechanical philosophy it would be the number and arrangement of the material corpuscles which composed the body. Locke sometimes endorses this latter understanding of real essence.
But he insists that these real essences are entirely unknown and undiscoverable by us. The nominal essences, by contrast, are known and are the best way we have to understand individual substances. Nominal essences are just collections of all the observed features an individual thing has.
So the nominal essence of a piece of gold would include the ideas of yellowness, a certain weight, malleability, dissolvability in certain chemicals, and so on.
Locke offers us a helpful analogy to illustrate the difference between real and nominal essences. He suggests that our position with respect to ordinary objects is like the position of someone looking at a very complicated clock. They are hidden behind the casing.
Similarly, when I look at an object like a dandelion, I am only able to observe its nominal essence the yellow color, the bitter smell, and so forth.
I have no clear idea what produces these features of the dandelion or how they are produced. Why do we consider some things to be zebras and other things to be rabbits?
But this has the consequence that our groupings might fail to adequately reflect whatever real distinctions there might be in nature. So Locke is not a realist about species or types. Instead, he is a conventionalist. Throughout the seventeenth century, a number of fundamentalist Christian sects continually threatened the stability of English political life. And the status of Catholic and Jewish people in England was a vexed one. So the stakes were very high when, in 4.
He defines reason as an attempt to discover certainty or probability through the use of our natural faculties in the investigation of the world. Faith, by contrast, is certainty or probability attained through a communication believed to have come, originally, from God. So when Smith eats a potato chip and comes to believe it is salty, she believes this according to reason.
But when Smith believes that Joshua made the sun stand still in the sky because she read it in the Bible which she takes to be divine revelation , she believes according to faith. Although it initially sounds as though Locke has carved out quite separate roles for faith and reason, it must be noted that these definitions make faith subordinate to reason in a subtle way. This is the proper Object of Faith : But whether it be a divine Revelation, or no, Reason must judge; which can never permit the Mind to reject a greater Evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow it to entertain Probability in opposition to Knowledge and Certainty.
First, Locke thinks that if any proposition, even one which purports to be divinely revealed, clashes with the clear evidence of reason then it should not be believed. Second, Locke thinks that to determine whether or not something is divinely revealed we have to exercise our reason. Only reason can help us settle that question. In all of this Locke emerges as a strong moderate. He himself was deeply religious and took religious faith to be important.
But he also felt that there were serious limits to what could be justified through appeals to faith. Locke lived during a very eventful time in English politics. For much of his life Locke held administrative positions in government and paid very careful attention to contemporary debates in political theory.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that he wrote a number of works on political issues. In this field, Locke is best known for his arguments in favor of religious toleration and limited government.
Today these ideas are commonplace and widely accepted. We now know, however, that they were in fact composed much earlier. The First Treatise is now of primarily historical interest. It takes the form of a detailed critique of a work called Patriacha by Robert Filmer. Filmer had argued, in a rather unsophisticated way, in favor of divine right monarchy.
On his view, the power of kings ultimately originated in the dominion which God gave to Adam and which had passed down in an unbroken chain through the ages. Locke disputes this picture on a number of historical grounds. Perhaps more importantly, Locke also distinguishes between a number of different types of dominion or governing power which Filmer had run together. After clearing some ground in the First Treatise , Locke offers a positive view of the nature of government in the much better known Second Treatise.
While Filmer had suggested that humans had always been subject to political power, Locke argues for the opposite. According to him, humans were initially in a state of nature.
The state of nature was apolitical in the sense that there were no governments and each individual retained all of his or her natural rights. The state of nature was inherently unstable. Individuals would be under constant threat of physical harm. And they would be unable to pursue any goals that required stability and widespread cooperation with other humans. Individuals, seeing the benefits which could be gained, decided to relinquish some of their rights to a central authority while retaining other rights.
This took the form of a contract. In agreement for relinquishing certain rights, individuals would receive protection from physical harm, security for their possessions, and the ability to interact and cooperate with other humans in a stable environment. So, according to this view, governments were instituted by the citizens of those governments.
This has a number of very important consequences. On this view, rulers have an obligation to be responsive to the needs and desires of these citizens. Further, in establishing a government the citizens had relinquished some, but not all of their original rights. This carved out important room for certain individual rights or liberties.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a government which failed to adequately protect the rights and interests of its citizens or a government which attempted to overstep its authority would be failing to perform the task for which it was created. As such, the citizens would be entitled to revolt and replace the existing government with one which would suitably carry out the duties of ensuring peace and civil order while respecting individual rights.
So Locke was able to use the account of natural rights and a government created through contract to accomplish a number of important tasks. He could use it to show why individuals retain certain rights even when they are subject to a government. He could use it to show why despotic governments which attempted to unduly infringe on the rights of their citizens were bad.
And he could use it to show that citizens had a right to revolt in instances where governments failed in certain ways.
These are powerful ideas which remain important even today. According to Locke, God gave humans the world and its contents to have in common. The world was to provide humans with what was necessary for the continuation and enjoyment of life. But Locke also believed it was possible for individuals to appropriate individual parts of the world and justly hold them for their own exclusive use. Put differently, Locke believed that we have a right to acquire private property.
For example, if I discover some grapes growing on a vine, through my labor in picking and collecting these grapes I acquire an ownership right over them. If I find an empty field and then use my labor to plow the field then plant and raise crops, I will be the proper owner of those crops. If I chop down trees in an unclaimed forest and use the wood to fashion a table, then that table will be mine. First, there is what has come to be known as the Waste Proviso.
One must not take so much property that some of it goes to waste. I should not appropriate gallons and gallons of grapes if I am only able to eat a few and the rest end up rotting. If the goods of the Earth were given to us by God, it would be inappropriate to allow some of this gift to go to waste. This says that in appropriating resources I am required to leave enough and as good for others to appropriate.
If the world was left to us in common by God, it would be wrong of me to appropriate more than my fair share and fail to leave sufficient resources for others. After currency is introduced and after governments are established the nature of property obviously changes a great deal. Using metal, which can be made into coins and which does not perish the way foodstuffs and other goods do, individuals are able to accumulate much more wealth than would be possible otherwise.
So the proviso concerning waste seems to drop away. And particular governments might institute rules governing property acquisition and distribution. Locke was aware of this and devoted a great deal of thought to the nature of property and the proper distribution of property within a commonwealth.
His writings on economics, monetary policy, charity, and social welfare systems are evidence of this. Locke had been systematically thinking about issues relating to religious toleration since his early years in London and even though he only published his Epistola de Tolerantia A Letter Concerning Toleration in he had finished writing it several years before.
The question of whether or not a state should attempt to prescribe one particular religion within the state, what means states might use to do so, and what the correct attitude should be toward those who resist conversion to the official state religion had been central to European politics ever since the Protestant Reformation. These experiences had convinced him that, for the most part, individuals should be allowed to practice their religion without interference from the state.
We might not be particularly good at determining what the correct religion is. There is no reason to think that those holding political power will be any better at discovering the true religion than anyone else, so they should not attempt to enforce their views on others. Instead, each individual should be allowed to pursue true beliefs as best as they are able.
Little harm results from allowing others to have their own religious beliefs. Indeed, it might be beneficial to allow a plurality of beliefs because one group might end up with the correct beliefs and win others over to their side.
People consent to governments for the purpose of establishing social order and the rule of law. Governments should refrain from enforcing religious conformity because doing so is unnecessary and irrelevant for these ends. Indeed, attempting to enforce conformity may positively harm these ends as it will likely lead to resistance from members of prohibited religions. It is nonsensical and foolish to designate the causal qualities of humans, or spirits, to inert matter.
Only life forces, such as spirits or souls, are able to function causally through perception and are the only substances that really exist. Knowledge springs from perceptions, and because material objects are not causal agents, they unquestionably do not arouse perceptual activity. Berkeley says that only an infinite being may produce and direct causally the perceptions that humans spirits have of physical matter. When he thinks of us, we are begotten and our existence activated.
Yet, God still remains ineffable as he is beyond our comprehension. It is ultimately God who causes us to sense the physicality of objects by means of his direct volition.
First He will conceive the idea that we humans sense or perceive an object and then we actually do as He thought. Berkeley explicates that all physical objects are perceived via sensation. Material objects are merely ideas obtained through perceptual activity and their attributes are sensible rather than being physical properties. Sensation is therefore impossible without the presence of ideas or else anything sensed would be unperceived or unthought.
Christian Science view of idealism. Christian Scientists generally believe that God is a disembodied spirit who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. They set all being in His mind. The true universe in its entirety, according to divine metaphysics, or Christian Science, is comprised of ideas that are completely spiritual and fashioned by divine thought, just as Berkeley espouses in his immaterialist views.
Therefore, Christian Scientists specify that we as humans are in truth spirits produced by divinity, and in consequence are all incarnations of God. God envelops all that is real, and therefore, everything he is eternal, omni beneficent, etc.
Rationalism Learning Objective Define rationalism and its role in the ideas of the Enlightenment. Key Points Rationalism—as an appeal to human reason as a way of obtaining knowledge—has a philosophical history dating from antiquity.
While rationalism did not dominate the Enlightenment, it laid critical basis for the debates that developed over the course of the 18th century. He thought that the knowledge of eternal truths could be attained by reason alone no experience was necessary.
Since the Enlightenment, rationalism is usually associated with the introduction of mathematical methods into philosophy as seen in the works of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. This is commonly called continental rationalism, because it was predominant in the continental schools of Europe, whereas in Britain empiricism dominated.
Both Spinoza and Leibniz asserted that, in principle, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be gained through the use of reason alone, though they both observed that this was not possible in practice for human beings, except in specific areas, such as mathematics. While empiricism a theory that knowledge comes only or primarily from a sensory experience dominated the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, attempted to combine the principles of empiricism and rationalism.
He concluded that both reason and experience are necessary for human knowledge. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism and skepticism, it emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory experience, in the formation of ideas over the notion of innate ideas or traditions.
But the old usage still survives.
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