“I Think Therefore I Am”
Spinoza was another rationalist. He was Jewish, and fled from persecution from his home in Spain. His beliefs upset the Jewish faith and his family disowned him. He was a very odd man. On the death of his wealthy parents, his sister got all of their wealth, so he went to court to get his share. He won and gave all the money back to his sister. He worked as a lens grinder, which led to an early death, due to the effects of glass dust on his lungs.
Spinoza thought that everything was an aspect of God. Descartes said everything was from the mind or made from matter. Spinoza believed that all we are, are ideas in the mind of God.
Leibniz, a supreme intellect in his day, was a very shallow, but ambitious. He thought that matter with no material form, were called Monads, which are spiritual forms that from complexes which are seen as matter. In other words, these ‘Monads’, bits of spiritual nothingness, can from material objects.
Because of Descartes emphasis on the mind, it became easier to know than the body. He also found it difficult to bring back the subject of matter back into his philosophy. Descartes set up a problem…
“How do the mind and the body connect?”
This question has presented problems to all rationalists. To make it easier, the mind and the body were referred as the following;
Mind – Incorporeal (has no substance to make it up)
Body – Corporeal
So the question turned to be,
“How can something incorporeal, interact wit something corporeal?”
Empiricism
Empiricists went against the ideas of the rationalists, about innate ideas.
John Locke was one who thought that at birth a mind is like a blank slate, and everything knowledge we know, comes through our senses and is presented on this. It is like, we see a horse, we see a horn, and we can put both of them together and form a unicorn in our mind. We can do this with all things from our knowledge that has come from the senses
Locke said that all ideas were acquired from experience, and there were two types,
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Ideas of sensation – input from the senses, e.g. seeing, smelling, etc
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Ideas of reflection – different operations of the mind, e.g. thinking, believing, etc
He also believed there were primary and secondary qualities.
- Primary – really exist in the bodies themselves, e.g. shape, body and basic impressions
- Secondary – produce ideas in the mind, which aren’t in the object, e.g. taste, temperature, etc
The above ideas were to try and distinguish between appearance and reality. Locke thought knowledge could be of certain types, e.g. black can be contrasted with white. With this, Locke considered three types of knowledge,
i) Intuitive
This is the most certain form of knowledge, because it is most obvious and hard to doubt, e.g. “I have a body”, “Black is not white”
ii) Demonstrative
We put simple ideas together to form complex ones, to demonstrate something, e.g. “heat of sun is like heat from a fire”.
iii) Sensitive
This form of knowledge is the most uncertain, as it relies on the senses, e.g. “There are 10 chairs in this room”, although your senses are actually deceiving you because there are actually 11 chairs
Two of these theories sound a lot like the thinking of rationalists, e.g. sensitive – saying how that id the most uncertain form, when it uses the senses, empiricism is based on the idea that all knowledge comes from the senses, so to a empiricist, shouldn’t this be the most certain rather than indecisive.
Berkeley thought that objects did not possess power. The only reason that the object exists is because we perceive. A sort of example to this is,
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear or see it, does it still make a sound?” meaning if no one is to perceive it, does it exist? Can we say any substance exists at all if we cannot see, feel, hear, smell or taste it? Ideas are in the mind of God, while God perceives things, they exists, was another explanation. So the tree in the park, that you know is there, but cannot see because you are not there, is actually there, since God perceives it. In answer to the ‘tree’ question, Berkeley would say there is no tree.
David Hume, another empiricist, said we had impressions and ideas. Impressions are of basic sense and have an objective. Examples of ideas we can have are mermaids, heaven, etc. they are weaker kinds of impressions, e.g. the sun is not as vivid in our minds as it is when we are looking at it. Hume said we believe what we believe because of ‘custom and habit’. For example, the sun has risen everyday, as we know it, so we assume it will rise tomorrow morning, and the morning after, and so on. This is known as induction. We assume that knowledge can be projected into the future, but we have no right to think that.
In conclusion, you can see that rationalists and empiricists have very different views. It is easy to see the difference – those who see knowledge comes from the mind and those who see it come from the senses. Although they both have very different views, John Locke – one of the early empiricists – had ideas very similar to those of rationalists. We see that in his description of the three types of knowledge, he states that the knowledge he says the knowledge in which we rely on own senses, is actually less reliable than that of when we use our thoughts – which is a very rationalist thought. Although, further into the future of empiricism, these works of the earliest, have now been seen as the most certain type rather than uncertain as John Locke stated. Empiricists and rationalists, is it absolutely certain, have very different views, but what we really want to know is, which is true to us now? Where does our knowledge come from – our thoughts, or through our senses?
