Notes on Introduction to Philosophy -- Phil A201
William Jamison - Instructor
Lecture 7
Seventh lecture notes for Introduction to Philosophy:
Leibniz and Stephen Stephen Hawking - What's a Quark? This was mostly a review of what had already been discussed last week concerning Leibniz and what we have discussed off and on through the course with respect to Hawking. We are moving faster than the syllabus. Is that because of the beautiful weather we have been having?
Berkeley - Idealism To be is to be perceived - if a tree falls...
Slide one:
George Berkeley 1685-1753
 | Essay towards a New Theory of Vision objects of sight versus touch. |
| (1) object (or ideas) of sight have nothing in common with the objects of touch |
| (2) connection of sight and touch is "arbitrary" and learned by experience only. The connection is arbitrary; but it is regular and constant. What we see suggests to us what we may expect to touch and handle. |
| In using sight to guide our movements we interpret the language of God. |
Slide two:
Principles and Three Dialogues
| Hylas (matter) Philonous (Love of mind) |
| Locke secondary and primary qualities |
| Secondary qualities do not exist apart from sensations |
| Primary qualities exist irrespective of our knowledge |
| Berkeley denies this distinction |
| to be is to be perceived - esse is percipi |
| materialists have faith in substance instead of faith in God |
Slide three: All in the mind of God
Existence of Self, Other Minds, and God
| you have, properly speaking, no idea of your own soul |
| notion of matter as the unthinking support of ideas, is "repugnant" or self contradictory |
| "it is no repugnancy to say that a perceiving thing should be the subject of ideas, or an active thing the cause of them." while "I have no reason for disbelieving the existence of Matter," "the being of my Self, that is, my own soul, mind, or thinking principle, I evidently know by reflexion." |
Slide four:
Spirit the only real cause or power
| Such is the nature of Spirit, or that which acts, that it cannot be of itself perceived, but only by the effects which it produceth. |
| The world is a constant creation; the infinite Spirit is ever speaking to the spirits of men. |
| The permanence and continuity that characterize our changing experience find their explanation in the reasonable constancy of the divine Will which is actively present in it all. |
Also note Jonathan Edwards and his relationship with Berkeley.
Hume - Skeptic of skeptics -- Who am I? -- Communitarian Ethics
Slide one:
David Hume - 1711-1776
| Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press... |
| perceptions (following Locke) |
| lively - impressions |
| less lively - ideas |
| all ideas are derived from impressions |
| Idea of God is merely extrapolation |
Slide two:
Custom and Habits of the Mind
| Association of Ideas |
| resemblance |
| contiguity in time or place |
| cause and effect |
| Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact |
| 1st intuitive or demonstrably certain |
| 2nd founded on cause and effect |
| comes only from experience |
Slide three:
Cause and effect
| The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possible reach any experience of their connection with objects. |
| Reason is as much a matter of habit as emotion |
| There is no synthetic a priori |
| Metaphysics is impossible |
| Philosophical skepticism is result |
Slide four:
Personal Identity
| We refer to ourselves according to habits and customs |
| there is no "I" that we can experience |
| we can not have an objective experience of the subject of our experience |
| practical living is not under question |
| only philosophical metaphysics is shown to be untenable and useless |
| therefore: give up metaphysics |
Slide five:
Hume on Religion
| conservative side - Cleanthes offers a posteriori arguments for God's existence, particularly the design argument: |
| Machines are produced by intelligent design |
| Universe resembles a machine |
| Therefore, the universe was produced by intelligent design |
Slide six:
Hume on Religion
| Demea: a priori arguments (Leibniz) |
| The world contains an infinite sequence of contingent facts; |
| The explanation of this whole series cannot reside in the series itself; |
| Therefore, there is a necessary substance which produced this infinite series, and which is the complete explanation of its own existence as well. |
Slide seven:
Hume on Religion
| Philo - skeptic against both: |
| design argument - faulty analogy: we don't know whether the order in nature was the result of design since we did not witness the formation of the world. |
| cosmological argument - a sufficient explanation for each particular fact in the infinite sequence of facts leaves no need to inquire about the origin of the collection of these facts. |