What is it?
- This philosophy is Empiricist -- all human knowledge begins in the senses. All the data for our intellect must come from outside that intellect.
- This philosophy is Dogmatic -- one of the necessary acts of the human intellect is an act of faith. The human intellect must always begin with believing in the senses and believing in Reason.
Cartesian Skepticism
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| Never trust a man whose hair is prettier than your mother's. |
The new philosophy, Descartes said, would use as few axioms possible, accept only logical deductions from them, and so escape all those never-ending disputes in metaphysics, epistemology, and theology.
He chose as his starting point a radical skepticism. He began with universal doubt: all propositions, ideas, thoughts were guilty until proven innocent; even the senses were suspect. "After all," Descartes' thought ran, "could not an evil spirit so confuse me as to make me believe that I am sitting at a table, or eating a meal, or walking down a road?"
Descartes claimed to have discovered the logical argument, unfolding all of philosophy, theology, and science from his famous cogito ergo sum -- from the self knowing itself, to the self's innate knowledge of God, to the knowledge of the external world.
No Exit
Unfortunately, Descartes' escape fails. By virtue of his method, he is forced to rely only on his "naked intellect" to find his way back to the world. But, also by virtue of his method, he denies his intellect anything to work with.- You think with objects -- ideas, images, thoughts.
- These objects always arise out of outside stimuli -- i.e., every thought is either "Hey, that X is cool" or "That X made me feel Y".
- But Descartes denies the intellect these outside stimuli, by dismissing them as potentially untrustworthy.
- Therefore, Descartes' naked intellect has nothing to think about (except his method) and so cannot think (except about the method).
To be continued ...
I see a need for a big red circle with a bonny bend sinister over the face of our Descartes.
ReplyDeleteIn your Copious Free Time, take a look at Thomism. Yes, reading Just Thomism gives one a sort of "Learning how to swim at the deep end of the pool" but there are better ways. (Hint: "The Last Superstition" and "Introduction to Thomism" are both Feser's efforts and extremely good. There's also "Thomas Aquinas in 50 Pages by Taylor Marshall, which is shorter and a bit more basic. Less angry, too. ;) ) The trick to Thomistic thought is --oddly-- the fractal. Seeing a fractal from a distance is intimidatingly complex. The cool thing about fractals is that while the math is tricky, the basic units as drawn are simple. (and not in the same way God is simple. I mean, really easy.)
There is a reason why man has thought for several thousand years that there is such a thing as "common sense". Much of Thomism, at it's core, is based on that. It is simply that, when you do the same operation enough times, you get chains of reasoning that become rather lacy and intricate. As a programmer this probably isn't such a revelation.
Hint: Thomism starts at where the Summa starts: Grass IS Green. Because a child knows that grass seen out a window, even though he can't get out there and touch it. The child still is convinced, without elaborate syllogisms, that indeed there is a wide green carpet that looks like it feels a certain way, and that the fact that it is GREEN tells us something about grass. In other words, this is common sense. It is only when philosophers get into the mix that the question of whether grass is real or if green is a mass hallucination or if thoughts are all lossy and separate become an issue. This was not always the case.
I'm not sure why, but Lisp, Fractals and Thomism seem to me to be cut from the same cloth. Only Thomism (to my knowledge, I'm just a baby as of yet) doesn't have lambda functions. Which is good, because that was always my stumbling block to grokking the Lispiness of being.
WARNING: I'm not really a philosopher, I just enjoy thinking too much as a hobby.
This is pretty awesome! I'm looking forward to it!
(On the other hand, Java (which I grok very much indeed) is getting lambda functions!)
Delete'Sooth on Thomism as common sense. My encounters with Aquinas have been entirely mediated -- mostly through Chesterton (in his fantastic sketch of the man), but also through Kreeft (in "The Shorter Summa" -- though that's very heavy going at times!). Probably a pardonable defect, but why I am hesitant to call myself a "Thomist" -- it almost seems to carry pretensions of scholarship.
Chesterton has my attention with nearly everything he writes; but he "got personal" by observing that Aquinas never asks what a modern would call the most fundamental question: "is there anything there at all." When asked the question, "To be or not to be, that is the question", St. Thomas answers, "To be, that is the answer". To answer anything else is to instantly lose, not only all philosophy, but all life.