University of Delaware PHIL101 Exam 3

Mind activities/abilities (Locke)

- Addition - Comparison - Abstraction

Hume on Self

- Against Descartes ("I think therefore I am") - You don't know that you exist, you just know there is thinking going on - We are just bundles of impressions

Hume on extra-mental world

- Agrees with Berkeley. - If all we have is access to our own impressions, and all the ideas that copy them, that's all we can claim exists - Have to be skeptical

Secondary Quality (Locke)

- Do not reflect the way things really are - Are private to individual perceiver and only exist in the perceiver's mind - subjective

Problems with Locke's State of Nature

- Everybody is on their own in recognizing moral law, judging others on the moral law, and executing the laws. - Lacks: legislators who could establish laws, known and objective judges, recognized enforcers of law

Natural Human Rights (Locke)

- Everyone has moral status with or without the government - I don't want to be killed, enslaved, or robbed therefore I recognize that all of us have natural rights to life, liberty and property - right to property. God gives world to all, but I make something my own by mixing my labor with it.

God (Berkeley)

- God is perceiving all - All there is in the world is God's mind and his ideas & our minds and our ideas. All mind no body.

Hume on Empiricism

- He is a radical empiricist - He is skeptical about everything - ALL ideas are copies of impressions - Two kinds of judgments: About the world & way things are, About relations of ideas & way ideas group themselves or ways we've decided to talk

State of Nature (Hobbes)

- Humans want power and material goods - Humans are born equal and equally free - The state of human nature is going to be war, chaos, and hell - No morality basically. Everyone just obeys one natural law: you gotta do whatever to survive (differs from Aquinas)

Substance (Locke)

- Metaphorical Glue - What underlies qualities and holds different qualities together to form an object - Has no qualities itself, so cannot be perceived or thought

A problem for Berkeley- solipsism?

- My ideas seem to have come from outside of me - Things relate to one another in an orderly way which I know that I am not imposing on them - Things continue in an orderly way without my perceiving of them

Advantages of Idealism (Berkeley)

- No substance (substance is unperceivable so it is unthinkable) - Saves world of appearance (the way the world appears to us is basically how the world is) - Solves problem of Cartesian dualism (Your body is a collection of ideas, not different mind and body interacting)

State of Nature (Locke)

- Not as pessimistic as Hobbes - There is a God who orders human existence - There is a natural law from which moral rules can be derived - Equals must be treated equally, and I see fellow humans as equals

The sovereign (Locke)

- Power: limited - You have natural rights, so the sovereign's job is to simply supply what's lacking in the state of nature: order. And that is what you agreed to. - Tacit consent: You agree just by living there? What if you can't leave and there is no better place to go?

The sovereign (Hobbes)

- Power: unlimited - No "unjust" law - Can be "bad" law: defined as a law that doesn't promote your own survival. But you have no say in how to make laws anyway so accept it. - Different from Aquinas's natural law, Hobbes does not suppose a higher order. No objective morality.

Primary Quality (Locke)

- Produces ideas that really corresponds to how things are in the object itself - can be described and measured in mathematical terms - real world is what can be measured and quantified - objective

Ideas come from... (Locke)

- Sensation (sense data) & Reflection (mind thinking about its own operations) - No innate ideas (unlike Descartes), even basic truths of logic come from sensation & reflection

Two Types of Ideas (Locke)

- Simple: single, unified, received passively by the mind - Complex: compounded ideas, deliberately put together by our minds

Hume on Math & Logic

- They are true, always and everywhere - not learned through senses - not truths about the world. They're truths about relations of ideas/how we think

Hume on Causation

- We are not justified in believing in cause and effect - We need a necessary connection: B must follow A because there is some force or power in A necessitating B (but this is unjustified) - as far as we know, A producing B does not exist

Hume on Morality

- We have ideas of right and wrong (they come from impression & experience) - They come from our feelings & that is the impression that results in our idea of right and wrong - not egocentric b/c we all "tend" to like what benefits society - we cannot hold people accountable for their behaviors b/c there is no universal moral standard

Three Proofs of Berkeley

- You cannot think something existing unperceived. The fact that you are thinking makes the idea perceived. - Locke says ideas are copies of things, which is wrong because: You have to know the original for you to say that something is a copy. Since you only know ideas, you have no right to claim that all of them are "copies" - No substance. Since it is unperceivable, why bother thinking about it?

British Empiricism (Locke)

- a 17th-century philosophical movement which held that the mind had no innate content-personal experience was responsible for the development of all thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge - What we experience are ideas

Hume on God

- he believes that there is not enough info to believe in god - opposes design argument - popular argument to prove existence of God is dismal failure

Idealism (Berkeley)

- to be is to be perceived - unless proven otherwise, we should only say things that we know for certain, that is everything in our experience.

Knowledge (Descartes)

1. Certainty 2. Indubitably (If we can possibly doubt it we can't know it) 3. Quest for knowledge following example of math

Arguments in belief of causation

1. Conceptual Connection: the idea of cause entails the effect (you cannot think of fire + cotton without thinking of cotton burning) Hume says this is false because you can imagine cause w/o effect and vice versa 2. Observable Connection: We are able to see that A caused B Hume says you do not observe necessitating causal force or power 3. Claiming necessary connection between A and B involves making an unjustifiable assumption that the future will be like the past always.

Problems with Cartesian Dualism

1. Interaction - How can 2 absolutely different kinds of things interact casually? 2. Descartes suggest they interact in the pineal gland, which doesn't solve problem since pineal gland is physical

2 Reasons for accepting propositions (Descartes)

1. Intuition (just cognitively "see" something indubitably) 2. Deduction (move from undoubted premises through undoubted principles to undoubted conclusions)

Cartesian Dualism (Descartes)

1. Separated immaterial mind (not physical) from body (physical), mind is the real and essential YOU 2. We intuit mind, we must deduce body 3. Mind is indivisible vs. divisible body 4. Mind is private vs. body is public

Foundationalism (Descartes)

1. There are basic beliefs that do not require further justification 2. Every justified belief is or can be traced back to a basic belief of this sort

Rationalism (Descartes)

1. Turn within. Knowledge arises from reason 2. Knowledge does not arise from our sense or experience which are changing and different to everyone

God (Descartes)

1. We can deduce the existence of God with certainty (such a clear perception must have generated and come from God) 2. A good God would not allow us to be systematically deceived

The Logical Conclusion of Empiricism

All we can perceive is our ideas in our mind. Therefore, all things are just combinations of ideas. No material, all mental.

Founder of Modern Philosophy

Descartes

Contract Theory (Locke)

Each of us gives up our personal power to legislate, judge, and enforce laws. We agree to turn these powers over to the state, and these three only because we can't give up our natural rights.

Hume's criticisms of the "Watchmaker from the Watch" (or House Builder from the House) argument for the existence of God include:

Even if we could show that there must be some cause for the universe, the suffering and disorder in it would imply a less than perfect Creator, perhaps a committee or an infant diety

Cogito Ergo Sum

I think, therefore I am (Descartes)

Contract Theory (Hobbes)

In order to not kill each other in cold blood, people agree with one another to make a contract. They agree to give up equality & freedom, and give all power to a sovereign in exchange for order. They give up ALL their power except for the power to abandon their citizenship.

Tabula Rasa

John Locke's concept of the mind as a "blank slate" before we start having experiences

According to Hobbes, where does government get all its authority?

The consent of the governed

Locke holds that a government is very useful because it can

apply the natural laws to our specific situation and judge and enforce these laws

Descartes concludes that we can trust that the external world exists because

there is a good God who would not allow us to be systematically deceived about things which we clearly and distinctly perceive like the existence of the external world.

Hume says that we can know that the future will resemble the past because

we cannot know that the future will be like the past

According to Berkeley we have empirical evidence against solipsism in that

we have experiences of which we ourselves do not seem to be the causes