VIII' Classical Philosophy and the

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VIII. Classical Philosophy and the

• Early Modern World

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VIII.A. The Rise of Rationalism

• Some Terminology
• Reason the use of the mind, logic, etc., in the
  explication of truth, the solving of problems,
  and so forth
• Rational possessing and using reason
• Rationality the state of possessing reason
• Rationalism reliance on reason as the primary
  basis for the establishment of truth

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VIII.A. The Rise of Rationalism

• More Aristotelian Background
• In PHYSICS, two kinds of motion
• Circular motion, in imitation of the unmoved
  mover
• Non-circular motion, by the DIRECT, CONTINUOUS
  action of a mover on the object in motion
• In COSMOLOGY, a hierarchical arrangement of
  bodies and structures

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VIII.A. The Rise of Rationalism

• The Scientific Revolution
• Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543, Poland)
• -- Sun at the center of the universe
• -- Rejection of Aristotles cosmology
• -- Implicit rejection of Medieval social order

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VIII.A. The Rise of Rationalism

• The Scientific Revolution
• Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543, Poland)
• Galileo Galilei (1546-1642, Italy)
• -- Confirmation of Copernican cosmology
• -- Rejection of Aristotles understanding of
  directly-caused motion

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VIII.A. The Rise of Rationalism

• The Scientific Revolution
• Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543, Poland)
• Galileo Galilei (1546-1642, Italy)
• Johann Kepler (1571-1630, Germany)
• -- Elliptical orbits
• -- Rejection of Aristotles understanding of
  non-directly-caused motion

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VIII.A. The Rise of Rationalism

• The Scientific Revolution
• Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543, Poland)
• Galileo Galilei (1546-1642, Italy)
• Johann Kepler (1571-1630, Germany)
• Isaac Newton (1642-1727, England)

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VIII.A. The Rise of Rationalism

• The Scientific Revolution
• Refutation of Aristotles physics
• Universe governed by natural laws
• Natural/spiritual division
• Less perceived need for God in nature or in
  society

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VIII.B. René Descartes (1596-1650)

• He was from near Tours in west-central France.
• As a student, he was frustrated by the lack of
  certainty in any field except mathematics.
• He traveled widely, and during his travels came
  to the conviction that he would found a new
  philosophical system.
• He wrote on mathematics and physics at the time
  of Galileos condemnation.
• He published Meditations on First Philosophy in
  1641 and Principles of Philosophy in 1644.

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VIII.C. Descartes, Meditations

• Assumptions and Terms
• Degrees of reality (Great Chain of Being)
• Formal reality a measure of the degree of
  reality something has (only substances have
  formal reality)
• Objective reality the degree of reality a
  concept has, corresponding to the formal reality
  of the substance that concept represents

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VIII.C. Descartes, Meditations

• Assumptions and Terms
• Causal theory of ideas A substance causes the
  idea that refers to it (cf. Platonic forms).
• Formal cause a cause whose formal reality is
  equal to the objective reality of the idea it
  causes.
• Eminent cause a cause whose formal reality is
  greater than the objective reality of the idea it
  causes.

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VIII.C. Descartes, Meditations

• Methodological Doubt
• The Principle I will withhold assent from all
  matters that are not entirely certain.
• What I now know comes from my senses.
• My senses sometimes deceive me.
• Therefore, I will not assent to knowledge gained
  by the senses.

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VIII.C. Descartes, Meditations

• The Indubitable Starting Point
• I assume that nothing I perceive exists.
• I assume that I have no senses.
• I assume that even God is deceiving me about my
  existence.
• But I cannot doubt that I exist for God to be
  able to deceive me.
• I cannot doubt that I am thinking/doubting, and
  so I must exist Cogito, ergo sum.

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VIII.C. Descartes, Meditations

• From the Starting Point to God
• I cannot doubt that I exist, think, and have an
  idea of God.
• Any idea must have either a formal cause or an
  eminent cause.
• The idea of God has more objective reality than I
  have formal reality, so I cannot be the cause of
  the idea.
• Therefore, another being God must exist as
  the cause of my idea of God.

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VIII.C. Descartes, Meditations

• Implications
• The human mind is the starting point for
  investigation.
• But since ideas move downward, the human mind is
  not the source of truth God is.
• So Descartes does not effect an intellectual
  revolution he opens the door to one.

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VIII.C. Descartes, Meditations

• The Cartesian Shift
• God I
• Humanity
• God Universe
• Physical Universe

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VIII.D. John Locke (1632-1704)

• He was from southwestern England and was educated
  at Oxford, where he studied Descartes.
• He spent time in France and the Netherlands, and
  then lived in London.
• He was the father of empiricism and a champion of
  tolerance.
• He wrote Essay Concerning Human Understanding in
  1689 and The Reasonableness of Christianity in
  1695.

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VIII.D. John Locke (1632-1704)

• The Plain Historical Method --
• Not a rejection of Descartes, but a realism
  (pessimism?) about certainty
• Ideas generally come from our sense experience.
• Sense experience yields probability, not
  certainty.
• Probability is sufficient for science and
  practical life.

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VIII.D. John Locke (1632-1704)

• The origin of ideas --
• Not the Platonic forms or originals
• Rather, sensation and reflection
• Experience writes these sensations on the tabula
  rasa of a childs mind.
• Our minds are primarily the passive receptors of
  ideas.

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VIII.D. John Locke (1632-1704)

• Implications --
• An easy departure from certainty
• An intense focus on the self
• Reason and experience as the twin sources of
  knowledge
• Relegation of faith and authority to less a
  significant sphere than reason/experience
• Deistic Christianity

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VIII.E. David Hume (1711-1776)

• He was born and educated in Edinburgh.
• He lived in France and studied from Descartes
  own library.
• He published the Treatise on Human Nature in
  1739-40.
• He published An Enquiry Concerning Human
  Understanding in 1748.
• He devoted himself to history (especially history
  of religion) and political thought in later life.

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VIII.E. David Hume (1711-1776)

• Critique of Rationalism and Empiricism
• Our minds make associations between events.
• We see b follow a often, so we expect that
  b will always follow a.
• There is not a necessary connection between a
  and b that is a product of our minds.
• Thus we cannot predict what will happen outside
  the realm of the way we normally experience the
  world.

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VIII.E. David Hume (1711-1776)

• Implications of this Critique
• We cannot gain either certainty (Descartes) or
  probability (Locke) about ideas outside our
  experience.
• Thus we can have no natural knowledge of God.
• Deism is thus seriously undercut.
• But what about revealed knowledge of God? What
  about genuine Christianity?

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VIII.E. David Hume (1711-1776)

• Hume on Historical Testimony
• The same principles apply If we cannot gain
  certainty from OUR experience, how can we gain it
  from the experience of the biblical writers?
• Criteria for the credibility of historical
  testimony
• Consistency of various accounts
• Dispassionate observers
• Confident, but not defensively confident,
  reporting
• Criterion of analogy

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VIII.E. David Hume (1711-1776)

• Hume on Miracles
• Miracles are violations of laws of nature.
• Those laws rest on repeated empirical
  observation.
• Experience then teaches us that those laws are
  extremely unlikely to be broken.
• Testimony about miracles is virtually always to
  be rejected.

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VIII.E. David Hume (1711-1776)

• Hume on Faith
• We cannot KNOW that miracles have happened, or
  even that God exists or what he is like.
• Christianity (and the Bible) cannot stand up to
  the rigors of a reasoned critique.
• But we can believe that Christianity is true,
  that this truth has been revealed to us.

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VIII.F. Thoughts on Enlightenment Christianity

• The optimism of Descartes, Newton, and Locke
  should be seen as a false optimism.
• The pessimism of Hume is often construed as an
  attack on Scripture and Christianity.
• But it is possible to see Humes work as an
  attack only on the ability of man to ground
  religion in unaided human reason.
• In this case, what we are seeing is that giving
  human reason an independent status leads to a
  dead end.

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VIII.F. Thoughts on Enlightenment Christianity

• The Response to Rationalism
• Staying out of the debate (Much of Pietism)
• Apologetics fighting fire with fire (Some of
  Pietism)
• Accommodation re-articulating the Christian
  faith in a scientific world
• (19th-Century Liberalism)

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VIII.F. Thoughts on Enlightenment Christianity

• Some Questions
• Is it really appropriate to use the tools of
  rationalism to fight rationalism?
• Is there any need to fight rationalism, when Hume
  has so devastatingly critiqued it?
• Have we been more deeply influenced by the
  rationalistic split between the spiritual and the
  material realms, and between the mind and faith,
  than we realize?

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IX. Philosophy

• after the
• Enlightenment

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IX.A. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• He spent his entire life in East Prussia.
• He studied physics and mathematics, as well as
  rationalistic philosophy, and he was professor of
  logic.
• He wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, the
  Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783,
  the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, and the
  Critique of Judgment in 1790.
• He came into conflict with Lutheran authorities
  in 1792, but still published Religion within the
  Limits of Reason Alone in 1793.

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IX.A. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Kants philosophical quest
• Continental Rationalism British
  Empiricism
• Assurance of certain Skepticism about the
  pos- knowledge sibility of knowledge
• Descartes Berkeley
• Leibniz Locke
• Spinoza Hume
• Wolff

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IX.A. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Kants Terminology
• Two kinds of knowledge
• A priori knowledge that is independent of
  experience, even if we begin to recognize it
  through experience
• A posteriori knowledge that is dependent on
  experience
• Two kinds of judgments (statements)
• Analytic a statement whose denial would involve
  a self-contradiction
• Synthetic a statement whose denial would not
  involve a self-contradiction

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IX.A. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Kant and Hume
• Hume claims that all knowledge about experience
  is based on experience.
• That is, all a posteriori knowledge is synthetic.
• Kant believes that at least in mathematics and
  physics, we can have synthetic knowledge that is
  a priori (universal and independent of
  experience).
• Thus Kant is trying to disprove Humes thesis.
• The question, then, is how synthetic a priori
  propositions are possible.

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IX.A. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?
• Our minds impose universality and necessity on
  the objects we perceive.
• Phenomena things as we experience them
• Noumena things as they are in themselves
• We can have universal (transcendental) knowledge
  only about phenomena, not noumena.

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IX.A. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• What does this have to do with Christianity?
• Christianity deals not just with physics, but
  with metaphysics.
• We are seeking not just an explanation of the way
  we experience things, but an explanation of the
  way they are.
• So Kants critique of our ability to have
  metaphysical knowledge is even more withering
  than Humes.

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IX.A. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Kant and the Existence of God
• He refutes the ontological argument by asserting
  that metaphysical judgments are always synthetic,
  and therefore, that they can be refuted without
  self-contradiction.
• He refutes the cosmological (causal) argument by
  asserting that causality is a function of our
  minds and thus necessarily applies only to
  phenomena.
• He refutes the teleological (design) argument by
  asserting that it applies only in the realm of
  phenomena.

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IX.A. Immanuel Kant

• Where do we go from here?
• Abandon reason as the basis for theology, and
  return to revelation/authority/faith.
• Struggle with Kants critique of pure reason in
  order to find holes in it.