Posted on 11/04/2002 7:52:21 AM PST by thinktwice
Descartes was a geometrician. He found only in mathematics and geometry the certainty that he required. Therefore, he used the methods of geometry to think about the world. Now, in geometry, one begins with a search for axioms, simple undeniable truths – for example, the axiom that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. On the foundations of such “self-evident” propositions, whole geometrical systems can be built.
Following his geometrical model, Descartes proceeds to doubt everything – de onmibus dubitandum. He will suspend belief in the knowledge he learned from childhood, all those things “which I allowed myself in youth to be persuaded without having inquired into their truth.” Doubt will be his method, a deliberate strategy for proceeding toward certainty. (Descartes is a doubter not by nature, but by necessity. What he really wants is secure understanding so he can stop doubting.)
Descartes finds that he has no trouble doubting the existence of real objects/events – our senses too easily deceive us. And we can doubt the existence of a supernatural realm of reality – figments and fantasies are too often conjured by our native imaginations. But now his geometrical model pays off: in trying to doubt everything, he discovers something that he can’t doubt. What he can’t doubt is that he is doubting. Obviously, I exist if I doubt that I exist. My doubt that I exist proves that I exist, for I have to exist to be able to doubt. Therefore I can’t doubt that I exist. Hence, there is at least one fact in the universe that is beyond doubt. “I am, I exist is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.
Descartes thus becomes the author of the most famous phrase in Western philosophy: Cognito ergo sum, or, in his original French, Je pense, donc je suis. – I think, therefore I exist. With roots in St. Augustine, this is certainly one of the catchiest ideas yet created by the human mind.
I don't understand your question.
My question asks a further explanation of how you come to say such a statement is incoherrent, contradictory and absurd.
If it is, the whole method is wrong from the get go, no?
It's Cogito ergo sum.
He could've gone that way. On second thought, probably not. He had a high opinion of his cogito. And that's where the split is, I reckon.
p.s. eastsider, since Aquinas, they argue that the body is restored to the soul.
p.s. eastsider, since Aquinas, they argue that the body is restored to the soul.At death!!!???
Back to Aquinas now, everyone.
Well what was she?
Ayn Rand's philosophy is known as Objectivism; she called herself an Objectivist, about which she wrote: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
Would you please address the "Knower/thing known" problem? It is critical to her (Ayn Rand's) entire endeavor.
Would you please identify the "Knower/thing known problem" a little better?
True. The unity of body and soul is ultimately mysterious and very difficult to explain positively. I prefer a negative proof. That is: all other categorizations of the human person end in contradiction and incoherence.
The Catholic position is that the human person is body/soul. Each have different powers yet are fully united.
The following explains the tension:
The summary so far given merely says what the Aristotelian-Thomistic theory is not. It is harder to explain what this (non-Lockean) identity really amounts to and why one ought to believe that Aquinas and Aristotle are right in their theory. The main point in favor of this theory of knowledge is the recognition that both sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge are activities that we engage in. In opposition to the Lockean view, where sense impressions are things that we suffer and undergo, Thomas and Aristotle claim that this is not the essence of sensation, although both admit that there is a passive element in the organs when they are passively affected by the sense object. Thomas and Aristotle believe that sensation is an activity that remains in the one who senses, and is not an activity that passes from an object to the organ. Thus, Aquinas calls it an immanent activity (as opposed to a transitive activity- like the heating of water). Aristotle says that it is a kind of being acted upon or motion, but one that should receive its own name. Like transitive actions, e.g. the heating of water, something receives a new form as the water receives the form heat from the fire. However, in such cases, the form of heat in the water is not the same as the form of heat in the fire, but only the same in kind, being in different parts of matter. Moreover, in the case of the heating of water, the water loses the form that it had before, namely the form of coolness. In the case of sensation, these features do not obtain: the reception is not of a similar form, but of the SAME form; and the reception does not involve the destruction of the pre-existing form, but does involve the fulfillment and completion of the knowing power; and thus, the reception is not into matter, but a kind of immaterial reception. Thus, the knower becomes one with the known, because it IS in a new way, i.e. with the very same form of the thing known, and this happens in an immaterial way that fulfills the knower. What I've said about sensation works the same with the intellect, but the identity is such that it occurs even without an organ, and thus the intellect is immaterial in an even stronger sense than the sense powers.The Aristotelian-Thomistic account, then, neatly sidesteps indirect realism/phenomenalism that has plagued philosophy since Descartes. It claims that we directly know reality because we are formally one with it. Our cognitive powers are enformed by the very same forms as their objects, yet these forms are not what we know, but the means by which we know extramental objects. We know things by receiving the forms of them in an immaterial way, and this reception is the fulfillment, not the destruction, of the knowing powers.
The theory is not without its problems and it is not entirely clear that it accords with other things we know about the world, because as a corollary to the theory, Aristotle and Thomas seems to be making the claim that what really happens in perception is nothing that can be empirically verified in the way other material interactions can be verified. Precisely because perception is an immaterial, immanent action, it is of a different kind than transitive actions, which is what their theory would claim scientific observation can detect. Thomists tend to believe that such a consequence is not fatal to the viability of this identity theory since they would also claim that the very life of living things cannot be totally explained, as modern science tries to do, by appealing only to microscopic parts in interaction (bio-chemistry). And yet it seems a matter of intuitive experience that an organism is more than the parts working together (for an organism that has just died has all the same parts). Thus, although modern chemistry and biology no doubt make true and illuminating observations about some of the mechanisms by which living things live and have perception, that sort of explanation does not totally capture the whole of what it means to live and perceive. Thus, the appeal to souls and immaterial reception of form is an irreducible and ineliminable source of explanation.
Things such as ...?
Oh? Are we equipped to do something? If so, what might that something be?
Not disagreeing...just looking for the perspective.
Yes. This split of Descartes is worthwhile recognizing. If you follow through it goes something like this: If thought is admitted to lead to a conclusion of existence, existence will at least be thought. And that's what you have in Descartes. In fact, the existence of God is no more than a logical conclusion. It never has flesh and blood. Only thinking is real. The rest, whatever the rest is, becomes a function of his thinking, is deduced from thinking. Kant tried to fix this dead-end alley a little. But his successors ended up in that inevitable hyper-egoism as the only candidate for real existence. Think of Rand: the human ego reigns as an absolute. There's that split.
Yes.
Doesn't he cite a "bent stick in water" as an example of our senses "fooling us"? If so, then this is obviously an error since we use the totality of our sense input, mediated through the central sense, to determine that a stick in water is not always where it appears to be to our eyes alone. This is not an error of our senses but rather an example of our senses and central sense working properly with regard to their proper objects.
That is, it is proper for the eye alone to sense light and color but not proper for the eye operating alone to determine the position of objects. It is the role of the central sense to use all sense data to determine whether a stick in water is truly bent.
OK. I look at a tree. I apprehend a tree. How do I know that I really apprehend that tree as it really is? Locke supposed that the knower creates a "little picture" in his mind of the thing known, in this case the tree. But there is a gap between the tree "out there" and the image of the tree in my mind, and there exists no objective ground from which to determine whether the image in my mind corresponds to the tree outside of my mind. This epistemological problem is insurmountable for materialist philosophy.
Aristotle and Aquinas' view was much different. They believed that a tree was a compound substance, that is that it was a thing composed of form and matter. The form can be considered as the non-physical organizing principle of the tree while the matter can be conceived of that which makes a tree this tree.
In the act of knowing, Aristotle and Aquinas would say that the form of the tree becomes one with the mind of the knower (without diminishing or destroying either), thus eliminating the gap between the knower and thing known. Thus we can know with certainty that "we know that tree."
To understand this fully you need to know a lot of Aristotelian terminology like act and passive, the four causes, and accident and substance. You can get a good background briefly at www.aquinasonline.org.
According to LLAN-DDEUSANT, they didn't smack him enough!
The fact that everything is given me in thought in no way permits me to assert that everything is reducible to thought. . .A symptom of a lack of corporal punishment. A good smack can depart infinite amounts of wisdom wordlessly.
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