A Dsicussion Of The Relative Merits Of

Locke And Leibniz Essay, Research Paper

Rene Descartes (1641) exerted a tremendous influence on developments in the fields of philosophy and science. The Frenchman was said to be an intellectual genius whose scholarly contributions extended from philosophical speculation and pure mathematics to the physiology of the animal body. Descartes is regarded by some historians as one of the founders of modern epistemology. Dissatisfied with the lack of agreement among philosophers, he saw the need for a new philosophical method – a method as rigorous as mathematics itself. He began by questioning everything which failed to pass the test of his criterion of truth – the clearness and distinctness of ideas. It was his intention to submit every thought to test, every thought to doubt. Reasoned by Descartes: though I might doubt everything, I cannot reasonably doubt that I, the thinking doubter, exist as a res cogitans (thinking substance). And thus evolved the famous Cartesian aphorism: Cogito, ergo sum (I think therefore I am). This Descartes offered as an immediate intuition of his own thinking mind. Descartes was a interactive dualist, as he argued that a body without a soul would be an automation, completely under the mechanistic control of external stimuli and its internal hydraulic or “emotional” condition – and completely without consciousness. On the other hand, a soul or mind without a body would have consciousness, but only of the innate ideas; it would lack the sensory impressions and ideas of material things that occupy normal human consciousness most of the time. Thus the body presumably adds richness to the contents of the soul’s consciousness, while the soul adds rationality and volition to the causes of behaviour. Therefore, Descartes believed that behaviour is not the result of mind or body acting alone, but the many different possible kinds of interactions between the two. Therefore, Descartes had confidence in his clear and distinct ideas concerning the material world. Other philosophers, however, came gradually to insist that man could experience physical substance and causal law indirectly and, on occasion, by inference only. They believed that what was needed was critical self-inspection and analysis of the content of experience, with particular stress on the origin and development of ideas. This psycho-philosophical analysis was attempted by three philosophers. The German philosophers, Leibniz and Kant developed a modified form of rationalism which consisted of a logical disquisition on the modes of activity by which the mind functions. In England, Locke attempted to trace the origin of ideas to actual experience and to disclose the laws which underlie the organization of these elements of the mind.` `John Locke (1690) is considered to be the first great British empiricist who declared that there were no innate ideas and that all man’s knowledge of the world comes from the senses. For Locke the mind at birth is a tabula rasa (blank slate), except for the few impressions formed during prenatal existence. Thus, even the most abstract ideas, such as power, infinity, identity, and substance, arise from experience. Evidence for this assumption, Locke maintained, is based upon the facts that children are totally unaware of the most universally accepted beliefs. In addition, he supported the remarkably prophetic idea that the investigation of rare cases of adult recovery of sight following congenital blindness would shed light on the development of human perception. Locke considered two elemental kinds of experience: ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, either of which may be simple or complex. The former arise in the separate senses and indicate the existence of an external physical world, while ideas of reflection arise from the “perception of the operations of our own minds within us.” Furthermore, the occurrence of reflective thought implies the presence of a spiritual soul, presumably the essence of life with which man is born. Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities was given further consideration by Locke. Primary qualities – or extension, figure, motion, rest, solidity, and number – produce in man ideas resembling the physical world which excites them; whereas the secondary qualities are “nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities” (e.g., taste, colour, sound, smell). Locke’s thinking led him to the notion of associationism, conceiving of complex ideas as the combination of simple ones. While the association of ideas (a phrase coined by Locke) or, rather, combination of simple ideas was discussed to some extent in terms of “pleasure,” “natural correspondence,” “chance,” and “custom, ” definite establishment of the doctrine is credited to later writers. In early 1697, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with Locke (1632-1704). Liebniz had read and been impressed by Locke’s recent book, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which discussed the nature of human knowledge from an empiricist’s point of view, mentioned above. But Leibniz had also felt that Locke’s empiricism had gone too far, and overlooked the role of several important properties innate to the mind. Despite their theoretical differences, Leibniz and Locke had much in common. Both had extremely wide interests, ranging from history and economics to science