Overview
Academic Requirements
This course requires active engagement in a variety of ways, including dialoguing with your peers, reading, watching documentaries, writing essays and completing the final assessment.
Module Reflections
• Please include at least ten bullet point notes on "takeaways," from different sections of my essay and any videos you are required to watch. These are quotes and thoughts that intrigue you. Place these notes at the top of your assignment along with a header (see example).
• Then pick two of the most interesting to you and write a reflection no less than a good paragraph (200 words) on each of the two takeaways you found most meaningful (400 total words).
Think for Yourself
Please avoid summarizing in your reflection because that is not the point of this philosophical invitation to think deeply about things for your self. This is a philosophical exercise or practice. I will be looking for your thoughts about the module rather than reiterating what the module already presented.
Your reflections need to demonstrate that you studied the whole module, both my essays and the videos. The easiest way to do this is to take some bullet point notes as you go through the module. As you do so, you will find some general themes you can think about and include in your reflection.
You are not required to use the following prompts, but they may help you think about what you are studying:
• What did you learn that was significant for you?
• Can you explain its significance?
• Can you explore any revelations or insights that your studies opened for you?
• What happened because of these insights to your thinking and learning?
• Did you have an emotional response, negative or positive? Do you know why?
• Have you had any experiences you are willing to share with our class that help you relate to and understand any of the material in this module?
• Did this assignment contain any “awakening” ideas, those that inspire you rather than depress you?
• Did you find any of the ideas surprising? Why?
• Can you give an example or two in your reflection that demonstrates you were engaging with, and thinking about, our curriculum in a serious way?
• Did you find yourself thinking about class content when you did not have to, such as finding yourself discussing ideas with friends or family?
• Have your studies contributed to any increase in self-knowledge (how you understand the world and your place in it) or a deeper understanding of one’s current world view?
Two Peer Exchanges
This is also the practice of philosophy, which requires dialogue with others. Philosophy is really just a long conversation through the past 3000 years or so. This assignment helps you enter this conversation. Hopefully, such dialogue, brings new perspectives. The ability to be able to see different views on a subject is one sign of a growing philosophical consciousness.
• You respond to a peer’s reflection and 2) you reply to a peer who responded to your reflection.
• Both peer exchanges must be more than 100 words each to be eligible to receive credit.
• From the due date of your reflection, you have two days (sometimes more — see schedule) to complete your peer exchanges.
• If your reflection does not receive a response that you can reply to within 36 hours, you no longer need to wait. Instead, you write a second response to a different classmate.
• If there are reflections that have not yet been commented on, please prioritize those.
Minimum Guidelines
• Please make ten bullet point notes on "takeaways," from different sections of my essay and any videos you are required to watch. These are quotes and thoughts that intrigue you.
• Each reflection must be at least 200 words (400 words total).
• Summaries do not receive credit because they do not require serious thought — simply the ability to record information.
• Your assignments are not eligible for A’s if they require proofreading.
• Peer exchanges must be at least 100 words to receive credit (200 words total).
• Assignments that are partial (not meeting minimum requirements) do not receive partial credit.
Descartes (1596—1650) was a philosopher, mathematician, and a man of science. In many ways he can be considered the founder of modern philosophy. This is an astounding tribute, because not since Aristotle, “The Philosopher,” had someone restructured the very foundations of philosophy.
Descartes was born in France and eventually settled in Holland. Why Holland? Because Holland was one of the few places where people were allowed to speculate freely. Hobbes had to have his books printed there and Spinoza would hardly have been allowed to work anywhere else.
Descartes seemed sincerely interested in getting the Church to change its negative attitude toward the new rationalism and science emerging during this period of time. He had a meditative bent and, like Socrates, could spend long hours in solitary contemplation.
Descartes, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, announced a massive intellectual project. He related his intention to tear down the edifice of knowledge and rebuild it from the foundations up” (Palmer, p. 133). He did this, rather successfully in his Meditations (1642) and in his Discourse on Method (1637).
While Descartes did not publish as much as you might expect of someone of his caliber to do, his works did create a revolution in Western philosophy.
What Can We Know For Sure? The Philosophical Problem of Modernity
When medieval certainties in God and the Bible were shaken, it was necessary to find out how we could know anything at all. Without God as an Absolute (according to Medieval thinkers) then nothing was certain.
Descartes set out to discover an irrefutable basis for certainty. To begin by doubting everything was the necessary first step, for he wished to sweep away all the past presumptions now confusing human knowledge, and isolate only those truths he himself could clearly and directly experience as undeniable.
It was the rigorous methodology characteristic of geometry and arithmetic that alone seemed to promise him the certainty he so fervently sought in philosophical matters. Disciplined, critical rationality would overcome the untrustworthy information about the world given by the senses, culture and the imagination.
Skepticism and mathematics thus combined to produce the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. It was both the impulse behind and the outcome of systematic doubt and self-evident reasoning. Descartes wrote that this was to be the bedrock of all human knowledge; the certainty of individual self-awareness. Descartes concluded that there was one datum that could not be doubted — the fact of his own doubting. “It was, in fact, necessarily true. It could not be denied or even doubted without self-contradiction. (Try it! if you say ‘I doubt that I exist’ haven’t you in fact proved that you exist?)” (Palmer 2006, 140). Cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am. All else can be questioned, but not the irreducible fact of the thinker’s self-awareness.
In recognizing this one certain truth, the mind can perceive that which characterizes certainty itself: Certain knowledge is that which can be clearly and distinctly conceived. “Having discovered certainty in selfhood and having established this his self was his consciousness (for it is possible to doubt that you have a body, but it is impossible to doubt that you have a mind; therefore, yourself and your mind must be identical), Descartes must now find a way of escaping the confines of his own subjectivity and establishing the existence of an external world. To do so, he analyzed the content of his mind and discovered it contained certain innate ideas (shades of Plato), including these: “self” “identity” “substance” “God” (Palmer 2006, 141).
Descartes was able to prove to his satisfaction that God existed. He thought that God himself was of such magnitude and perfection that God was self-evident. God must be a reality beyond the finite and contingent thinker. In other words, there has to be something outside of my mind that created consciousness in the first place.
This gave Descartes the certainty of an objective, omnipotent God. This then proved to him that something existed outside of his own mind and thus he was able to validate the world of math (which can not be seen — like God). Therefore, man’s most powerful tool for understanding the universe was mathematics, available to the natural light of human reason.
"Descartes enthroned human reason as the supreme authority in matters of knowledge, capable of distinguishing certain metaphysical truth and of achieving certain scientific understanding of the material world. …In the ultimate religious questions, not divine revelation, but the natural light of human reason had the final say” (Tarnas 1991, 279). It is difficult to stress how radical this was, especially during these tumultuous times. In fact, it was dangerous.
Why? Because Descartes looked to his own mind and ability to reason for the truth. This should remind you of Plato. He too thought the world of reason, the world of the Ideas, was the real world of true knowledge.
When Descartes put the stress on the thinker and the intellect rather than the body and the senses, it quickly became evident that he was talking about a sort of dualism where the thinker was inside a head looking out at everything else. Consciousness was not the same as the things that existed “out there” without consciousness.
Rather, as purely material objects, all physical phenomena could, in essence, be comprehended as machines — much like the clever machines such as clocks and windmills being constructed and enjoyed by seventeenth century Europeans. God created the universe and defined its mechanical laws, but after that the system moved on its own, the supreme machine constructed by the supreme intelligence.
The ideas supporting Deism were given a strong coherency by the philosophy of Descartes. Deism is the idea of God as a “clockmaker” God who creates a clock and winds it up and then goes away. This allows people to posit a creator and then explain why this creator does not seem to interfere with the world by doing things like answering prayer and eliminating evil.
Plato had said that the Nous (the active human intelligence experienced within) was related to the Logos (the rational and creative intelligence of the cosmos). It seems to me we are seeing here a similar insight with a more modern twist.
Seven Philosophical Consequences of Cartesian Thought
The philosophical world would never be the same again after Descartes wrote his books. He is one of those thinkers you must understand if you want to understand the modern Western culture, even if in the end you disagree with him. To give you an idea of his importance I will present the seven consequences of his “philosophical revolution,” from Tarnas' The Passion of the Western Mind.
(One) Education would take on new meaning. “Proper education of the human mind in a well-designed environment would bring forth rational individuals, capable of understanding the world and themselves, able to act in the most intelligent fashion for the good of the whole” (Tarnas 1991, 281). The goal was no longer simply people who would believe what they were told and obey the authorities of the day. The goal was now to have people who could think for themselves.
(Two) “Out of that profound cultural transformation in the way philosophy would now understand humanity, science emerged as the West’s new faith… Verifiable facts and theories tested and discussed among equals replaced dogmatic revelation hierarchically imposed by an institutional Church” (Tarnas 1991, 282). The scientific revolution would forever change the way we think about the world.
(Three) “The straightforward evidence of the naive senses, the theological and scientific certitude of the naive centuries, that the Sun rises and sets and that the Earth beneath one’s feet is utterly stationary at the center of the universe, was now overcome through critical reasoning, mathematical calculation, and technologically enhanced observation. The nature of reality had fundamentally shifted for Western man, who now perceived and inhabited a cosmos of entirely new proportions, structure, and existential meaning” (Tarnas 1991, 283). Just as Europeans were discovering the “new world” of the Americas, so they were discovering a whole new way of envisioning the intellectual world.
(Four) It would not take people long to discover that what worked with science and technology might also work with society and politics. “The strategies and principles that science had shown to be so useful for discovering truth in nature were clearly relevant to the social realm as well. The application of systematic critical thought to society could not but suggest the need for reform of that society, and as modern reason brought to nature a scientific revolution, so would it bring to society a political revolution. Thus did John Locke, and the French philosophers of the Enlightenment after him, take the lessons of Newton in science and Descartes in philosophy, and extend them to the human realm” (Tarnas 1991, 283-284). We will see below how Thomas Hobbes, in England, begins to think about politics in a scientific way.
(Five) I hope you can see how we have moved out of the medieval worldview where faith, rather than reason, dominated the way people saw things. This is the modern world we are entering, for better or worse, depending on your point of view. “Human reason had fully displaced religious sources of knowledge about the universe, and in turn had defined its own limits as those constituted by the boundaries and methods of empirical science. In contrast to the medieval Christian cosmos, which was not only created but continuously and directly governed by a personal and actively omnipotent God, the modern universe was an impersonal phenomenon, governed by regular natural laws, and understandable in exclusively physical and mathematical terms” (Tarnas 1991, 284-285).
(Six) Faith and reason were now definitively severed. “While in the medieval Christian view, the human mind could not comprehend the universe’s order, which was ultimately supernatural, without the aid of divine revelation, in the modern view, the human mind was capable by its own rational faculties of comprehending the order of the universe, and that order was entirely natural” (Tarnas, p. 285).
This didn’t happen all at once, of course. In fact, this is a worldview that is still unfolding in our own culture, where many people still feel the divine is at the center of everything, while others have decided that we do not need a supernatural being to explain the natural world.
(Seven) It was in my first essay that I wrote about a dualism that seems to be at the heart of the way we perceive ourselves in the Western world. It seems to be an inherent capacity of the mind to see things this way because it shows up in both religious and secular disguises. “The Christian dualism between spirit and matter, God and world, had gradually transformed into the modern dualism of mind and matter, man and cosmos: a subjective and personal human consciousness versus an objective and impersonal material world" (Tarnas 1991, 286).
"Science replaced religion as preeminent intellectual authority, as definer, judge, and guardian of the cultural worldview. Human reason and empirical observation replaced theological doctrine and scriptural revelation as the principal means for comprehending the universe” (Tarnas 1991, 286). Because of this, philosophy would no longer simply be a tool of theology; it would now become its own field of knowledge, no longer tied to the Church.
"For 1500 years, people had looked to a Second Coming of Christ to bring about the redemption of the world and the end of evil as we know it. But during the beginning of the modern era we see a new optimism arise that people could bring about a secular paradise through the progress of knowledge, especially in the fields of technology and medicine. So many of the things that limited us could be overcome (Tarnas 1991, 290).
The Modern Goal
The modern goal was to create the greatest possible freedom for man… Leaving behind [religious] tradition generally for the power of the autonomous human intellect, modern man set out on his own, determined to discover the working principles of his new universe, to explore and further expand its new dimensions, and to realize his secular fulfillment” (Tarnas 1991, 290).
This must have been a very exciting time to be an intellectual. But change took a while and so it was also a dangerous time to be alive. Thinkers had to be careful about how they challenged religious authorities if they wanted to be free of persecution.
While Descartes is not personally responsible for all of these changes, he did set in motion a whole new force in the Western world, and it would never be the same again.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) saw society and human nature in dark terms, but he also tried to fix it.
Hobbes was born in England and was educated at Oxford. He led a long and interesting life, dying at the age of 91. His entrance into philosophy in middle age was not through speculative or metaphysical curiosity, but through his interests in social and political problems. As a result, he is often thought of a the founder of modern political science.
Natural philosophy, which today we call science, “confers obvious benefits on [humans]. But moral and political philosophy also possesses great utility. For human life is afflicted by calamities, of which civil war is the chief, which arise because men do not understand sufficiently the rules of conduct and of political life. ‘Now, the knowledge of these rules is moral philosophy.’ Both in the sciences and in politics, knowledge is power” (Copleston 1962, 13).
In medicine we can learn to heal suffering by discovering what is causing an illness and either curing it or, even better, preventing it from occurring in the first place. So Hobbes hoped that by understanding the causes of societal ills we could learn to find a better way to get along and work with one another.
Philosophy and the Problem of Knowledge
Hobbes demonstrates that there are levels of knowledge. As an empiricist, Hobbes believes that knowledge starts with sense impressions. We gather data. But this is not philosophy. Philosophy begins when one applies reasoning to this sense data.
For example, anyone can know the sun in terms of having the impression of light and heat. But we do not accept this sense knowledge of the sun as being scientific astronomical knowledge. Hobbes wants to understand why humans act the way they do. In many ways he is interested in human psychology and in learning about the motivations that influence human behavior. From our observations we can start to reason and draw links between what we observe. This is the beginning of the scientific method.
Hobbes' philosophy is thoroughly materialistic. He deals with the real world of hard facts. But notice that he does not take the next step and declare that there is no God. He simply states that God cannot be studied philosophically or scientifically.
Hobbes thinks theology and metaphysics are irrational. Whatever we can imagine is finite. How can we talk about the infinite? We can use certain words, such as “incorporeal substance,” but it is just as unreal as talking about a round square. We can say the word, but that does not mean we understand, because the words do not signify anything, so they are meaningless. Hobbes actually has quite a bit to say about God and religion, and he ends up agreeing with medieval philosophers who said that we could know that God is but not what God is.
What we want to study now is the world of political philosophy that Hobbes opened up. For that it was only necessary to see that in tackling the problem of knowledge, Hobbes comes down heavily in favor of common sense and an empirical method that tends to avoid the metaphysical problems and instead focus on practical problems. This tendency to avoid speculation and instead focus on pragmatic issues is one of the marks of modern philosophy.
Political Philosophy
Hobbes wrote Leviathan at the height of the English Civil War when he was living in France, and published it in 1651. In this book he rejects Aristotle’s teaching that humans are basically social animals, and insists that humans are basically competitive and selfish and that only a strong central authority can keep the peace. Because of this, he comes down in favor of security over freedom, and for this he was not loved.
Whether we agree or disagree with Hobbes' basic worldview, we can appreciate that in “his painstaking analysis of the ways in which society can and should function, Hobbes opened up a whole new world of political science” (back cover, Penguin, Leviathan). Some philosophers saw humans as basically good, even if they were ignorant and thus confused. Socrates was like this. Hobbes, however, thought humans were basically bad.
“Our world is obsessed with problems of power, and Hobbes was an analyst of power. We want not only to understand and so control power, but also to harness it to right. So did Hobbes. He exposed the lineaments of power more clearly than anyone had done since Machiavelli, more systematically than anyone had ever done, and than most have done since. But he also asserted the equal natural rights of [humans], and tried to put the two things together to get a theory of right, and obligation, as well as a theory of power” (Crawford Macpherson in Hobbes 1968, 9).
To understand the philosophers we study in this class, it is always a good idea to see what they were concerned with and what their struggles were. This is an example of the importance of understanding the historical context of certain works. Hobbes watched the country he loved fight a civil war, and this was for him a great evil that needed to be understood to prevent another war from ever happening again.
Another source of modern interest is that Hobbes wrote at a time when a capitalist society was just beginning. We live in a market society, and much of our worldview and our values are based, consciously or unconsciously, on market values. This makes his analysis all the more intriguing.
Hobbes’s Method
Hobbes hoped to understand society the same way science hopes to understand any phenomena. If you want to understand how a car works, you have to take it apart and look at all the pieces and see how they work with each other. Hobbes started by asking himself how far he could break society down, and when he did that, he saw that the smallest common denominator is the individual person. It is people who make up society, and so if we want to understand that society, then we need to understand the people who make it up. Many of us will be uncomfortable with his analysis, but that does not mean we should ignore it.
Hobbes explained that the fundamental motivating force in humans is to survive and avoid death. This movement is hidden beneath a layer of appetites and aversions, but a closer look will reveal that each of these appetites and aversions serve the interest of promoting survival. He was also a behaviorist long before there was such a thing. In the ongoing philosophical argument regarding whether humans have free will or whether they are determined (nature versus nurture, in psychological terms), Hobbes would come down on the side of determination.
Our lack of freedom may not be readily apparent, but Hobbes believed he could demonstrate that we are the victims of our thoughts, emotions, and sensations. As a result, we need to understand how we are moved to do the things we do if we are going to experience any degree of security.
As long as we are alive, we are going to have things we desire and things we fear. In order to get what we want and avoid what we do not want, we need power. Hobbes writes that we all seek power, but because we are different we are satisfied with different levels of power. There are two kinds of power: natural power and instrumental power.
Natural power is the original assets we have such as strength, prudence, intelligence and personality. It is natural because we come with it, so to speak, but notice that it is not equal. Some people are stronger and smarter than other people. Instrumental powers are those powers we can acquire on the basis of our assets, such as reputation, riches, and friends. Our power is our ability to get what we want.
Hobbes goes further in defining power to say: “And because the power of one [person] resists and hinders the effects of the power of another: power simply is no more, but the excess of the power of one above that of another” (Hobbes 1968, 35). Notice that at first power is simply a description of our ability to get what we want and avoid what we do not want. But then the nature of power shifts and Hobbes stated that the only real power is the power we have that is greater than another’s power to deny us what we want or to give us what we do not want. Now we get into politics, because power is competitive.
Power is competitive because, as Hobbes points out, some people have unlimited desires. Since some people can never have enough, the only way they can get more and more is to take what is yours. To avoid that, you must resist them, and thus you have the competition. Hobbes’s conclusion is that our need for power becomes a harmful thing.
Hobbes adds to this the notion that a person’s value is the price of his or her power. In other words, what will it cost someone to have us give him or her some of our power? Here we see the market values come into play. Hobbes points out that if the competition for power is violent, then there is continual warfare. Since this does not benefit society, we must have another way of gaining power; so we trade and/or buy it. This is the world of politics. In a simple way, how do people get our vote? They buy it; if not with money, then with promises to do such things as we want and not to do the things we do not want.
Hobbes’s Solution
From this analysis, Hobbes leads us to his understanding, “that the only way to avoid death and provide for themselves the possibility of commodious living was for them to acknowledge a perpetual sovereign power, against which each of them would be powerless” (Hobbes 1968, 39-40).
People would have to grant each other certain rights, recognize a certain law and make an agreement with each other. In telling us about this, Hobbes introduced us to “the famous concepts State of Nature, Natural law , and the Social Contract” (Hobbes 1968, 40). We will look at each of these in turn.
In the state of nature, with no controlling authority and no law enforcement, Hobbes saw nothing but disaster. It is a state of life lived in fear and which is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes stated the right of nature is to do whatever is necessary to preserve one’s life. Avoiding death is the highest good. It is the right of nature to do so because we are naturally impelled within to do so.
Natural Law, on the other hand, is that which preserves life and avoids death in a way that is reasoned out. Natural law is the law of Reason.
What we are able to think about and convince others of is considered natural because it is self-evident. The social contract has to do with the fact that it seems reasonable to people that they are more likely to get what they want and avoid what they do not want if they all agree together to give up the state of nature and the rights to do anything to secure oneself.
The problem is we cannot trust others to keep their word. Therefore the social contract has to be enforced by a state that has the power to enforce this contract. The state receives its power from people agreeing to transfer their power over to the state.
We can see what Hobbes means in a concrete way when we think of the role of police in our society. We all know we should not speed, run red lights, etc., because it is not safe to do so. We hire police to make sure we all obey the rules. If we would all just “do the right things” there would be no need for police. But unfortunately that does not seem to be the case.
There is a certain logical coherence in why we need a sovereign government of some kind, but one immediately wants to ask, "What will prevent the state from abusing its own power?
Just think of the police we hire and how we have learned that they sometimes abuse their power. Hobbes gives a number of answers to supposed objections that can all be summed up by the fact that it is not in the state’s interest to abuse its power too much. For example, if the people are not prosperous, the state will not be either. In other words, it is in the state’s interest to govern as well as it can. How you feel about this would be a good reflection question.
Reflections on Hobbes
Hobbes does not give us the benefit of the doubt! He believed that he had done his homework (and watched the English slaughter one another) and these were his results. Without a binding social contract, people will act only in their own self-interest. In other words, people are basically bad.
It would be interesting to know what Hobbes thought of people who seem to genuinely care about others, such as those who rescue people while endangering their own life. Perhaps he would say even they are doing it for their own salvation or for praise or for a reward of some kind.
If two people are on a desert island and there isn’t an abundance of coconuts to eat, then neither dares turn his back nor sleep, lest the other bash him with a rock in order to get all the coconuts for himself. However, if both are rational, they will realize that the most likely way of surviving is to agree with each other to forswear violence and share the coconuts.
The trouble is, given the selfish nature that Hobbes attributes to all of us, there is no reason at all for either party to keep the agreement if they can figure a way to break it with impunity.
There is every reason for them to distrust each other. Despite their “agreement,” neither dares yet to sleep a wink. The solution requires that a third party be found. The first two parties give to the third party all the rocks (and perhaps an army), and they give up their right to violence. In exchange, the state promises to use her absolute power to guarantee that the first two parties honor their agreement with each other. “She may be either a monarch or a parliament — in either case she is the source of all authority” (Palmer 206, 150-151).
Hobbes favored monarchy as a form of government, because he thought democracies were too fickle, but he conceded that his insights would work with any form of government. In other words, people need a government, and which kind of government is secondary to the need for some authority above the individual. Individuals would always try to take advantage of one another if they did not make an enforceable contract to prevent this.
Hobbes did not flatter the human ego, so you can imagine he was not received with a great deal of favor. By saying kings could rule only because society contracted with them to do so went against long standing tradition that kings ruled as a matter of divine decree. This is yet another sign that we have moved out of the medieval world and into the modern world.
It is all too easy to see Hobbes as too negative, but his ideas actually influenced the founders of our country. They too recognized the need for, and the dangers of, a powerful state. Their amazing solution was to divide the sovereign up into three branches to create a balance of power, and to have this power guarantee basic rights including a free press that would then be able to keep its eye on the “sovereign.” Our founders went further than suggested by Hobbes because they were more optimistic about human nature, but they did not ignore him either.