Molyneux's Question

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Other ◽  
Molyneux's Question ◽  
Molyneux’S Question

In 1693 William Molyneux put a question to John Locke:Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to teil, when he feit one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table, and the blind man to be made to see;quare,Whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and teil which is the globe, and which the cube? (Locke,EssayII, ix, 8)The question became celebrated, attracting some of the foremost minds of the eighteenth Century and beyond. However, it is far from obvious what Molyneux's question is really about. What issue, or issues, of a more general and theoretical nature, does it raise? Since this is unclear, it is also unclear whether Molyneux's question still matters today. I defend a particular conception of what the question is about. If I am right, the question does indeed still matter.

The Empiricism of Locke and Newton

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
G. A. J. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between John Locke and Isaac Newton, his co-founder of, in the apt phrase of one recent writer, ‘the Moderate Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, has many dimensions. There is their friendship, which began only after each had written his major work, and which had its stormy interlude. There is the difficult question of their mutual impact. In what ways did each draw intellectually on the other? That there was some debt of each to the other is almost certain, but its exact extent is problematic. Questions may be asked over a whole range of intellectual issues, but not always answered. Thus their theology, which was in many respects close, and which forms the bulk of their surviving correspondence, may yet reveal mutual influence. There is the question of their political views, where both were firmly Whig. But it is upon their philosophy, and certain aspects of their philosophy in particular, that this paper will concentrate. My main theme is the nature of their empiricism, and my main contention is that between them they produced a powerful and comprehensive philosophy.

Hume and the Molyneux Problem

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry E. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Relational Theory ◽  
Positive Answer ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Molyneux's Question ◽  
Molyneux’S Question

How would Hume have addressed William Molyneux’s question to Locke: would a man born blind but able to distinguish between a sphere and cube by touch, immediately on acquiring sight, distinguish these figures visually? As a central issue in eighteenth-century epistemology and psychology, one would expect Hume to have dealt with it in his Treatise and, like Locke and Berkeley, answered in the negative. After offering a possible reason for Hume’s neglect of this problem, the paper argues that Hume’s focus on the problem of a vacuum and a relational theory of space would have prompted a response more akin to Leibniz than Molyneux. The paper first analyzes Hume’s position, then discusses the central features of Hume’s account of extension. It argues that this account commits Hume to the thesis that both visual and tangible ideas of space are three-dimensional and, if developed, would lead to a positive answer to Molyneux’s question.

scholarly journals Accessibility and Phenomenality: Remarks on Solving Molyneux’s Question Empirically

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. h223
Author(s):  
Juan R Loaiza
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Question Answering ◽  
Xvii Century ◽  
Molyneux's Question ◽  
Molyneux’S Question

In the xvii century, William Molyneux asked John Locke whether a newly-sighted person could reliably identify a cube from a sphere without aid from their touch. While this might seem an easily testable question, answering it is not so straightforward. In this paper, I illustrate this question and claim that some distinctions regarding the concept of consciousness are important for an empirical solution. First, I will describe Molyneux’s question as it was proposed by Molyneux himself, and I’ll briefly say something about its early debates. Second, I will go over some empirical attempts to solve this question, including recent experiments coming from neuroscience. Third, I will introduce some distinctions with regards to consciousness, and in the following section I will apply them to the Molyneux case. Finally, I will shortly consider some consequences of this approach. I conclude by suggesting researchers pay attention to different senses in which Molyneux’s question might be posed for empirical purposes.

scholarly journals Looking Beyond the Enlightenment Mother-Teacher: Anna Letitia Barbauld and the Eighteenth-Century Maternal Ideal

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Ready
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
The One ◽  
Republican Motherhood

Based on her popular prose writing for children, liberal Dissenter Anna Letitia Barbauld has been cited as a prominent example of the Enlightenment mother-teacher associated with the influence of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, close reading of her poetry reveals a complex maternal ideal in operation that was in part that of the Enlightenment mother-teacher, in part a modified form of republican motherhood, a strategic composite drawn, on the one hand, from classical republican discourse, which promoted the woman’s role in fostering patriotism and liberty, and, on the other, from contemporary defences of commerce, which highlighted women’s civilizing and humanizing roles. Barbauld’s poetic career is compelling in illuminating not only the complexity of the eighteenth-century maternal ideal but also its simultaneous opportunities and limitations for women. While the eighteenth-century maternal ideal allowed the possibility for exciting innovation and reinterpretation of traditional gender categories, expanding the boundaries of feminine authority and authorship, it could equally be exploited by those bent upon undermining women’s efforts to enlarge their social and cultural sphere of action.

The Empiricism of Locke and Newton

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
G. A. J. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between John Locke and Isaac Newton, his co-founder of, in the apt phrase of one recent writer, ‘the Moderate Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, has many dimensions. There is their friendship, which began only after each had written his major work, and which had its stormy interlude. There is the difficult question of their mutual impact. In what ways did each draw intellectually on the other? That there was some debt of each to the other is almost certain, but its exact extent is problematic. Questions may be asked over a whole range of intellectual issues, but not always answered. Thus their theology, which was in many respects close, and which forms the bulk of their surviving correspondence, may yet reveal mutual influence. There is the question of their political views, where both were firmly Whig. But it is upon their philosophy, and certain aspects of their philosophy in particular, that this paper will concentrate. My main theme is the nature of their empiricism, and my main contention is that between them they produced a powerful and comprehensive philosophy.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Natives, Religion, and Race in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
The Other ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Over Time

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.

A Comparison of Wolff’s and Kant’s Receptions of Emanuel Swedenborg

Kant-Studien ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura Follesa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Emanuel Swedenborg ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The One

Abstract Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) did not provide the sole perspective through which Emanuel Swedenborg’s work was known in Germany in the eighteenth century. Before Kant, another German philosopher was interested in Swedenborg from a completely different perspective: Christian Wolff. On the one hand, this paper analyzes the meaning of Wolff’s anonymous reviews of Swedenborg’s early writings published in Acta Eruditorum, the authorship of which was only recently discovered, in order to show Swedenborg’s intertwinement with German scholars during the 1720s. On the other, I juxtapose Kant’s and Wolff’s evaluations of Swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality.

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