scholarly journals Locke's Ontology of Relations

Locke Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 61-86
Author(s):  
Samuel C. Rickless
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Theory Of Ideas ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Empiricist Theory ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
Mental Acts

In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke’s primary aim is to provide an empiricist theory of ideas that can support interesting results about the nature of language and knowledge. Within this theory, Locke distinguishes between simple ideas and complex ideas (E II.ii.1: 119). Roughly, an idea is complex if it has other ideas as parts; otherwise, it is simple. For Locke, as is well known, all simple ideas derive from sensation (perception through sight, taste, smell, hearing, or touch) or reflection (a form of introspection directed at mental acts) (E II.i.2–4: 104–106). Aetiology also plays a role in Locke’s classification of complex ideas: ideas of modes, ideas of substances, and ideas of relations. All complex ideas are formed by a voluntary act of combination or composition. Ideas of modes, such as numbers, beauty, and theft (E II.xii.5: 165) are formed without considering whether the combinations conform to real patterns existing in the world (E II.xi.6: 158, E II.xxii.1: 288, E II.xxxi.3: 376). Ideas of substances (such as human beings, sheep, and armies—E II.xii.6: 165), by contrast, are formed with a desire ‘to copy Things, as they really do exist’ (E II.xxxi.3: 377). Ideas of relations are like ideas of modes (E II.xxxi.14: 383–84), except that their aetiology includes, in addition to the mental act of composition, the distinct mental act of comparison on the basis of some respect or dimension (E II.xi.4: 157, E II.xxv.1: 319).

scholarly journals Why is Locke's Linguistic Theory Still Current and Interesting Today?

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Alessandro Prato
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Relative Independence ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Empiricist Theory ◽  
Pragmatic Factor ◽  
Power Of Language ◽  
The Mind

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke set out to offer an analysis of the human mind and its acquisition of knowledge still very current and important today. Locke offered also an empiricist theory according to which we acquire ideas through our experience of the world. The article examines Locke’s views on language and his principal innovation in the field of linguistic theory, represented by the recognition of the power of language with respect to the classification of the world, and its relative independence from reality. In particular the following topics are discussed: a) the polemical contrast with Cartesian philosophy b) the criticism that Locke levels against innatism c) the function of abstraction of the mind d) the concept of semiotics as a theory of thought and its expression e) the radical concept of arbitrariness f) the pragmatic factor intrinsic to Locke’s linguistics described as “communicational scepticism”.

Locke and Malebranche

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Jolley
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Theory Of Ideas ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Empiricist Theory

This chapter addresses the issue of whether Locke’s own empiricist theory of ideas offers, as Locke often suggested, a more intelligible way of explaining human understanding than Malebranche’s doctrine of Vision in God. Drawing on Locke’s statements about the corpuscularian hypothesis, it argues that although the empiricist theory may satisfy some criteria of intelligibility, it is forced to recognize the existence of processes that are ‘incomprehensible’; to that extent, Locke’s theory of ideas runs parallel with his mature philosophy of matter. The epistemic status of the empiricist theory of ideas is thus more problematic than it is often taken to be.

Receptivity and Creativity in Hermeneutics

2016 ◽  
pp. 225-239
Author(s):  
Chung-ying Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Positive Projection ◽  
The One ◽  
Coming To Know

There are two aspects of the hermeneutic: the receptive and the creative. The receptive of the hermeneutic consists in coming to know and acknowledge what has happened, observing what there is as historically effected, foretelling what will happen as a matter of projection of future possibilities, and disclosing / discovering transcendental conditions, fore-structures or horizons of human understanding and interpretation; the creative of the hermeneutic, on the other hand, consists in realizing and demonstrating human sensibilities and human capabilities and needs, conceptualizing what is factual and real based on human cognitive and volitional faculties and experiences, developing values and pursuing regulative ideals of actions, and searching for best possible ways or methods to reach for individual and communal end-goals which will enhance human beings as autonomous entities and moral agents in the world. The receptive is represented by the phenomenological approach to Being and reality whereas the creative is conveyed by an ontology of reflection of human being for self-definition and self-cultivation of human faculties. This amounts to bringing out an existing distinction between ming (what is imparted) and li (the presupposed ground) on the one hand and xing ( human potentiality for being in oneself) and xin (human understanding and interpretation toward action) on the other in the tradition of Confucian metaphysics.Next, I shall focus on Heidegger and Gadamer as taking ontological receptivity (as a matter of fore-structures of Being or Language of human understanding) as the source of meaning of existence and meaningfulness of texts. Th ere are of course creative elements to be identifi ed with forming investigative projects of the Dasein for disclosing truth of the Being, but the main tone is to realize the Being or Language as base structures of our hermeneutic consciousness or hermeneutic space of understanding. Because of spacelimitation, however, I shall leave to another occasion the discussion of the creative formation and positive projection of a transformative cosmological philosophy in the Yijing tradition as represented in my onto-hermeneutics which takes experiences of ≫comprehensive observation≪ (guan) and ≫feeling- refl ection≪ (gan) as two avenues toward human understanding and hermeneutic enterprise of interpretation.

Plato’s Philebus

Classics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvain Delcomminette
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Hierarchical Classification ◽  
Cosmological Argument ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Universe

The Philebus is almost unanimously considered as one of Plato’s last dialogues, probably written around the same time as the Timaeus. Unlike other late dialogues, however, it takes the more conventional form of a conversation between Socrates and two interlocutors: Philebus and Protarchus. Philebus in fact refuses to discuss and remains silent for most of the dialogue, leaving to Protarchus the task of defending hedonism against the attacks of intellectualism championed by Socrates. The Philebus is a particularly rich and difficult work, which has often been viewed as messy. Although it has received the subtitle “On pleasure” since Antiquity, it contains, besides a lengthy examination of pleasure that notably argues for the possibility of false pleasures, a reflection on the relations between unity and plurality, an exposition of dialectic presented as a “god-given” and “heavenly” method, a fourfold classification of “all there is,” a cosmological argument purported to show that the world is governed by intelligence, and a hierarchical classification of the different kinds of knowledge. All these elements are integrated in a quest for “the good,” which at the beginning of the dialogue is identified to the best human life, but at the end seems to gain greater generality and concern not only human beings but also the whole or the universe. Are all these themes supposed to connect somehow, and if they are, in what manner? This question was already debated by the Neoplatonist commentators and was taken over by modern scholarship since the 19th century. Another question that has provoked scholars is the relation between the “metaphysics” exposed in the dialogue and Plato’s “unwritten doctrines” referred to by Aristotle. However, the greatest part of scholarship on the Philebus is currently devoted to scrutinize a theme or a portion of the text itself. After a relative neglect, this dialogue has indeed become the focus of much scholarly work during the last decades. The present bibliography had consequently to be highly selective and favors the most useful starting-points for further explorations of the wealthy literature devoted to this fascinating text.

Anaxagoras and the Theory of Everything

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Curd
Keyword(s):  
Available P ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Theory Of Everything ◽  
New Material ◽  
The Universe

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae proposed a theory of everything. Like other Presocratics, Anaxagoras addressed topics that could now be placed outside the sphere of philosophical inquiry: not only did he explore metaphysics and the nature of human understanding but he also offered explanations in physics, meteorology, astronomy, physiology, and biology. His aim seems to have been to explain as completely as possible the world in which human beings live, and one's knowledge of that world; thus he seeks to investigate the universe from top to bottom. This article explores Anaxagoras's world from its basic foundations. It undertakes to show the connections among the metaphysical, epistemological, and cosmological parts of Anaxagoras's theory. The discovery and publication of new material has also enhanced the understanding of Presocratic thought. A spectacular example is the new material from Empedocles of Acragas that has become available.

A Ridiculous Plan

Locke Studies ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 137-157
Author(s):  
Hannah Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Francis Bacon ◽  
John Webster ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
Shared Language ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Latin Version ◽  
Philosophical Grammar

‘I am not so vain to think’, wrote Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) ‘that any one can pretend to attempt the perfect reforming the languages of the world, no not so much as that of his own country, without rendring himself ridiculous’. It seems highly probable that among the objects of Locke’s scorn were the universal or philosophical language planners, whose extravagant movement was approaching its unhappy end when he was formulating his masterpiece in the 1670s and ’80s. This article investigates what it was about their plans that made Locke jeer. While their schemes varied considerably, all were broadly con- cerned to map precisely and transparently the order of thoughts and things, often by means of ‘real characters’—written signs which can be understood by people who speak different languages. These projects were informed by a diverse and overlapping assortment of motivations and beliefs, such as irenicism, millenarianism, and Latitudinarianism, but two ambitions run prominently, if not completely, through the movement. The first looked to restore the Adamic harmony between language, mind, and world, whereby words would deliver knowledge of nature, and thereby read God’s other book in an act of piety. The second was that language should be universal. While the two overlap, in so far as the unity of the world vouchsafes semantic uniformity, and while commentators have often, and rightly, paid attention to the first of these ambitions, I am going to focus on the second. The goal to renovate a language which could be understood by all was nurtured in the shadow of Babel, and sparked by those injunctions of Francis Bacon which shaped the movement as a whole. Certain passages of The Advancement of Learning (1605), and especially of its Latin version, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623), exhorted philosophers to inquire further into ‘the notes of things and cogitations’. In particular, Bacon proposed that a ‘philosophical grammar’ might serve as ‘an antidote against the curse of the confusion of tongues’. In his Academiarum examen (1654), John Webster agreed that a ‘universal character’ would repair ‘the ruines of Babell’. The otherwise often distinctive voice of George Dalgarno chimed in with the promise in his first broadsheet, Character Universalis (1657), that by means of his ‘universal character’, ‘men of all nations may enjoy the benefit of conversing one with another’. And in his dedicatory letter to leading lights of the movement John Wilkins and Seth Ward, which prefaces his second broadsheet (Tables of the Universal Character, 1657), Dalgarno explained that what follows is intended ‘towards the releife of the confusion of languages’. Drawing on widespread, often tacit, suppositions, the planners premised their belief in the possibility of a shared language on the assumption that the entities which words represent are shared, that the meanings of words are the same for all.

scholarly journals Ecology and Society. Impacted Ecosystems. Part I

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-29
Author(s):  
Marina Frontasyeva ◽  
Alexander Kamnev
Keyword(s):  
Social Indicators ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Exponential Population Growth ◽  
Great Acceleration ◽  
Economic And Social Indicators ◽  
Exponential Population

Abstract The Earth has existed for more than four billion years and has sustained life for three billion. Human beings have existed for just 200,000 years, yet our impact on the planet is so great that scientists around the world are calling for our period in the Earth’s history to be named ‘the Anthropocene’ - the age of humans. The changes we are now making have exacted a heavy toll on the natural world around us, and now threaten the planet’s ability to provide for us all. Problems of Ecology and Society in the new geological era as the Anthropocene - ‘the age of humans’ - are overviewed. The name is widely recognized as a useful classification of the period in which human activity has created and continues to generate deep and lasting effects on the Earth and its living systems. Examples of the interrelated effects of exponential population growth and massively expanding consumption of natural resources called Great Acceleration are given. Updated ‘planetary dashboard’ of environmental, economic and social indicators charts the trajectory of the Anthropocene are briefly summarized.

Materialism from Hobbes to Locke

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Ralph Cudworth ◽  
Henry More

Are human beings purely material creatures, or is there something else to them, an immaterial part that does some (or all) of the thinking, and might even be able to outlive the death of the body? This book is about how a series of seventeenth-century philosophers tried to answer that question. It begins by looking at the views of Thomas Hobbes, who developed a thoroughly materialist account of the human mind, and later of God as well. All this is in obvious contrast to the approach of his contemporary René Descartes. After examining Hobbes’s materialism, the book considers the views of three of his English critics: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. Both More and Cudworth thought Hobbes’s materialism radically inadequate to explain the workings of the world, while Cavendish developed a distinctive, anti-Hobbesian materialism of her own. The second half of the book focuses on the discussion of materialism in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, arguing that we can better understand Locke’s discussion if we see how and where he is responding to this earlier debate. At crucial points Locke draws on More and Cudworth to argue against Hobbes and other materialists. Nevertheless, Locke did a good deal to reveal how materialism was a genuinely possible view, by showing how one could develop a detailed account of the human mind without presuming it was an immaterial substance.

Classification of Ideas in Locke's Essay

Dialogue ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Walter B. Carter
Keyword(s):  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ◽  
Usual Interpretation

The usual interpretation of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding is that he tried to show that all of men's complex ideas were formed by a process of compounding simple ideas. Some commentators say this represents his actual approach o t human knowledge, others say that while parts of the Essay are written in this manner it does not represent his final views. All agree that if this compositionalism is Locke's position then it is inadequate and contains numerous contradictions. It is the thesis of this paper that Locke never was a compositionalist in the required sense and that therefore the inadequacies and contradictions do not exist. Since the compositionalists interpret the Essay mainly on the basis of the classification of ideas in the first edition rather than that in the fourth it will be necessary to examine the two classifications in the Essay to see which does represent Locke's position. It will be found that the fourth edition classification represents his views and that this refutes compositionalism.

scholarly journals Suffering in the perspective of God’s governance, eschatology and God’s council

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham Van de Beek
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Model ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Temporal Model

From the beginning of Christian theology, theologians have struggled with the question of how suffering in the world is related to God’s providence. A classic response to this question is that, ultimately, God’s governance is beyond human understanding. More recently an eschatological solution has been preferred: God is involved in a historical process and he will finally overcome evil. This article argued that both responses have their own problems. In the first God is a hidden mystery, and in the latter either the outcome of history is uncertain or God is waiting unnecessarily long. On the other hand, both provide consolation to human beings in times of suffering. Which one of the two answers is more helpful, depends on culture and context. Therefore, they are both acceptable responses to the question. At a deeper level, one can argue that both refer to eternity − one in a spatial model (above) and the other in a temporal model (hereafter). Both space and time are metaphors in this context. That is also the case when we speak of ‘before’ with regard to God’s eternal council. Ultimately, from a perspective of eternity, God’s council, God’s governance and God’s final judgment coincide. In Christian theology these concepts can only be understood in the paradigm of God’s revelation in Christ, who is the expression of the mystery of creation − as is especially indicated in the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians. Vanaf het begin van het Christendom hebben theologen geworsteld met de vraag hoe het lijden in de wereld zich verhoudt tot Gods voorzienigheid. Een klassiek antwoord daarop is dat ten laatste Gods bestuur het menselijk begrip te boven gaat. Tegenwoordig wordt eerder de voorkeur gegeven aan een eschatologische oplossing: God is betrokken in een proces door de geschiedenis waarin Hij uiteindelijk het kwaad zal overwinnen. De auteur betoogt dat beide benaderingen hun eigen problemen hebben. In het eerste geval is God een onkenbaar mysterie en in het tweede geval is de afloop onzeker of wacht God onnodig lang met zijn overwinning. Aan de andere kant bieden beide antwoorden mensen troost in lijdenssituaties. Welke van de twee antwoorden het beste is, hangt af van cultuur en context. Daarom zijn beide aanvaardbaar als antwoord op het probleem van Gods voorzienigheid. Op een dieper niveau kan men betogen dat beide verwijzen naar de eeuwigheid, het eerste antwoord in een ruimtelijk model (‘te boven’) en het tweede in een tijdsmodel (‘hierna’). Zowel ruimte als tijd zijn hier metaforisch gebruikt. Dat is ook het geval als we spreken over ‘vóór’ met betrekking tot Gods eeuwige raad. Uiteindelijk zijn, vanuit het perspectief van de eeuwigheid, Gods raad, Gods beleid en Gods laatste oordeel identiek. In de christelijke theologie kunnen deze concepten alleen worden verstaan in het paradigma van Gods openbaring in Christus, die de expressie van het geheimenis van de schepping is, zoals met name de brieven aan de Efeziërs en aan de Kolossenzen aangeven.

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