Locke against Descartes

This chapter considers Locke’s criticisms of Descartes’s views about the mind. Although Locke grants that dualism might be true (i.e., that human beings might have an immaterial mind), he thinks the Cartesian version of that view is false. The chapter focuses on two topics within Locke’s discussion of Descartes’s views: whether we have an innate idea of God, and whether the mind is always thinking. On the first issue, Locke rejects the view of Descartes (and More, Cudworth, and others) that we have an innate idea of God, but also rejects Hobbes’s view that we have no idea of God. On the second issue, Locke opposes Descartes’s view that the mind is always thinking, as well as his related view that thinking is the principal attribute of the mind, and indeed his metaphysical scheme of substance, principal attribute, and mode.

The idea of being is not uniquely innate

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2016v20n3p343According to the Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855), being is an innate idea that is requisite for contemplating anything. He emphatically claims that it is the one and only innate idea. Rosmini makes a sharp distinction between sensations and perceptions. Perceptions are thought to arise when the undetermined idea of being (tantamount to possibility) is combined with sensations, universals when being is combined with perceptions. It is argued here that Rosmini’s explanation of the origin of universals does not work. If the idea of being is regarded as innate, then several others should be similarly regarded, notably the idea of qualitative identity which is an idea necessary for deriving universals. Although Rosmini holds that certain properties are necessarily present in real objects and therefore implicit in the idea of being, the property of being qualitatively identical with something else is not among those properties. Theological motives may have encouraged Rosmini to emphasize being as a peculiarly fundamental idea. However, if the idea of being is more fundamental than other universals, it may be regarded so in virtue of its generality, not because it has a uniquely innate character.

Osservazioni sulle fonti luterane della controversia De notitia Dei naturali insita in infantibus

Starting from a passage of Adam Steuart's refutation of Descartes' Notae in programma quoddam, this essay reconstructs the debate on the innate idea of God in infants (incorrectly attributed to Descartes by Steuart, who was a Calvinist) that took place in Lutheran-oriented philosophy and theology between the end of the 16th and the middle of the 18th century. It is shown that one of the most common questions in modern philosophy is closely connected with theological thinking - in this case Lutheran - from the formulation of the dogmatic systems up until their criticism by the Enlightenment. Also explained is the way in which the reception of Cartesianism was singularly influenced by the various backgrounds and the different and continuously changing polemical goals that inspired each author. In fact, Descartes was even accused of being a Lutheran.Key words: History of modern philosophy, History of Protestant theology, History of Cartesianism, History of Lutheranism, Reception of Cartesianism.

The Rise, Fall and Rise of Epistemology

I began the study of philosophy in an organized fashion after I was demobilised in 1946. My first steps were firmly Lockean. Innate idea, substance, primary and secondary qualities and personal identity were the topics of the first term's essays, along with smaller infusions of Descartes, Berkeley and Hume. The fundamental examination paper in those days in Oxford was General Philosophy and that meant the problems in the theory of knowledge that had exercised the great philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, beyond them, Russell, Moore, Price and Ayer. The syllabus was very clearly set out by the chapter headings of Russell's Problems of Philosophy.

The Idea of Extension: Innate or Adventitious? On R. F. McRae's Interpretation of Descartes

In two separate studies, published some four years apart, Robert McRae has argued the provocative thesis that the idea of extension is not to be numbered among the ideas accounted innate by Descartes, but among the adventitious. He has defended this view despite explicit statements to the contrary by Descartes both in the Correspondence and in the second part of the Principles of Philosophy. Against such evidence McRae has urged the overriding importance of the sixth Meditation, where, he alleges, Descartes asserts “unequivocally… that the idea of extension is produced in us by bodies and is therefore not innate” (147; my emphasis). It is only in the later of the two studies that McRae's reasons for regarding the testimony of the sixth Meditation as authoritative are fully spelt out. Express statements to the contrary “must give away”, he writes, “for the proof of the existence of body by the adventitious idea of it is absolutely crucial to the Meditations” (L 100; my emphasis). In this paper I propose to challenge McRae's interpretation of the extension of the concept “innate idea”, while acknowledging his signal contribution to the clearing up of the intensional meaning, or rather meanings, of the concept of innateness. My thesis is that “extension” is an innate idea, though constraints of time will allow me to do little more than try to show that McRae's stated reasons for rejecting this view are not compelling.