Mike Maxim
80-253 Essay Exam 1
30 Sep 02
1.) I.A
The accomplishments in science of Galileo had a profound effect on the philosophy and writing of Rene Descartes. Galileo’s groundbreaking work involving the “mathemitization of nature”, as Husserl puts it, had impact on philosophy as well as physics. Mathematics before Galileo existed as a “pure” science. Geometry in particular was characterized by the manipulation of pure shapes and lines in precise logical theorems. What Galileo observed is that using these fundamental mathematical truths about geometry, he could by logical deduction of these rules come about to an understanding of nature from these deductions. Galileo’s methodology in this sense was to start with the fundamental mathematical truths that he knew, and deduce the laws of nature. Husserl speaks of this in his work, The Crisis in European Sciences (Part II Page 29), when he discusses how Galileo hypothesized that wherever a methodology is developed, the result is that the inherent subjective nature of the data is then brought into an objective light via the new mathematical rules. Husserl points out that Galileo, and certainly Descartes after him, put great faith in the ability of mathematics to objectively describe the world.
In the first Meditation, Descartes attempts to set out in a Galilean like quest in the area of human reason and existence. Descartes, like Galileo, was convinced that the human mind was able to comprehend absolute truths both clearly and distinctly. It was now his job to find the basic truths of existence and proceed in a series of logical, mathematical-like deductions from those truths, much the same way Galileo did with nature. To start off, Descartes puts everything he had believed until the writing of the first Meditation into doubt. His basis for doing this is the various times in his life when he has been deceived. An example he gives is he sometimes has difficulty determining if he is in a dream, or his eyes may be tricked by an optical illusion of some kind. Descartes does make care, however, to assert the fundamental truths of arithmetic and geometry (areas of knowledge independent of objects (a priori)) when he says, "for whether I be awake or asleep, two plus three makes five, and a square does not have more than four sides.". Objects in the world he gives no real existence because they could of course be an illusion and are subject to doubt. He also points out that it is necessary to establish the existence of a perfect being (God) who is not a deceiver. The necessity of this is shown when Descartes discusses the possibility of the deceiver tricking him into thinking that 2 and 3 actually add to 5. The systematic doubt Descartes employs serves to set up the inherent Galilean writings in the next 4 meditations of finding basic truths, and systematically deducing the rest of the description of existence from these truths. The result would be an objective account for the inherent subjective nature of experience. Objective, because in this case he starts from nothing, and builds a description of existence in a mathematical methodology.
2.) I. B.
The second Meditation of Rene Descartes’s Meditations focuses on establishing the fundamental truths of existence. The first task in line for Descartes is the problem of determining whether or not he exists. Surely without this critical information, any further study into the problem of existence in general would be futile. The solution Descartes arrives at is to examine the self closely. He notices that during the duration of his writing, he is doubting, understanding, denying, affirming, and in general thinking constantly in one shape or form. This act of constantly thinking persuades Descartes to come to the necessary conclusion that an agent doing the thinking must exist. In other words, because he is doubting, affirming, etc., this implies that something is actually carrying this out, and that must be him. He exists because he thinks. This conclusion is consistent with Descartes’s general method for discovery in that it relies on no other information that he has put into doubt. As he says, "Most certainly the knowledge of this matter does not depend upon things that I do not yet know to exist." In other words, the establishment of the Cogito is a logical deduction from a priori understandings of logic (there must be a cause to the thinking).
After establishing the first element of existence, Res Cogitans, or thinking things, Descartes now wishes to explain his body and other things around him. Descartes made sure to include the body in his list of things to be doubted, for it does not fall under the thinking argument. To help show the criterion for bodies that exist outside the mind, Descartes offers up an example involving wax. Consider if the wax is melted. It undergoes a series of changes and becomes something that, while very different from the original wax, still maintains some of the fundamental properties of the original wax. These properties are extension, flexibility, and mutability. Both instances, the melted and solid wax, hold these fundamental properties. Descartes uses the mutability feature of the wax to show why he could not be imagining the melting process. To imagine it, he would need to be imagining an infinitely many possibilities and changes of extensions, and therefore the wax exists as res extensa, or an extended thing. The body meets the criterion of res extensa and therefore it must exist as well. From this series of deductions, Descartes has come to the conclusion that there are two types of substance in the world, res cogitans and res extensa. The mind is a thinking substance, independent from the body and the rest of the things in the world. Thus Descartes sets up the mind and body problem with his famous “ghost in the machine” characterization of the mind.
Related to the discussion of res extensa is a characterization of the world by Heidegger in Being in Time that employs a different account of entities in the world. Heidegger claims that entities do not manifest themselves as extended things, but instead as tools in a wide sense of the word tool or equipment. The equipment here cannot be referenced as a thing would be, like, “an equipment”, but instead in the equipment totality (context). Equipment is always involved in certain contexts such as a pen being in the context of pen and ink. Thus Heidegger establishes the “being” of entities in the world in terms of use, or as he puts it “entities manifest themselves as ready-to-hand” (Cavalier online notes). This is the main ontological category Heidegger places entities in, the category of entities that are termed ready-to-hand. The main difference between Heidegger and Descartes is that Heidegger places emphasis on “being” without referring to the separation of mind and body. His description of the world doesn’t even include the word man or consciousness, signifying his vast departure from Descartes’s “ghost in the machine” outlook.
3.) II. A
Continental Rationalism, led by Leibniz and Spinoza, prescribed that all certain knowledge is the result of logical deductions from analytic a priori truths inherent in the mind. Any knowledge not obtained in this fashion was subject to doubt. However, rationalism came under attack by the British Empiricists for lacking the ability to connect knowledge with experience or reality. The empiricists, led by Hume, claimed the opposite of what the rationalists did. They held that all knowledge was a direct result of experience, and that no innate ideas exist. Hume exemplified this position when he claimed notions of cause and effect were actually just a psychological inclination and that no one can claim the law of cause and effect is true because no one actually experiences it. Obviously one of the main criticisms against this sort of thinking was that it had serious difficulties explaining the logical necessity of experiential laws. A succinct way to clarify both positions is to say that the rationalists depended on analytic a priori knowledge whereas the empiricists employed synthetic a posteriori knowledge.
Kant was interested in the capacity of human reason to know things in the world and expressed this interest in his Critique of Pure Reason. He insisted there existed a different type of proposition that the rationalists and empiricists insisted were impossible, and that was the notion of the synthetic a priori. That is, propositions that have their justification in pure reason, yet deal with objects outside of the mind. As an example of a proposition like this, we observe 7+5=12. Here the proposition is always true and is necessarily true so it is a priori, although there is no way to derive 12 from pure analysis of 7 and 5, so the proposition is synthetic as well. Kant insisted that propositions like this were everywhere in science and metaphysics as well. The problem now was to explain how it was possible for humans to make such propositions.
Kant’s “Copernican” (as it is referred to in Stumpt’s History of Philosophy) revolution consisted of explaining these propositions by noticing that there exists a fundamental cooperation between the knower and the thing being known. That is the objects being known conform to the judgments made by the knower. As Kant says in the COPR, “… but if the object must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility (of synthetic a priori knowledge)”. It is in this sense that the empiricists such as Hume went astray. Hume assumed that the objects existed independently from judgments made by the observer and therefore an observer has information about only that object. As a result, the observer cannot make any a priori statements about it. However, Kant’s notion of a cooperation between the observer and the observed, more specifically that the objects conform to the judgments of the mind, allows one to make a priori statements about those objects other than the one being observed. Kant is not saying the mind creates objects; however he is saying the mind plays an intimate role in how those objects are ultimately experienced.
Kant then describes the way this cooperation takes place. Objects are “given” to us through space and time (Structures of Sensibility). In addition, objects are conceptually formed through structures of understanding, like causality and dependence. The union of these two notions of object is how we get an experience and how knowledge of that object becomes possible. In other words, an experience is both the object given to us by space and time, as well as the concept of the object which we obtained through reason. The two are interdependent and provide the possibility of knowledge. Because of these concepts and their strict dependence on experience, we are able to make statements about all objects of this type, without seeing them all, contra Hume and the rest of the empiricists who believed that the mind was just a receptor of experience. Kant also established that the rationalist doctrine was flawed because it attempted to reason about things outside of experience. Kant showed that experience and reason are both needed for knowledge to be possible, therefore rationalist ideas about proving the existence of God, and other things of which no experience existed for was impossible. Therefore Kant succeeded in establishing a limit on pure reason; that is knowledge must start with experience.
4.) II. B.
Reason is fundamentally limited in its ability to prove or disprove the existence of God. The source of this inability is the lacking of any experience of God. As Kant points out in his Critique of Pure Reason, there can be no knowledge without experience, and any judgments made about objects that were not “given” to the mind via an experience are not valid judgments. It is this fundamental problem that makes all proofs, which rely solely on reason, of God’s existence or lack of existence wrong.
The first fallacious proof we will consider is the Argument from Design. The basis of this argument is that if one observes the world for an extended period of time, it becomes clear that it is an intricate, highly ordered machine composed of many sub machines which are in turn highly ordered in themselves. In addition, the world is somewhat shaped toward human existence which suggests the mind of the Orderer is similar to the mind of humans, although greatly more powerful. The Orderer in this case then is God, and the God is similar to humans. The error in this proof was most famously brought to light by Hume in his Concerning Natural Religion. If, like Hume and those proving God’s existence, we consider God as an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good being then we run into serious problems when trying to explain natural evil. By natural evil we mean things like floods, earthquakes, and famine and not evil that comes from men. The evil in the creation shows that the creator is either not one of the three properties listed or does not exist. Thus the proof looks troublesome. The main point Hume makes here is that one cannot move from the facts of the world to the existence of a divine creator. Along with the good, there is evil, and this contradicts the pure nature of God. A common response to this is that we cannot see all ends to such things as earthquakes and in fact they might not be evil in the large picture. However, this does not strengthen the proof at all, because there is no proof in saying that an event might not be evil in some reference frame we do not have access to. The fact of the world as we see it is that earthquakes are evil and this prevents us from establishing God’s existence based on the facts of the world. It is important to note that this discussion does not prove that God does not exist. It just shows that the Argument from Design does not prove God does exist.
Kant also dispels two other types of proofs for God’s existence categorized by the names ontological proofs and cosmological proofs. The ontological proofs proceed along the lines of this example. Any perfect being necessarily has “existence” as one of its qualities, because if it didn’t exist, it would not be perfect. Kant points out that the problem with this proof is that it is taken from judgments which have no grounding in experience, as he says in the COPR, “taken from judgments, not from the things and their existence”. Furthermore, if we deny God exists, we deny both the subject “God” and the predicate “exists”, therefore denying that a perfect being exists if existence is a necessary attribute of the being is not a contradiction because nothing is left to be contradicted. That is, we have denied the being as well as the being existing.