The Modern Intellectual Tradition

"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

Sequence of Philosophers

Descartes

• Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
• Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
• I think therefore I am. (not a direct quote)
• Foundationalism: What can we know with certainty?
• "Proof" of God
  • I can conceive of infinity.
  • Only God is infinite.
  • I cannot conceive something unless it exists.
  • Therefore God exists.
  • No, really, that's the whole thing. But remember it was the 1600s and he was going where no-one had gone before.

Locke

• Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
• Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.

Berkeley

• Empiricism.
• There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
• If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?