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.

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?