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.

• https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

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."

Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution

Aristotle

All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."

Aquinas

The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.

Copernicus

Helocentric.

Giordano Bruno

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.

Galileo

New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

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).
• Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy

Foundationalism

What can we know with certainty?

• Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
• Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
  • Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
  • What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
  • 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
• I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
  • Something must be doing the thinking.
  • The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
    • I think I think therefore I think I am.
• Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
  • I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
• Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.

Attempted Proof of God

• Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
• By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
• I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
• I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
• Only god is infinite.
• The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
• Therefore God exists.

Attempted Proof of Material Substances

• God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
• God is not a deceiver.
• Material substances must be real.

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?

Rousseau

• Initial Essay Contest: Have our advances made us better?
  • His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
• "Is a rich junkie free?"
  • A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
• If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they don't want it.
  • If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?

Hume

• Skepticism: If science is subject to change, and always changing, then why trust science?
• middle middle middle
• However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
  • I really want to flesh this out, because I'm still angry about "therefore you can't trust science - our greatest philosophers say so."

Kant

The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

Marx

Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).