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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.
The last type of argument is the cosmological argument which proceeds as
follows. Everything is at rest unless it is moved, things are moving, and therefore there
must have been a first mover, God. The argument starts off with an observation about an
experience of watching things move. However, as Kant observes, it quickly moves from
experience into judgments with no experiential basis. The laws of cause and effect do not
apply outside the realm of sense experience. Any deductions about cause and effect in the
past that were not experienced have no basis as certain knowledge, only a speculative
guess. Therefore while it may seem that this chain of reasoning takes us to a first mover
or God, it does not securely do it because it relies on judgments about cause and effect
without sense experience to justify them. Another problem with this argument is that it
fails to establish the nature of the God, and therefore is quite limited.