PSYA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Materialism, Empiricism, Luigi Galvani
Document Summary
To pursue something scientifically one must first assume that the behaviour of that thing conforms to some sort of natural laws, laws that can eventually be understood, specified, and used to predict future behaviour. We are spirits of a material world the police. Humans are different have soul (spiritual entity does not have to conform to physical laws: given this, trying to understand them via a scientific process is pure folly. Animism suggesting that something has a soul in general e. g. rocks, thunderstorms. Rene descartes: animals do not have souls are machines (do not feel pain, cartesian dualism dual nature to humans (partly hydraulic machines but are ultimately controlled by souls) Luigi galvani: movement of humans and animals due to electrical energy (i. e. frog being, from the empirical perspective, it adds real physical evidence to the electrocuted moves) notion that bodies seem to be machine-like (driven by electrical currents)
