PHL100Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Atomism, Empiricism
Document Summary
In contrast to plato and descartes, for hobbes all our knowledge comes from our senses. In the first part of the book, he looks, like plato & aristotle, to the nature of man: but what he sees is very starkly different. Hobbes" debt to ancient atomism: everything consists of atoms, different shapes account for different properties, they move around, bump into each other, combine, mental properties accounted for by very fine atoms. What distinguishes humans is speech: the (cid:862)trai(cid:374)(cid:863) of (cid:862)(cid:373)e(cid:374)tal dis(cid:272)ourse(cid:863): our thoughts are(cid:374)"t ra(cid:374)do(cid:373), (cid:271)ut (cid:272)o(cid:374)ditio(cid:374)ed (cid:271)(cid:455) experience just as our ideas are. So we have no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our senses (iii. When a man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum total, from. Addition of parcels, or conceive a remainder, from subtraction : thus, we define validity in a purely abstract way:
