PHIL 202 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Mechanical Philosophy
4 May 2018
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History of Modern Philosophy
3.07.18 Lecture Notes – Locke, Thinking Matter
- Knowledge does not accurately reflect actual reality and is also narrower than our ideas
- Our knowledge cannot exceed our ideas either in extent or perfection
- Locke – we will never be able to know whether any material beings things or not
- God is known by demonstration
- What is the problem of thinking matter?
o Matter is an extended thing
o Thought is not an extended thing
o Leibniz – but monads
- What other philosophical issues are connected to thinking matter, at least for Locke?
o Material and immaterial nature of God
o Free will
o Conceivability as a guide for something
o Limits on knowledge
o Substance metaphysics
▪ Cartesian dualism
• Essence of the body is extension, while the essence of the soul is
thought
▪ Mechanical philosophy – mechanistic explanations for nature
o Neto’s idea of attratio has destailized his ituitios of hat a e
conceived – Locke believes in Newton
- Leiiz’s ill arguet
o If you walk into a mill, assuming that it is a perceiving or thinking thing, you
cannot find anything that explains perception
- Idea of matter, idea of thinking
o We have no way of knowing how these go together
o Locke introduces this problem of thinking matter – problem of the limits of our
knowledge
o Ee if atter did thik, e ould’t e ale to tell the differee etee that
and having an immaterial soul
o Pg 359 – God can superadd a faculty of thinking to another substance
o Seems to support the dualist view of there being body and spirit
o Descartes says in the Meditations that the properties of body and spirit are
mutually exclusion – you cannot have a thing that thinks and has extension and
vice versa
o God’s superaddition is compatible with the Cartesian POV – the superaddition
does not change the underlying nature of the matter, which is still extension
o Locke claims that the phenomena of superaddition is necessary to the
conceivability of life
o Locke presses Stillingfleet about what the logical contradiction is between
matter having extension and also having the property of thinking
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