The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were busy times in philosophy and the sciences. With the emergence of the "new science", philosophers were forced to re-think traditiional views about the natural world and our place within it. Of particular importance were questions about the relationship between nature and the human mind. Is the mind a part of the natural world, a device whose operations can be explained mechanically? How should we characterize the modes of investigation employed in the sciences of nature, and are they equally applicable to the study of human thought? How do we know what we know about the external world and about the mind itself, and how do these two types of knowledge interact? In this course, we will concentrate on two important figures from this period: Descartes and Hobbes. It is Descartes who gave the best-known articulation of many views that set the agenda in philosophy of mind and epistemology for several centuries: the idea that mind and body are fundamentally different things and operate according to different principles, the belief that we have direct and incorrigible access to our own thoughts, the related belief that our knowledge of the external world is mediated by our ideas, and the assurance that reason alone can yield fundamental truths about the world. Much contemporary work in philosophy of mind is articulated against these Cartesian views. But there is also a less familiar side of Descartes: Descartes was familiar with the growing body of research on physiology and the nervous system in his day, and indeed regarded many functions we would think of as "psychological" as explainable on mechanical principles governing "that machine" the body. Examining this side of Cartesian thought forces us to take more seriously Descartes' views about the limits of mechanical explanation. In Hobbes we find a good foil for the Cartesian position. Hobbes envisioned a vast reductionist programme, in which the principles of political science could be reduced to the interactions of individuals whose actions could be explained in terms of their mental states. These mental states, in turn, had a kind of "mechanics" of their own, and were conceived as "motions" of the body and hence were to be reduced to physiology and ultimately to physics. Hobbes' reductionism and his "computational" view of reasoning are held by some contemporary scholars to be early precursors of modern views of the mind--particularly, of the theory that the mind is a computer. We will concentrate on both thinkers' views about the mind and the nature of science.
COURSE FORMAT: Seminar
Level: UG Credit: 1.00 Gen Ed Area & Dept: HA PHIL
Prerequisites: None
Last Updated on MAR-10-1997
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