Notes to: The Great Conversation: Moving from Medieval to Modern (& other chapters)

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

"The Great Conversation," by Norman Melchert (sixth edition)

Chapter twelve: Moving from Medieval to Modern (pages 299-319)

• "Paradoxically, and to some extent accidentally, skepticism has arisen once more from its ashes-- this phoenix that first Plato and then Augustine sought to slay." 
• The author asks us to "attempt to recapture a more direct and naive interpretation of our experience" and explains how, speaking of the firmament concept, "this view of the heavens is very common among primitive people and among children, too." It is exceedingly patronizing and, I daresay, naive in itself. These so-called "primitives" were often much more intelligent than many people today, and the only reason we know their faults is because we have had the opportunity to stand on their shoulders. 
• "Aristotle does not accept the atomists' conception of a void, that is, a space in which nothing exists. His reasoning depends on the notion of potentiality. Wherever there is space, there is potentially some substance. But potentiality is just the possibility of having some form; and what is formed into a substance is matter. So wherever there is space there is matter, matter never exists unformed; so the idea of empty space is a contradiction in terms. There could not be other worlds out in space beyond this world; this world is not just the only world there is, but the only world there could be." 
• "Terrestrial and other celestial substances are made of different stuff and governed by different laws. Spiritual beings-- angels, for instance, whom Aquinas holds to be pure forms without matter-- have their home in these more perfect regions." 
• In Dante's Purgatory are those who "still love earthly things too much, or not enough, or in the wrong way."
• "Some of the humanists are churchmen, but many are not. They belong to that aristocratic stratum of society that has leisure to cultivate the arts, paint, compose, or write. They are not, on the whole, antagonistic to the Church; nor do most of them pit the old pagan classical works against Christianity. On the contrary, they tend to see a profound harmony between Christianity and the classics." 
• Erasmus: "Whatever is devout and contributes to good morals should not be profane."
• Eramus: "[Socrates is] an admirable spirit, surely, in one who had not known Christ and the Sacred Scriptures. And so, when I read such things of such men, I can hardly help exclaiming, 'Saint Socrates, pray for us!'"
• Erasmus: "Completely mistaken, therefore, are those who talk in their foolish fashion about Christ's having been sad and gloomy in character and calling upon us to follow a dismay mode of life. On the contrary, he alone shows the most enjoyable life of all and the one most full of true pleasure." 
• "This gives us an insight into why these thinkers are call humanists. Their concern is the development of a full and rich human life-- the best life for a human being to live. Their quest is stimulated by the works of classical antiquity, which they read, edit, translate, and imitate with eagerness. They live, of course, in a culture dominated by Christianity and express that quest in basically Christian terms, but their interests focus on the human." 
• "The ideal is a person who can embody all the excellences a human being is capable of of: music, art, poetry, science, soldiery, courtesy, virtue, and piety." 
• "Pice finds [in Oration on the Dignity of Man] the unique dignity of man in the fact that human beings alone have no 'archetype' they are predetermined to exemplify. Everything else has a determinate nature, but it is man's privilege to be able to choose his own nature." 
• "Finally, the humanists recapture some of the confidence that had characterized Athenians of the Golden Age. Human failings are more apt to be caricatured as foolishness (as Erasmus satirically did in Praise of Folly) than to be condemned as sins." 
• "If displeased with a monarch, the pope could put an entire land under the 'interdict,' which meant that no masses and no sacraments could be celebrated there-- a dire threat indeed for those who depended on them for their eternal salvation." 
• "Heresy was considered 'the greatest of all sins because it was an affront to the greatest of persons, God; worse than treason against a king because it was directed against the heavenly sovereign; worse than counterfeiting money because it counterfeited the truth of salvation; worse than patricide and matricide, which destroy only the body.'"
• "Unless they could be assimilated into the structure of the Church, as the monastic orders were, reformers were harshly dealt with." 
• Martin Luther: "A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it." 
• "By what criterion or standard are we going to tell when we know the truth? If a criterion is proposed,how do we know that it is the right one? Is there a criterion for choosing the criterion?"
• "The gods do not quarrel about length and weight and such matters, but about good and justice. Where there are accepted criteria (rules of measurement, for instance) for settling disputes, wars are unlikely. But where there are apparently irresolvable disagreements, involving appeal to differing standards, might may seem like the only thing that can make right." 
• "What the Reformation does, philosophically speaking, is to unsettle the foundations. Though the reformers only intend to call an erring Church back to its true and historical foundations, the consequences are lasting divisiveness, with those on each side certain of their own correctness and of the blindness (and wickedness) of their opponents. This unsettling of the foundations by the reformers is one of the factors that lies behind Descartes' attempt to sink the piles so deep that beliefs built on them could never again be shaken." 
• "To live, one must choose, and to choose is to prefer one course as better than another." 
• "You can see here [in Montaigne's arguments] that skepticism is here being used as a defense of the status quo. Montaigne was born and brought up as a Catholic. No one can bring forward reasons for deserting Catholic Christianity that are any better than Raymond Sebond's reasons for supporting Catholic Christianity. Reason supports the Roman view just as strongly as it supports the Protestant view or, indeed, any other view-- which is, of course, not at all! So to keep from 'rolling around incessantly,' the sensible course is to stick with the customs in which one has been brought up." 
• Copernicus: "Mathematics is for mathematicians." 
• "Oddly enough, his [Kepler's] predilection for the sun as the center has its roots now so much in observation, or even in mathematics, as in a kind of mystical Neoplatonism, which takes the sun to be 'the most excellent' body in the universe." 
• "Part of Kepler's quasi-religious conviction is that the universe is fundamentally mathematical in nature. God is a great mathematician, and his creation is governed by mathematically simple laws." 
• Blaise Pascal: "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces strikes me with terror." 
• "Primary qualities are those that Galilean mathematical sciences can handle: size, figure, number, and motion.... All other qualities exist only subjectively-- in us. They are caused to exist in us by the primary (quantitative) qualities of things." 
• "Heat, for example, experienced in the presence of a fire, no more exists in the fire than a tickle exists in the feather brushing my nose. If we try to use the term 'heat' for something out there in the world, it turns into 'nothing but a name'-- that is, it does not describe any reality, since the reality is just the motion of 'a multitude of minute corpuscles.' The tickle exists only in us; and if the term' heat' (or for that matter 'red' or 'sweet' or 'pungent') is to be descriptive, then what it describes is also only in us. Take away the eye, the tongue, the nostrils, and all that remains is figure and motion."

Chapter thirteen: Rene Descartes: Doubting Our Way to Certainty (pp 321-361)

• Rene Descartes: "I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth travelling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situation which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it." 
• "If he [Descartes] is going to 'learn to distinguish the true from the false,' he would have to look to himself." 
• "[Descartes] tries to do without concepts of weight and gravity, for these seem to be 'occult' qualities like those in the nonmathematical science of Aristotle. To say that a body falls because it has weight or because it is naturally attracted to another body seems to him no explanation at all; it is just attaching a name to a phenomenon and supposing that we thereby learn something." 
• Descartes proposed a mechanistic explanation for the development of the universe.
• "The first [of Descartes' rules of method] was never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it. The second, to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as may be required in order to resolve them better. The third, to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by beginning with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to ascend little by little, step by step, to knowledge of the most complex, and by supposing some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence. And the last, throughout to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure of leaving nothing out." 
• "Descartes thinks he has found a way to solve this problem of problems [skepticism]. He will outdo the Pyrrhonists at their own game; when it comes to doubting, he will be the champion doubter of all time." 
• "Note the personal, meditative character of the writing. Descartes is inviting us to join him in thinking certain things through, asking us to mull them over and see whether we agree. He is not making authoritative pronouncements. Just as he reserves the right to be the judge of what he should believe, so he puts you on the spot. You will have to be continually asking yourself: Do I agree with this or not? If not, why not? This familiar first-person style is quite different from most of medieval philosophy; it harks back to Augustine's Confessions in the late fourth century." 
• "Norman's First Law: Watch that first step, it's a big one-- good advice for appraising philosophical systems." 
• Rene Descartes: "Whether we are awake or asleep, two plus three is always five, and the square never has more than four sides." 
• "The distinction between ordinary perception and judgment is crucial for Descartes. It is illustrated by the hats and coats we see through the window. We say that we see men passing, but this is inaccurate, for they may be just robots dressed like men." 
• "Perceiving, then, is not a purely passive registration by the senses. Implicit in all perception is judgment, or giving assent." 
• I wonder what Descartes would make of modern theories that the conscious mind is a mere appendage to what does the real thinking. 
• "Something has formal reality if it is, in our terms, actual or existing."
• Ex nihilo nihil fit: From nothing, nothing comes. 
• I dislike the use of the word "robot" in this version of Meditations on First Philosophy. It is an anachronism. 

"Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley: Materialism and the Beginnings of Empiricism" 

• "Descartes' new beginning in philosophy was dramatic and arresting. many thought this was just what was needed. It swept away all the old rubbish, legitimated the new science, and seemed a breath of fresh air in its clarity and apparent simplicity." 
• "Whereas for Aristotle and his medieval disciples, motion is development toward some fulfilling goal (a change from potentiality to actuality), for the new science, motion is simply a body's change of place in a neutral geometrical space." 
• "Resolution is actually taking apart a complex object-- dissecting the body of a human or other mammal." 
• "Hobbes aspires to be the Galileo or the Harvey of the human world. He is convinced that a scientific understanding of human nature will be both a contribution to knowledge and a practical benefit. If we could but organize society on the basis of truths about ourselves, rather than on the basis of ignorance and superstition, we could avoid conflict and live together in peace." 
• "Living things, whether natural or artificial, are just matter in motion." 
• "The entire life of the mind is nothing more than matter in motion. For sensations are motions, and all the rest is built up out of sensations. There are no distinctive mental qualities at all. Mind is just matter that is moved in certain distinctive ways." 
• "An epiphenomenalist thinks there are unique mental qualities, that they are causally dependent on physical states, but that they do not in turn affect the physical world." 
• Thomas Hobbes: "Whatsoever we imagine, is finite. Therefore there is no idea or conception of anything we call infinite." 
• "We do, of course, have words for Gods; we can call him a 'being of infinite perfection'-- as Descartes does. But these terms do not really function to describe God; rather, says Hobbes, they are signs of our intention to honor him." 
• "Such a hunt for causes is usually carried out in words, which are useful both as aids to memory and as signs representing our thoughts to others." 
• "The only judgment possible is that of the individual; if she desires X, she judges X to be good; if he dislikes Y, he considers Y evil. And from those judgments there is (in the state of nature) no appeal." 
• "Happiness-- or felicity, as Hobbes calls it-- is just a life filled with the satisfaction of our desires." 
• Hobbes: "The weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest." 
• "Traditional philosophers, he [Francis Bacon] said, are like spiders, spinning out intricate conceptions from their own insides. Alchemists and other early investigators were like ants, scurrying about collecting facts without any organized method. We should rather follow the example of the bees; let scientists cooperate in acquiring data, offering interpretations, conducting experiments, and drawing judicious conclusions."
• "Bacon identified four 'idols' that, he said, have hindered the advance of knowledge: (1) idols of the tribe-- tendencies resident in human nature itself, such as imagining that the senses give us a direct picture of their objects or imagining that there is more order in experience than we actually find; (2) idols of the den-- people's inclination to interpret experiences according to their private dispositions or favorite theories; (3) idols of the marketplace-- language that subverts communication through ambiguities in words or in names that are assumed to name something but actually do not; and (4) idols of the theater-- the dogma of traditional philosophy, which portray the universe no more accurately than stage plays portray everyday life." 
• "Nature, Bacon told us, can be commanded only by obeying her; by submitting to nature's own ways through carefully designed experiments, we can gain knowledge." 
• "Hobbes uses the term 'right' to refer to this liberty everyone has in the state of nature. So Jones having the 'right' to defend himself is simply the fact that there are no rules that curtail his tendency to preserve his life and happiness."
• "Each of us, according to this second law, should be content with as much liberty with respect to others as we are willing to allow with respect to ourselves. There should be-- in order to end the state of war-- a mutual limiting of rights, as far as this is of mutual benefit to each." 
• "Although a clear implication of Cartesian method is that 'first' philosophy is really epistemology, Descartes' own meditations are still in the metaphysical mode." 
• "Unless we are clear about our capacities for gaining knowledge, we are likely to waste our time in controversies over matters that are beyond our grasp and end in confusion. Understanding how our mind works and whence its contents come has to be the first order of business." 
• John Locke: "It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish which lies in the way to knowledge." 
• "Moreover, he thinks that circumscribing the scope of our understanding will be a very useful thing to do; he is not writing just to satisfy curiosity on this score, but to mitigate the quarrels-- religious, political, or what have you-- leading even to wars, that arise when men believe they have certainty about things that are actually beyond our powers to know." 
• "That there are such ideas in our minds, Locke says, we all admit. The first question is this: How do they get there?" 
• Locke: "Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: -- How comes it to be furnished?"
• "On the one hand, there is the experience of external objects via our senses; this is the first and greatest source of ideas. Locke calls this source sensation. Here we get the ideas of yellow, hot, cold, hard, soft, bitter, sweet, and so on. On the other hand, we can reflect internally on how our minds work, garnering ideas of mental operations. Locke calls this source reflection. From reflections we get the ideas of perceiving, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and so on." 
• "A simple idea is one that, 'being in itself uncompounded, contains in it nothing but one uniform appearance, or conception in the mind.'" 
• "What might seem to be a single experience may be composed of several simple ideas; touching a piece of ice, for instance, produces not one idea but the two distinguishable ideas of cold and hard."
• Locke: "When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make as pleasure new complex ideas." 
• "Modes... do not exist on their own, but only as modifications of a substance. Locke strives to show that our ideas of space, time, and infinity are modes, built by adding simple ideas to simple ideas. Relations are of many kinds and are very important in our knowledge. Examples are knowing that one thing occurs before another, that this is nixt to that, that a causes b, that x is identical with y, and that two numbers added make a third number." 
• "Two principles characterize what we might call commonsense realism about the world.
• "Things exist independently of our perceiving that they do.
• "Things have the qualities they seem to have: The rose we see is really red, the sugar on our tongue is really sweet, and the fire we approach is really hot.
• "Berkeley wants to defend our natural belief in both of these claims." 
• "According to Locke, material substances do exist independently of our perception of them. Moreover, they have qualities of their own-- the primary qualities of extension, figure, solidity, and motion. However, Locke insists that the true nature of substance is unknowable. Berkeley asks: How does this differ from skepticism?"