Rene Descartes was an 18th century philosopher who, like many other philosophers, was

a man posing his thoughts on the way that the world worked on both a broad and personal
perspective. Through an attempt to resolve personal conflict between his religious beliefs, he was
a catholic, and his scientific intuitions, he took an interactionist view which has been dubbed as
Cartesian dualism. In this theory he posed a mechanist view where the body was a machine, but
it was under control of cogito. Cogito, said to reside in the pineal gland, was the persons soul and
is completely non-physical, however it is the reciever of sensations which can be said to be of the
physical world. The mechanical body, being under sole control of cogito, acts after cogito has
appraised sensations and sends out appropriate physical orders to the body. Descartes also
argued that there are ideas that are so unflawed i.e. God, mathematics, infinity, etc. that they
must have been placed in the minds of humans by a source just as perfect as said ideas. Of
course the source for such perfection is the work of God in Descartes view. Although Descartes
ideas are extremely profound and insightful, it was the scrutinization of his theories which may
prove to be just as important as any of his works. Descartes paved the way for many other great
minds to express there views either by agreeing with, arguing against, or posing a revision of his
ideas.
One of the schools of thinking that arose from Cartesian dualism was the British
empericists. Johne Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume are three of these empiricists. The
general position of the empiricists was the the experience is what shapes the mind. One of the
early minds to come out in protest against Descartes views was Johne Locke. Locke was an
empericist all the way. He completely rejected the notion that there are any innate ideas. He used
the phrase tabula rosa, which is latin for blank slate, as a metaphor for the human mind. We are
all born with no a priori knowledge and everything we know comes from experience. It is through
our reflection on the conscious experience that we form our complex ideas. Although he argued
against nativism, he took a stance that the way in which we are able to process our sensations
and reflections was predetermined. Lockes theorized that the way that we experience is due to
the primary and secondary sense properties. The primary sense proporties are the objective
properties of the physical world such as motion or solidity. The secondary sense properties are
subjective and are added by our sense organs and can include such things as temperature and
color.
George Berkelely was a well educated Irish bishop who completely rejected materialism.
He took an immatterialistic view and questioned whether matter as we know it even exists.
Berkeley believed that only our perceptions exist and it was because of God, who was always
percieving us, that we were able to percieve. The sense properties allowed to us through Gods
perception was what formed our reality. This was not Gods reality, rather the reality forced on us
through Gods perception. So if our reality is all secondary senses, that leads to the question
which Berkelely also asked: Is our reality really real? If our reality is a perception of two
dimensions, and those two dimensions impose a 3rd dimension never actually percieved then
how do we know that the 3rd dimension really exists. This can be seen quite simply and right now
as I am writing on my computer I am looking at the monitor. All that I can see is the front of the
monitor and I dont even know if there is a back to it. I can turn it around and look at the back but
just as I do, the front of the monitor disappears. It is sort of like a magic trick making something
disappear right before your eyes, but this is how we visually process the world. It is theories such
as Berkeleys that question the very foundation of our existence and can still be seen as a topic of
interest today especially since the movie " The Matrix" where this idea of a three dimensional
world is brought to trial.
David Hume also did not agree with Descartes idea of the all powerful cogito. Hume
believed that the way in which we organized our thoughts were through experience. Experience
came about through perceptions which came from ideas and impressions. The impressions were
given higher status since they came from our direct sensory impressions, or from either calm or
violent reflection. Hume believed that our ideas, simple(single sensation that cant be broken
down) and complex(constituents of simple ideas), were not as important as our impressions. On
the topic of causation Hume thought that a cause could never be percieved, rather it could only
be implied from an effect and reflection upon many cause and effect scenarios. Our abiltiy to
reflect upon these scenarios and determine cause and effect was due the Law of Contiguity and
our ability to see time as a straight line always moving forward. We percieve the cooccurence of
events temporaly and are able to say, " I turned the handle and then the door opened; Turning
the handle, caused the door to open."
David Hartley was trained as a minister but became a physician which may have been
why he was sympathetic to human physiology. Hartley believed that learning took no reflection or
thinking and was done involuntarily. This was not to say that there was not voluntary behavior,
except that the voluntary behavior was controlled by ideas and stimuli while the involuntary where
controlled by reflexes. Once voluntary acts were done to the point to which they are "mindless"
they become reflexes. Hartley, like Hume, put great emphasis on the cooccurence of events.
While Locke believed that complex ideas spawned from reflection, Hartley believed it took no
introspection and that complex ideas were formed automatically through associations, either
simultaneaous or successive. Hartley also posed the theory that all ideas were derived from
vibrations in the brain that remain after a sensation. These remenant vibrations were called
vibratiuncles.
James Mill wrote a book that is the takes an in depth look at associationism. He also
came up with the idea of mental physics where he theorized that ideas were comprised of mental
elements which were dependant on the laws of association. It is this idea that would make him a
psychological atomist much like Hume. The degree of assciation was related to the vivedness
and frequency of the sensations and ideas. James Mill fathered John Stewart Mill whos works
attemped to discover the laws that govern human nature. J.S. Mill came up with primary and
secondary laws. Primary laws were those which governed a phenomenon such as gravity, and
secondary laws were those which interfered with primary and make it hard to predict. In a
situation with gravity being a phenomenon the secondary laws may be something like the shape
of the object and wind resistance which will interfere with the laws of gravity. Unlike his atomist
father, J.S. Mill endorsed the idea of mental chemistry in where certain ideas combine like
chemicals to form unique ideas.
Thomas Reid was a rationalist and a commensense philosopher. Commensense
philosophers believed that we should trust our impressions of the physical world because we all
naturally posses the power to make sense of the world. Basically he didn't believe in questioning
reality or matter or the whys and hows. He just figured that we are part of the world and we
should be able to understand it.Reid was a naive realist who thought the world is just as we
experience it. He did not place emphasis of impressions or simple vs. complex ideas such as
Hume or Hartley, rather he felt that God endowed us with all we need to make sense of the world
and was not in the business of tricking us with false reality or lettling us only know the world
through left over fragments of sensations. Reid also believed that there were faculties of the
mind(43 total) such as attention, consciousness, judgement etc.which acted to bring the mind
together as a functioning unit.
Immanuel Kant was intrigued by Hume and agreed that we may never truly experience
the cause, in a cause and effect relationship. Kant however, questioned where we got the very
concept of cause. This is where Kant, in a similar fashion to Reid's faculties, came up with
innnate categories of thought. Our perception of the world was imposed on us by the categories
of our mind such as totality, time, reality etc. These categories of thought were the truths of the
mind, the constants that never change. Kant did not discount the notion of sense perception but
felt that the categories are what shaped the perception of our senses into meaningful thought.
This is known as the phenomenological experience and is similar to Berkley's view that
organization is imposed by our minds. Kant theorized that all of reality was made of noumena and
never be able to know noumena so just as Hume thought the quest for absolute certainty was
pointless, Kant would agree and say that indeed studying the mind was pointless. The mind was
made of the empirical ego which was conscious thought. Empirical ego was all the sense data
that could be introspected on. The transcendental ego is sort of like Descartes cogito and is never
directly experienced and infact is not known.