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Plato's middle to later works, including his most famous work, the Republic, are generally regarded as
providing Plato's own philosophy, where the main character in effect speaks for Plato himself. These
works blend ethics, political philosophy, moral psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics into an
interconnected and systematic philosophy. It is most of all from Plato that we get the theory of Forms,
according to which the world we know through the senses is only an imitation of the pure, eternal, and
unchanging world of the Forms. Plato's works also contain the origins of the familiar complaint that the
arts work by inflaming the passions, and are mere illusions. We also are introduced to the ideal of
"Platonic love:" Plato saw love as motivated by a longing for the highest Form of beauty—The Beautiful
Itself, and love as the motivational power through which the highest of achievements are possible.
Because they tended to distract us into accepting less than our highest potentials, however, Plato
mistrusted and generally advised against physical expressions of love.
Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western
philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound
impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his
metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large
part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply,
is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It
is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics.
The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in
constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind’s access only to the empirical realm of
space and time.
Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate
that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists’ notion that pure, a priori
knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured with forms of
experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of
empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world,
but they are necessary for experience of spatio-temporal objects with their causal behavior and logical
properties. These two theses constitute Kant’s famous transcendental idealism and empirical realism.
Kant’s contributions to ethics have been just as substantial, if not more so, than his work in metaphysics
and epistemology. He is the most important proponent in philosophical history of deontological, or
duty based, ethics. In Kant’s view, the sole feature that gives an action moral worth is not the outcome
that is achieved by the action, but the motive that is behind the action. And the only motive that can
endow an act with moral value, he argues, is one that arises from universal principles discovered by
reason. The categorical imperative is Kant’s famous statement of this duty: “Act only according to that
maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
John Locke (1632—1704)
John Locke was among the most famous philosophers and political theorists of the 17 th century. He is
often regarded as the founder of a school of thought known as British Empiricism, and he made
foundational contributions to modern theories of limited, liberal government. He was also influential
in the areas of theology, religious toleration, and educational theory. In his most important work,
the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke set out to offer an analysis of the human mind
and its acquisition of knowledge. He offered an empiricist theory according to which we acquire ideas
through our experience of the world. The mind is then able to examine, compare, and combine these
ideas in numerous different ways. Knowledge consists of a special kind of relationship between different
ideas. Locke’s emphasis on the philosophical examination of the human mind as a preliminary to the
philosophical investigation of the world and its contents represented a new approach to philosophy,
one which quickly gained a number of converts, especially in Great Britain. In addition to this broader
project, the Essay contains a series of more focused discussions on important, and widely divergent,
philosophical themes. In politics, Locke is best known as a proponent of limited government. He uses
a theory of natural rights to argue that governments have obligations to their citizens, have only limited
powers over their citizens, and can ultimately be overthrown by citizens under certain circumstances.
He also provided powerful arguments in favor of religious toleration. This article attempts to give a
broad overview of all key areas of Locke’s thought.
René Descartes (1596—1650)
René Descartes is often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” This title is justified
due both to his break with the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy prevalent at his time and
to his development and promotion of the new, mechanistic sciences. His fundamental break with
Scholastic philosophy was twofold. First, Descartes thought that the Scholastics’ method was prone to
doubt given their reliance on sensation as the source for all knowledge. Second, he wanted to replace
their final causal model of scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic model.
Descartes attempted to address the former issue via his method of doubt. His basic strategy was to
consider false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt. This “hyperbolic doubt” then serves
to clear the way for what Descartes considers to be an unprejudiced search for the truth. This clearing
of his previously held beliefs then puts him at an epistemological ground-zero. From here Descartes sets
out to find something that lies beyond all doubt. He eventually discovers that “I exist” is impossible to
doubt and is, therefore, absolutely certain. It is from this point that Descartes proceeds to
demonstrate God’s existence and that God cannot be a deceiver. This, in turn, serves to fix the certainty
of everything that is clearly and distinctly understood and provides the epistemological foundation
Descartes set out to find.
Once this conclusion is reached, Descartes can proceed to rebuild his system of previously dubious
beliefs on this absolutely certain foundation. These beliefs, which are re-established with absolute
certainty, include the existence of a world of bodies external to the mind, the dualistic distinction of the
immaterial mind from the body, and his mechanistic model of physics based on the clear and distinct
ideas of geometry. This points toward his second, major break with the Scholastic Aristotelian tradition
in that Descartes intended to replace their system based on final causal explanations with his system
based on mechanistic principles. Descartes also applied this mechanistic framework to the operation of
plant, animal and human bodies, sensation and the passions. All of this eventually culminating in a
moral system based on the notion of “generosity.”
The presentation below provides an overview of Descartes’ philosophical thought as it relates to these
various metaphysical, epistemological, religious, moral and scientific issues, covering the wide range of
his published works and correspondence.