René Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and writer of the Age

of Reason. He has been called the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western
philosophy can be seen as a response to his writings. He is responsible for one of the best-known
quotations in philosophy: "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am").

He was a pioneer and major figure in 17th Century Continental Rationalism (often known as
Cartesianism) later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the British
Empiricist school of thought of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. He represents a major break with
the Aristotelianism and Scholasticism of the Medieval period.

His contribution to mathematics was also of the first order, as the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate
system and the founder of analytic geometry, crucial to the invention of calculus and mathematical
analysis. He was also one of the key figures in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th Centuries.

Life

Descartes (pronounced day-CART) was born in the town of La Haye en Touraine (since renamed
Descartes) in the Loire Valley in central France on 31 March 1596. His father, Joachim Descartes, was a
busy lawyer and magistrate in the High Court of Justice, and his mother, Jeanne (née Brochard), died of
tuberculosis when René was just one year old. René and his brother and sister, Pierre and Jeanne, were
therefore mainly raised by their grandmother.

From 1604 until 1612, he attended the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche, Anjou, studying
classics, logic and traditional Aristotelianism philosophy. His health was poor and he was granted
permission to remain in bed until 11 o'clock in the morning, a custom he maintained for the rest of his
life. He then spent some time in Paris studying mathematics, before studing law at the University of
Poitiers, in accordance with his father's wishes that he should become a lawyer, obtaining his law
degree in 1616.

However, he then abandoned his education and spent several years travelling and experiencing the
world (he later claimed that his formal education provided little of substance). It was during this time (in
1618) that he met the Dutch philosopher and scientist Isaac Beeckman (1588 - 1637) while walking
through Breda in Holland, who sparked his interest in mathematics and the new physics.

In 1622, he returned to France, and soon afterwards sold all his property at La Haye, investing the
proceeds in bonds which provided him with a comfortable income for the rest of his life. He returned to
settle in Holland in 1628. The next year, he joined the University of Franeker; the year after that, Leiden
University; and, in 1635, he is recorded as attending Utrecht University. He had a daughter, Francine,
after a relationship in Amsterdam with a servant girl, Helène Jans, although Francine died at the age of
fve. In fact, in the years between 1828 and 1649, he lived at 14 separate addresses in 10 different Dutch
cities.

It was during this 20 year period of frequent moves that he wrote almost all of his major works on
philosophy, mathematics and science. He shrewdly held off publication of his first work, "Le Monde"
("The World"), written between 1629 and 1633, due to the condemnation of the works of Galileo Galilei
(1564 - 1642) and Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543) by the Roman Catholic Church in 1633. The most
famous of his works include: the "Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa Raison et chercher la
Vérité dans les Sciences" ("Discourse on the Method") of 1637, his first rationalist vision of the progress
of human knowledge; the "Meditationes de Prima Philosophia" ("Meditations on First Philosophy") of
1641, a more formal exposition of his central tenets, in Latin; and the "Principia Philosophiae"
("Principles of Philosophy") of 1644, an even more systematic and comprehensive exposition of his
views. For a time, in 1643, Cartesian philosophy was condemned by the University of Utrecht.

Descartes died of pneumonia on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been invited as
a teacher for Queen Christina of Sweden. Later, his remains were taken to France and buried in the
church of Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris, and then, during the French Revolution, disinterred for
burial in the Panthéon among the other great thinkers of France. Currently, his tomb is in the church of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, and his brain is in the Musée de l'Homme.

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Descartes lived during a very skeptical period, at a time before science as we know it existed, and after a
long period of relative stagnation in philosophical thought during the Church-dominated and Aristotle-
influenced late Middle Ages. He had been impressed, in both his academic work and in his experience of
the world at large, by the realization that there appeared to be no certain way of acquiring knowledge,
and he saw his main task as the epistemological one of establishing what might be certain knowledge as
a stepping stone towards the ultimate pursuit of truth. His more immediate aim in this was to put
scientific enquiry in a position where it was no longer subject to attack by Skeptics, and he tried to do
this by a kind of pre-emptive Skepticism, essentially by being more skeptical than the Skeptics.

At the heart of Descartes' philosophical method was his refusal to accept the authority of previous
philosophers, and even of the evidence of his own senses, and to trust only that which was clearly and
distinctly seen to be beyond any doubt (a process often referred to as methodological skepticism or
Cartesian doubt or hyperbolic doubt). Only then did he allow himself to reconstruct knowledge (piece by
piece, such that at no stage was the possibility of doubt allowed to creep back in) in order to acquire a
firm foundation for genuine knowledge and to dispel any Skepticism.

He outlined four main rules for himself in his thinking:

Never accept anything except clear and distinct ideas.

Divide each problem into as many parts are needed to solve it.

Order your thoughts from the simple to the complex.

Always check thoroughly for oversights.

Using this process, which he detailed in his epochal "Discourse on the Method" of 1637 and expanded in
the "Meditations on First Philosophy" of 1641, Descartes attempted to narrow down, by what is
sometimes called the method of doubt, what was certain and what contained even a shadow of a doubt.
For example, he realized that he could doubt even something as apparently fundamental as whether he
had a body (it could be that he was just dreaming of it or that it was an illusion created by an evil
demon), but he could not, under any circumstances, doubt whether he had a mind or that he could
think. He followed this up with a pure, abstract thought experiment. He imagined an evil spirit (or
"deceiving demon") whose sole intention was to mislead him, and asked whether there was anything
about which the demon would not be able to mislead him. His conclusion was the act of thinking, that
the demon could never make him believe that he was thinking when he was not (because, after all, even
a false thought is still a thought).
Because he believed that the reason is the reason that men exist, he then argued that, if someone was
wondering whether or not he existed, then the very act of thinking was, in and of itself, proof that he did
in fact exist: the famous Latin, "Cogito ergo sum" is found in his later "Principles of Philosophy". It is
worth mentioning here that, by "thinking", Descartes did not just mean conceptual thought, but all
forms of consciousness, experience, feelings, etc.

Having dispelled all doubt by this process, Descartes then worked to build up, or reconstitute, the world
again. But he was careful not to do this willy-nilly, but only according to his own very strict rules, so that
the "reconstituted world" was not the same as the original one which he had dismantled piece by piece
due to doubts. The way he achieved this (which, it must be said, appears from a modern viewpoint like
something of a conjuring trick) was to argue that among the contents of our (certain) consciousness was
the idea of God, which in itself he saw as proof of the existence of God. He then argued that, if we have
the overwhelming impression of the existence of a concrete world around us, as we do, then an
omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God would ensure that such a world does in fact exist for
us. Furthermore, he asserted that the essence of this physical world was extension (that it takes up
space), contrary to the extensionless world of the mind.

Paradoxically, this was an essential step forward in 17th Century science as it established a physical
world which was of a mathematical character and permitted mathematical physics to be used to explain
it. Also important is that, as we have seen, although God was indispensible to Descartes' method of
arriving at a physical world, once such a world was accepted, it was no longer necessary to involve God
in the description and measurement and explanation of how things work. Thus, the process of science
was freed from theological contraints and interference.

Descartes dismissed the senses and perception as unreliable, and to demonstrate this he used the so-
called Wax Argument. This revolves around the idea that a wax object, which has certain properties of
size, colour, smell, temperature, etc, appears to change almost all of these properties when it is melted,
to the extent that it appears to our senses to be a completely different thing. However, we know that it
is in fact still the same piece of wax. Descartes concluded from this that the senses can be misleading
and that reason and deduction is the only reliable method of attaining knowledge, which is the essence
of Rationalism.

Descartes further argued that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily (not willed by him), and are
therefore external to his senses and therefore evidence of the existence of an external world outside of
his mind. He argued that the things in the external world are material because God would not deceive
him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and has given him the propensity to believe that such
ideas are caused by material things. Because of this belief that God is benevolent and does not desire to
deceive him, he can therefore have some faith in the account of reality his senses provide him.

Descartes believed that the human body works like a machine, that it has the material properties of
extension and motion, and that it follows the laws of physics. The pieces of the human machine, he
argued, are like clockwork mechanisms, and that the machine could be understood by taking its pieces
apart, studying them, and then putting them back together to see the larger picture (an idea referred to
as Reductionism). The mind or soul, on the other hand, is a non-material entity that lacks extension and
motion, and does not follow the laws of physics.

Descartes was the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it exists today (see the
section on Philosophy of Mind), and the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-
awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the physical seat of intelligence (Dualism).
In his epistemological work in the "Discourse on the Method", he had realized that, although he could
doubt that he possessed a body, he could not under any circumstances doubt that he possessed a mind,
which led him to conclude that the mind and the body were two very different and separate things. His
particular form of Dualism (known as Cartesian Dualism) proposed that the mind controls the body, but
that the body also influences the otherwise rational mind (such as when people act out of passion) in a
kind of two-way interaction, which he claimed, without much evidence, occurred in the pineal gland.
Gilbert Ryle later described this kind of Dualism (where mental activity carries on in parallel to physical
action, but where their means of interaction are unknown or, at best, speculative) as the "ghost in the
machine". Although his own solution was far from convincing, this kind of Cartesian Dualism set the
agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind-body problem for many years after Descartes' death.

It should be noted, however, that for all Descartes' innovation and boldness, he does not abandon the
traditional idea of God. He defined "substance" (essentially meaning what the world really consists of)
as "that which requires nothing other than itself in order to exist", but he concluded that the only true
substance was God himself, because everything else (from souls to material objects like the human
body) was dependent on God for its existence. He used his own variations of the causal argument, the
ontological argument and the cosmological argument for the existence of God in his "Meditations" (see
the section on Philosophy of Religion), and the existence of God played a major role in his validation of
reason and in other parts of Descartes’ system. Given the important rôle God plays in his work,
suggestions that Descartes was really a closet atheist, and that he includes the arguments for the
existence of God as window dressing, appear extremely unlikley.

In mathematics, Descartes realized that a graph could be drawn to show a geometrical interpretation of
a mathematical function using points known as Cartesian coordinates, and thereby founded analytic
geometry or Cartesian geometry (using algebra to describe geometry), which was crucial to the
subsequent development of calculus by Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727) and Gottfried Leibniz. He also
invented the notation which uses superscripts to indicate powers or exponents, and his rule of signs is
also a commonly used method to determine the number of positive and negative zeros of a polynomial.
It can be argued that his reflections on mind and mechanism, impelled by the invention of the electronic
computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence, blossomed into the Turing test of a machine's
capability to demonstrate intelligence.

In optics, he showed by using geometric construction and the law of refraction (also known as
Descartes' law) that the angular radius of a rainbow is 42 degrees. He also independently discovered the
law of reflection (that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection).

In physics, Descartes introduced (before Newton) the concept of momentum of a moving body (what he
termed the "amount of motion"), which he defined as the product of the mass of the body and its
velocity or speed. His three "laws of nature" became the basis of Newton's later laws of motion and the
modern theory of dynamics: that each thing tries to remain in the same state and, once moved,
continues to move; that all movement is along straight lines; and that when a body comes into contact
with another body the combined "quantity of motion" remain the same (his conservation of motion
principle).

In an attempt to explain the orbits of planets, Descartes also constructed his vortex theory which would
become the most popular theory of planetary motion of the late 17th Century (although subsequently
discredited). However, he continued to cling to the traditional mechanical philosophy of the 17th
Century, which held that everything physical in the universe to be made of tiny "corpuscles" of matter
(although, unlike Atomism, the theory maintained that there could be no vacuum, just a mass of swirling
matter).

For Descartes, ethics was a science, the highest and most perfect of them. Like the rest of the sciences,
ethics had its roots in metaphysics.[30] In this way he argues for the existence of God, investigates the
place of man in nature, formulates the theory of mind-body dualism, and defends free will. However, as
he was a convinced rationalist, Descartes clearly states that reason is sufficient in the search for the
goods that we should seek, and virtue consists in the correct reasoning that should guide our actions.
Nevertheless, the quality of this reasoning depends on knowledge, because a well-informed mind will be
more capable of making good choices, and it also depends on mental condition. For this reason he said
that a complete moral philosophy should include the study of the body. He discussed this subject in the
correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, and as a result wrote his work The Passions of the
Soul, that contains a study of the psychosomatic processes and reactions in man, with an emphasis on
emotions or passions.

Descartes in his Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body suggested that the body
works like a machine, that it has material properties. The mind (or soul), on the other hand, was
described as a nonmaterial and does not follow the laws of nature. Descartes argued that the mind
interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism or duality proposes that the mind
controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when
people act out of passion. Most of the previous accounts of the relationship between mind and body
had been uni-directional.

Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is "the seat of the soul" for several reasons. First, the soul is
unitary, and unlike many areas of the brain the pineal gland appeared to be unitary (though
subsequent microscopic inspection has revealed it is formed of two hemispheres). Second, Descartes
observed that the pineal gland was located near the ventricles. He believed the cerebrospinal fluid of
the ventricles acted through the nerves to control the body, and that the pineal gland influenced this
process. Sensations delivered by the nerves to the pineal, he believed, caused it to vibrate in some
sympathetic manner, which in turn gave rise to the emotions and caused the body to act.[22]
Cartesian dualism set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind–body problem for many
years after Descartes' death.[34]

BARUCH SPINOZA

Baruch Spinoza (AKA Benedict Spinoza) (1623 - 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish
origin who lived and worked during the Age of Reason.

Along with René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, he is considered one of the great Rationalists of the
17th Century, although the breadth and importance of his work was not fully realized until years after
his death.

An enormously controversial figure (both in his own day and after) for the highly original and
provocative positions he advocated, Spinoza is nowadays respected as one of the definitive ethicists
(he took a largely Moral Relativist position), and as a harbinger of enlightened modernity. His
metaphysical views were essentially monistic and pantheistic, holding that God and Nature were just
two names for the same single underlying reality.

Life

Spinoza was born on 24 November 1632 in Amsterdam, Holland, to a family of Sephardic Jews
descended from displaced Maranos from Portugal. His father was Abraão (Miguel) de Spinoza, a
successful importer and merchant; his mother was Ana Débora, Miguel's second of three wives, who
died when Baruch was only six years old.

He had a traditional Jewish upbringing, and his early education consisted mainly of religious study,
including instruction in Hebrew, liturgy, Torah, prophetic writings and rabbinical commentaries.
However, his critical, curious nature would soon come into conflict with the Jewish community.

At the age of 17, when his father died in the wars against England and France and the family fortune
was decimated, Spinoza was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family business,
although he was eventually able to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his
brother, Gabriel, and devote himself to his real love, philosophy. He gave away his share of his
father's inheritance to his sister, and lived the rest of his life in genteel poverty as a grinder of optical
lenses.

In 1656, Spinoza was issued a writ of "cherem" (the Jewish equivalent of excommunication) for the
apostasy of how he conceived God, and for various positions contrary to normative Jewish belief and
his criticisms of the Talmud and other religious texts. He had reportedly been offered 1000 florins to
keep quiet about his views, but had refused on principle. Following his excommunication, he adopted
the first name Benedictus or Benedict (the Latin equivalent of Baruch, meaning "blessed") or, more
informally, the Portuguese equivalent Bento.

After his excommunication, Spinoza lived and worked at times at the school of his old Latin teacher,
Franciscus van den Enden, an atheist and devotee of the Rationalism of Descartes, who was forbidden
by the city government to propagate his doctrines publicly. He dedicated himself completely to
philosophy, and his fervent desire was to change the world through establishing a clandestine
philosophical sect, although this was only eventually realized after his death, through the dedicated
intercession of his friends.

He became acquainted with several Collegiants, members of an eclectic sect with tendencies towards
Rationalism, as well as corresponding with Petrus Serrarius (1600 -1669), a radical Protestant and
millennarian merchant, who acted as a patron of Spinoza for a time. By the beginning of the 1660s,
Spinoza's name had become more widely known, and he met and corresponded with Gottfried Leibniz
and Henry Oldenburg (1619 - 1677). Around 1661, he relocated from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg (near
Leiden) and later lived in Voorburg (1663) and then The Hague, earning a comfortable living from his
work as an optician and lens-grinding, although he was also supported by small, but regular,
donations from close friends. He never married, nor did he father any children.

Spinoza's first publication was a geometric exposition of the work of Descartes, the two part
"Principia philosophiae cartesianae" ("Principles of Cartesian Philosophy"), published in 1663. In the
early 1660s, he worked on what was to become his magnum opus, the "Ethics", but he suspended the
work in 1665 in favour of his "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" ("Theologico-Political Treatise"), which
was eventually published anonymously in 1670. The public reaction to this work, though, was
extremely unfavourable and Spinoza was wary enough to abstain from publishing more of his works
for the rest of his life (the "Ethics" and several other works were all published posthumously by his
friends, in secrecy). Even his colleague Leibniz disagreed harshly with it (and published his own
detailed refutation), although some of Leibniz's own work bears some striking resemblances to certain
key parts of Spinoza's philosophy. In 1676, Spinoza met with Leibniz at The Hague to privately discuss
his "Ethics", which he had just completed but dared not publish.

Spinoza died at the young age of 44 on 21 February 1677 in The Hague, due to a lung illness (perhaps
tuberculosis or silicosis, possibly due to breathing in fine glass dust from the lenses he ground). Even
after his death, Spinoza did not escape controversy, and in 1678 his works were banned throughout
Holland.

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Although he is usually counted, along with Descartes and Leibniz, as one of the three major
Rationalists of the 17th Century, his writings reveal the influence of such divergent sources as
Stoicism, Jewish Rationalism, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes and a variety of heterodox religious
thinkers of his day, and he made significant contributions in virtually every area of philosophy. His
pursuits were eclectic and his thought was strikingly original, which makes him somewhat difficult to
categorize.

His first published work, the "Principia philosophiae cartesianae" ("Principles of Cartesian
Philosophy") of 1663, was a systematic presentation of the philosophy of Descartes, to which he
added his own suggestions for its improvement, and it already contained many of the characteristic
elements of his later work. The "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" ("Theologico-Political Treatise") of
1670 was an examination of superficial popular religion in general and a vigorous critique of the
militant Protestantism practised in Holland at the time. He argued that Christians and Jews could live
peaceably together if they would only rise above the petty theological and cultural controversies that
divided them. The core of Spinoza's ethical views was encapsulated in his early "Tractatus de
intellectus emendatione" ("Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding").

But his major work was the monumental "Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata" ("Ethics"), an
abstract and difficult work, finished in 1676 but only published posthumously in 1677. Each of its five
consituent books comprises a long sequence of numbered propositions, each of which is deduced
through a method consciously modelled on the deductive logic used by the Greek mathematician
Euclid in his seminal work on geometry. Like Euclid, Spinoza started with a small set of self-evident
definitions and axioms, meticulously built up his deductive argument, and concluded each section
with a triumphant "QED" ("quod erat demonstrandum", or "that which was to be demonstrated"). It
is sometimes held up as a supreme example of a self-contained metaphysical system, whose object is
nothing less than to explain everything, the total scheme of reality.

As a young man, Spinoza had subscribed to Descartes' belief in Dualism, that body and mind are two
separate substances. However, he later changed his view (as demonstrated in the "Ethics") and
asserted that they were not separate, but a single identity, and that body and mind were just two
names for the same reality. Starting from Descartes' definition of substance as "that which requires
nothing other than itself in order to exist", Spinoza's conclusion was quite different from that of
Descartes: where Descartes saw the one underlying substance as being God, Spinoza saw it as the
totality of everything (in other words, Nature). All of reality, then, was really just one substance, and
all apparently different objects were merely facets or aspects (what he called "modes") of that
underlying substance. In this way, Spinoza refined Descartes' rather unsatisfactory treatment of the
mind-body problem in Philosophy of Mind by positing that the physical and mental worlds (extension
and consciousness) were essentially one and the same thing. This was therefore a kind of Monism, as
opposed to Descartes' Dualism, (more specifically, it was a historically significant solution known as
Neutral Monism).

Following on from this analysis, then, Spinoza saw God and Nature as just two names for the same
reality of the universe, essentially a kind of Pantheism. Thus, he believed that there was just one set
of rules governing the whole of reality, and that the basis of the universe was a single substance, of
which all lesser entities are actually "modes" or modifications. Spinoza's "God" (or "Nature") was
therefore a being of infinitely many attributes, of which extension and thought were but the two that
we can understand. He envisaged a God that was not a transcendent creator of the universe who
rules over the universe by providence, but a God that itself is the deterministic system of which
everything in nature is a part. Thus, for Spinoza, God effectively is the infinite natural world and He
has no separate "personality", nor is he in some way outside of Nature (supernatural).

Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs
through the operation of necessity, leaving absolutely no room for free will and spontaneity. For him,
even human behaviour is fully determined, and freedom (or what we presume to be free will) is
limited to merely our capacity to know that we are determined and to understand why we act as we
do. Nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and reason does not work in terms of contingency.

Spinoza's Ethics have much in common with Stoicism in as much as both philosophies sought to fulfill
a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness (Eudaimonism). He asserted that the
"highest good" was knowledge of God, which was capable of bringing freedom from fear and the
tyranny of the passions, and ultimately true blessedness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from the
Stoics in his rejection of their contention that reason could overcome emotion. He contended that an
emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion, and that knowledge of the true
causes of passive emotions (those not rationally understood) could transform them into active
emotions (ones that can be rationally understood), thus anticipating by over 200 years one of the key
ideas of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939).

Spinoza took the Moral Relativist position that nothing is intrinsically good or bad, except to the
extent that it is subjectively perceived to be by the individual. In a completely ordered world where
"necessity" reigns, the concepts of Good and Evil can have no absolute meaning. Everything that
happens comes from the essential nature of objects or of God/Nature, and so, according to Spinoza,
reality is perfection, and everything done by humans and other animals is also excellent and divine. If
circumstances sometimes appear unfortunate or less than perfect to us, it is only because of our
inadequate conception of reality. He asserted that sense perception, though practical and useful for
rhetoric, is inadequate for discovering universal truth.

While it is easy to see why both the Jewish and Christian authorities of Spinoza's day felt both
appalled and threatened by his ideas, his philosophy did hold an attraction for late 18th Century
Europeans in that it provided an alternative to Materialism, Atheism and Deism. Three of Spinoza's
ideas in particular strongly appealed to them: the unity of all that exists; the regularity and order of all
that happens; and the identity of spirit and nature.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also Leibnitz or von Leibniz) (1646 - 1716) was a German philosopher,
mathematician, scientist and polymath of the Age of Reason.

As a philosopher, he was, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, a major figure in the
Continental Rationalism movement (the main 17th Century opposition to the British Empiricist school
of thought of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume). He devised his rather eccentric metaphysical
theory of monads operating in a pre-established divine harmony in order to overcome what he saw as
some of the drawbacks of the theories of Descartes and Spinoza. He remained a devout Christian
throughout his life and his formulation of the Problem of Evil in a world created by a good God was an
influential one.

His contributions to Logic were perhaps the most important between Aristotle and the developments
in modern formal Logic of the mid-19th Century, and to some extent he anticipated modern Symbolic
Logic.

He is equally important in the history of mathematics, as the inventor of calculus (independently of Sir
Isaac Newton), and as the discoverer of the binary system (the foundation of virtually all modern
computer architectures). He also made major contributions to physics, and anticipated notions that
surfaced much later in other sciences biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology,
linguistics and information science, as well as writing on politics, law, ethics, theology, history and
philology.

Life

Leibniz (pronounced LIBE-nitz) was born on 1 July 1646 in Leipzig in Saxony, eastern Germany. His
father, Friedrich Leibniz, died when Gottfried was just six years old, so he mainly learned his religious
and moral values from his mother, Catherina Schmuck (the daughter of a lawyer and Friedrich's third
wife). However, his father, who had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig,
left his personal library to his son, who was granted free access to it from age seven onwards, in
addition to attending the regular Nicolai School in Leipzig.

By twelve, he had taught himself Latin, which he used freely all his life, and had begun studying Greek.
At 14, he entered the University of Leipzig, mastering the standard university courses in classics, law,
Logic, and Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy under Jakob Thomasius (1622 - 1684), although his
education in mathematics was probably not up to the French and British standards.

In 1666, at the age of 20, he published his habilitation thesis and first book, "De Arte Combinatoria"
("On the Art of Combinations"), in which he aimed to reduce all reasoning and discovery to a
combination of basic elements (such as numbers, letters, sounds and colours). But, when the
University of Leipzig refused to assure him a position teaching law upon graduation, he submitted it to
the University of Altdorf instead, and obtained his doctorate in law there within five months.
However, he then declined their offer of an academic appointment, and instead spent the rest of his
life in the service of two major German noble families.

His first salaried position was as an alchemist in Nuremberg (even though he knew little or nothing
about the subject). During this time, he met and was befriended by the wealthy Baron Johann
Christian von Boineburg, who employed Leibniz as an assistant and later introduced him to the Elector
of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn. The Elector asked Leibniz to assist with the redrafting of the
legal code for his Electorate and, in 1669, appointed him Assessor in the Court of Appeal. Although
von Boineburg died late in 1672, Leibniz remained under the employment of his widow until she
dismissed him in 1674.

Leibniz's early service to the Elector was soon followed by a diplomatic role, and his political solution
to the increasing ambitions of King Louis XIV of France (principally aimed at diverting him from
attacking German areas) received cautious support in Germany and serious attention in France,
although it was never actually implemented. However, during his time in Paris, from around 1672, he
greatly expanded his knowledge of mathematics and physics, (especially after a stroke of luck in
meeting the Dutch physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens, who became his mentor for a
time), and began contributing to both, including the invention of his version of differential and
integral calculus. He also met the leading French philosophers of the day, Nicolas Malebranche and
Antoine Arnauld (1612 - 1694), and had the opportunity to study the published and unpublished
writings of Descartes and Pascal.

After the French political plan petered out, the Elector of Mainz sent Leibniz on a similar peace
mission to the English government in London, early in 1673. The mission ended abruptly with the
news of the Elector's death, but not before Leibniz had demonstrated to the Royal Society the first
calculating machine that could execute all four basic arithmetical operations (a project he had been
working on since 1670). He was made an external member of the prestigious Society, although he was
criticized by some of the members, and the experience served to show him that his knowledge of
mathematics was less than complete, and encouraged him to redouble his efforts.

With the sudden deaths of both the Elector of Mainz and (a few months earlier) of his other
benefactor, von Boineburg, Leibniz returned to Paris, rather than Mainz. Duke Johann Friedrich (the
Duke of Brunswick at that time), with whom Leibniz had been in correspondence since 1669, offered
him the post of Councillor and librarian at his court in Hanover, and (with no apparent prospects in
Paris or the Habsburg imperial court presenting themselves) he reluctantly accepted. He managed to
delay his arrival in Hanover until the end of 1676, though, and in the meantime he travelled again to
London (where he may have seen some of Sir Isaac Newton's work on calculus, fuelling later claims
that he had stolen ideas from Newton), and to The Hague in Holland, where he met Antonie van
Leeuwenhoek (1632 - 1723), the discoverer of microorganisms. He also spent several days in intense
discussion with the Dutch Rationalist philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, whom Leibniz greatly respected
(although dismayed at his apparent contradiction of both Christian and Jewish orthodoxy).

In 1677, he was promoted to Privy Counsellor of Justice of the House of Hanover, a post he held for
the rest of his life, serving three consecutive rulers as historian and political adviser, and as librarian of
the ducal library. He was also correspondent, adviser and friend to several influential women in the
Hanover court, including the Electress Sophia of Hanover, her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover
(the Queen of Prussia) and Caroline of Ansbach (consort of the future King George II of England) and,
despite the rather provincial nature of Hanover itself, Leibniz was to some extent involved in
European politics of the period.

He was also fortunate in that the Brunswicks allowed, and even encouraged, his intellectual pursuits
unrelated to his duties as a courtier, as well as the vast correspondence he kept up. Assigned projects,
like a commissioned history of the Guelf family of the House of Brunswick, however, often tended to
take a back seat to his personal scientific and philosophical work, and his dilatoriness led to a certain
amount of bad feeling.

Leibniz's most important mathematical papers were published between 1682 and 1692, particularly in
the "Acta Eruditorum", a journal which he co-founded with Otto Mencke in 1682, and which played a
key role in advancing his mathematical and scientific reputation. During the 1690s, he put much
energy into promoting scientific societies, and he was involved in moves to set up academies in Berlin,
Dresden, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. He was elected to the Paris Academy in 1701, after publication
of his paper on the binary system of arithmetic. He kept up regular corrspondence with over 600
correspondents, including most of the great scholars of Europe, in a great variety of different fields.
He often styled himself "von Leibniz", even though we have no confirmation that he was ever granted
a patent of nobility.

In 1712, Leibniz began a two year residence in Vienna, where he was appointed Imperial Court
Councillor to the Habsburgs. When Elector Georg Ludwig became King George I of Great Britain in
1714, under the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement (which Leibniz himself had done much to bring
about), he had hoped to be brought into the British court, but his hopes were soon dashed (especially
as Newton was seen as having "won" the calculus priority dispute). Finally, his dear friend and
defender, the dowager Electress Sophia, died in 1714.

Leibniz himself died in Hanover, Germany, on 14 November 1716, and his funeral was shunned by the
court of George I, the Royal Society and the Berlin Academy of Sciences, his grave remaining
unmarked for more than 50 years. He had never married or raised a family, and he left a fair sum
(earned from his well-paid position with the Brunswicks) to his sole heir, his sister's stepson.

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Leibniz wrote a great deal, but published hardly any of it during his life, his philosophy seeming to
take a back seat to his many other interests and duties. Other than the "Théodicée" of 1710 (the only
treatise Leibniz published in his lifetime), his philosophical writings consist mainly of a multitude of
short pieces (journal articles, manuscripts published long after his death, and many letters to many
correspondents), giving his philosophical thinking a fragmented appearance.

His first philosophical work, the "Discours de métaphysique" ("Discourse on Metaphysics"), written in
1686 but not actually published until the 19th Century, was a commentary on a running dispute
between the French Rationalists Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld (1612 - 1694), and led to
an extensive and valuable correspondence with Arnauld (covering, among other matters, one of
Leibniz's lifelong aims, the reunification of the Christian Churches). Between 1695 and 1705, he wrote
his "Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain" ("New Essays on Human Understanding"), a lengthy
commentary on John Locke's 1690 "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", although it too was
not published until 1765, long after his death.
The "Théodicée", written in 1710, is as much theological as philosophical. It tries to justify the
apparent imperfections of the world and to tackle the Problem of Evil in a world created by a good
God by claiming that our world is optimal among all possible worlds, and that it must be the best
possible and most balanced world, simply because it was created by a perfect God. The optimism of
this idea was lampooned by Voltaire in his comic novella, "Candide", although the modern
observations that led to the "fine-tuned Universe" argument may seem to support his view.

Perhaps Leibniz's best known contribution to Metaphysics (as exposited in the "Monadologie" of
1714), is his theory of monads, a form of dualistic Idealism sometimes known as Panpsychism or
Parallelism. Monads are the ultimate elements of the universe: eternal, immaterial, indecomposable,
individual, non-interacting, subject to their own laws, and each reflecting the entire universe in a pre-
established harmony (effectively "programmed" in advance by God, whom he called the "central
monad", to "harmonize" with each other). Unlike atoms, monads possess no material or spatial
character, and are completely mutually independent, so that interactions among monads are only
apparent. For Leibniz, then, everything in the material world that we see and touch are actually only
phenomena, merely appearances or by-products of the real world, which is in fact an infinite array of
these non-material monads. In some ways, this is not unlike the very modern idea of the universe
being ultimately composed of energy.

According to Leibniz's theory, human beings and even God himself are monads, and the existence of
God can be inferred from the harmony prevailing among all other monads (because it is God who wills
the pre-established harmony). Thus, the external world is ideal (in the philosophical sense of Idealism)
and phenomenal (in the philosophical sense of Phenomenology), and its motion is the result of a
dynamic force (the pre-established harmony or, effectively, God) on these simple and immaterial
monads. Although Leibniz claimed to believe in the existence of free will, his programme is essentially
a deterministic one.

Leibniz also used his theory of monads in an attempt to overcome the problematic interaction
between mind and matter arising in the system of Descartes (the so-called mind-body problem in
Philosophy of Mind). Indeed, he developed the theory largely to address it, unimpressed as he was
with Spinoza's earlier solution to this problem, with its lack of individuation and its representation of
individual creatures as merely accidental. In Leibniz's conception of things, there is really no need for
the concept of causality at all, as everything is pre-arranged and organized by the omnipotent God
himself. Leibniz's theory was, however, considered somewhat arbitrary and eccentric, even in his own
day.

Towards the end of his life, Leibniz published an essay called "Principles of Nature and Grace, Based
on Reason" (1714), in which he put forth his Principle of Sufficient Reason, which states that there is
an explanation for every fact and an answer to every question, however intractible they may appear.
Following from this, he was perhaps the first philosopher to explicitly ask the question "Why is there
something rather than nothing?", a fundamental and apparently intractible question that others had
shied away from. His answer to this question, perhaps disappointingly, was the rather formulaic one
of God, and when asked for an explanation for God's existence his equally unsatisfactory answer was
that God is a necessary being, such that his non-existence would be logically impossible, a response
that Hume and others took immediate issue with.

Although he published nothing on formal Logic in his lifetime, Leibniz can be considered the most
important logician between Aristotle and the mid-19th Century developments in modern formal Logic
of George Boole and Augustus De Morgan. He enunciated the principal properties of what we now call
conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, set inclusion and the empty set.

Quite early in his career, Leibniz's developed a calculus ratiocinator, which resembles modern
Symbolic Logic to some extent, based on his belief that much of human reasoning could be reduced to
calculations of a sort, and out of his passion for symbols and notation. He defining a "real" character
as a written sign that represents an idea directly, and not simply as the word embodying an idea (like
Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, and the symbols of astronomy and chemistry), and
proposed a "universal characteristic", built on an alphabet of human thought, in which each
fundamental concept would be represented by a unique "real" character, with more complex
thoughts represented by combining characters. Later, in 1676, when he had a better grounding in
mathematics, he conceive of a kind of "algebra of thought", modelled on and including conventional
algebra and its notation.

In mathematics, Leibniz was the first (in 1692 and 1694) to employ the mathematical notion of a
function explicitly to denote any of several geometric concepts derived from a curve, as well as the
first to see that the coefficients of a system of linear equations could be arranged into an array (now
called a matrix) which can be manipulated to find the solution of the system.

He is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton, with the discovery of infinitesimal calculus, which,
according to his notebooks, he employed for the first time in November 1675 to find the area under
the function y = x. He introduced several notations used to this day (e.g. the elongated S for the
integral sign, and the d used for differentials) and, in the autumn of 1676, he discovered the familiar
d(xn) = nxn-1dx.

However, he did not publish anything about his calculus until 1684 and, from 1711 until his death,
Leibniz's life was envenomed by a long and antagonistic dispute with John Keill, Newton and others,
over whether Leibniz had invented the calculus independently of Newton, or whether he had merely
invented another notation for ideas that were fundamentally Newton's. Although his approach to the
calculus fell well short of later standards of rigour (as did Newton's), and later work discredited the
use of infinitesimals to justify calculus, his work marked an important start in the discipline, and much
of his analysis has been vindicated.

As early as 1671, Leibniz began to invent a calculating machine, the first that could execute all four
arithmetical operations, gradually improving it over a number of years (he was elected to the Royal
Society in 1673 on the strength of it). By 1679, he had perfected his binary system of arithmetic (base
2), which was later used in most computers, although he did not publish anything until 1701. He
imagined a machine in which binary numbers were represented by marbles, governed by a
rudimentary sort of punched card system, groping towards hardware and software concepts worked
out much later by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.

In physics, Leibniz often disagreed with both Descartes and Newton. He devised a new theory of
motion (dynamics) based on kinetic energy and potential energy, which posited space, time and
motion as relative (whereas Newton felt strongly that space was absolute), anticipating by over 200
years Albert Einstein and recent cosmology and quantum mechanics. His "vis viva" (living force)
represented an alternative viewpoint to the conservation of momentum championed by Newton in
England and by Descartes in France.
He also dabbled in other sciences, often with prescient ideas. By proposing that the earth has a
molten core, he anticipated modern geology. From his study of comparative anatomy and fossils, he
worked out a primal organismic theory. In psychology, he anticipated the distinction between
conscious and unconscious states, and in sociology, he laid the ground for communication theory. In
public health, he advocated establishing a medical administrative authority, with powers over
epidemiology and veterinary medicine. In economics, he proposed tax reforms and a national
insurance scheme, and discussed the balance of trade.

He was also an inventor and engineer, and has been claimed as the "father of applied science",
insisting that theory be combined with practical application. He designed wind-driven propellers and
water pumps, mining machines to extract ore, hydraulic presses, water desalination systems, lamps,
submarines, clocks, etc, and (with Denis Papin) even an early steam engine.

DAVID HUME

David Hume (1711 - 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist and historian of the Age of
Enlightenment. He was an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and, along with John Locke
and Bishop George Berkeley, one of the three main figureheads of the influential British Empiricism
movement.

He was a fierce opponent of the Rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, as well as an atheist
and a skeptic. He has come to be considered as one of the most important British philosophers of all
time, and he was a huge influence on later philosophers, from Immanuel Kant and Arthur
Schopenhauer to the Logical Positivists and Analytic Philosophers of the 20th Century, as well as on
intellectuals in other fields (including Albert Einstein, who claimed to have been inspired by Hume's
skepticism of the established order).

Even today, Hume's philosophical work remains refreshingly modern, challenging and provocative. In
later life, however, he largely turned away from philosophy in favour of economics and his other great
love, history, and it was only then that he achieved recognition in his own lifetime.

Life

Hume was born on 26 April 1711 in a tenement on the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father
was Joseph Home (an advocate or barrister of Chirnside, Berwickshire, Scotland), and the aristocrat
Katherine Lady Falconer. He changed his name to Hume in 1734 because the English had difficulty
pronouncing "Home" in the Scottish manner.

He was well read, even as a child, and had a good grounding in Greek and Latin. He attended the
University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve (possibly as young as ten), although he
had little respect for the professors there and soon threw over a prospective career in law in favour of
philosophy and general learning. At the tender age of eighteen, he made a great "philosophical
discovery" (which remains somewhat unexplained and mysterious) that led him to devote the next
ten years of his life to a concentrated period of study, reading and writing, almost to the verge of a
nervous breakdown.
In order to earn a living, he took a position in a merchant's office in Bristol before moving to Anjou,
France in 1734. It was there that he used up his savings to support himself while he wrote his
masterwork, "A Treatise of Human Nature", which he completed in 1737 (at only 26 years of age).
Despite the disappointment of the work's poor reception in Britain (it was considered "abstract and
unintelligible"), he immediately set to work to produce an anonymous "Abstract" or shortened
version of it.

After the publication of his "Essays Moral and Political" in 1744, Hume was refused a post at the
University of Edinburgh after local ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume due to
his Atheism. For about a year he tutored the unstable Marquise of Annandale and became involved
with the Canongate Theatre in Edinburgh, where he associated with some of the Scottish
Enlightenment luminaries of the time.

From 1746, Hume served for three years as Secretary to a distant relative, Lieutenant-General St.
Clair, including as an aide-de-camp on diplomatic missions in Austria and Northern Italy, and even at
one point as a staff officer on an ill-fated military expedition as part of the War of the Austrian
Succession. It was during this period that he wrote his "Philosophical Essays Concerning Human
Understanding", later published as "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", which proved
little more successful than the "Treatise". He was charged with heresy (although he was defended by
his young clerical friends, who argued that, as an atheist, he was outside the Church's jurisdiction),
and was again deliberately overlooked for the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

In 1752, the Faculty of Advocates employed him as their librarian, for which he received little or no
emolument, but which gave him access to a large library, and which enabled him to continue
historical research for his "History of Great Britain". This enormous work, begun in 1745 and not
completed until 1760, ran to over a million words and traced events from the Saxon kingdoms to the
Glorious Revolution. It was a best-seller in its day and became the standard work on English history
for many years. Thus, it was as a historian that Hume finally achieved literary fame.

From 1763 to 1765, Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris, where he was admired by Voltaire
and was friends (briefly) with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For a year from 1767, he held the appointment
of Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department in London, before retiring back to Edinburgh
in 1768.

He died in Edinburgh on 25 August 1776, aged 65, probably as a result of a debilitating cancer he
suffered from in his latter years, and was buried, as he requested, on Calton Hill, overlooking his
home in the New Town of Edinburgh. He remained to the end positive and humane, well-loved by all
who knew him, and he retained great equanimity in the face of his suffering and death.

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Most of Hume’s philosophical work dates from his earlier years, in particular stemming from a
mysterious intellectual revelation he appears to have experienced at the age of just eighteen. He
spent most of the next ten years frantically trying to capture these thoughts on paper, resulting in "A
Treatise of Human Nature" which he completed in 1737 at the age of just 26 (and published two years
later). This book, which he subtitled "An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning
into Moral Subjects", is now consider to be Hume's most important work and one of the most
important books in the whole of Western philosophy, despite its poor initial reception. He refined the
"Treatise" in the later "Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding" (actually published as
"An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" in 1748), along with a companion volume "An Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals" (1751), although these publication proved hardly more successful
than the original "Treatise" on which they were based.

Hume was a thorough-going Empiricist, the last chronologically of the three great British Empiricists of
the 18th Century (along with John Locke and Bishop George Berkeley), and the most extreme. He
believed that, as he put it, "the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences",
that human experience is as close are we are ever going to get to the truth, and that experience and
observation must be the foundations of any logical argument. Anticipating the Logical Positivist
movement by almost two centuries, Hume was essentially attempting to demonstrate how ordinary
propositions about objects, causal relations, the self, etc, are semantically equivalent to propositions
about one's experiences.

He argued that all of human knowledge can be divided into two categories: relations of ideas (e.g.
propositions involving some contingent observation of the world, such as "the sun rises in the East")
and matters of fact (e.g. mathematical and logical propositions), and that ideas are derived from our
"impressions" or sensations. In the face of this, he argued, in sharp contradistinction to the French
Rationalists, that even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, or even in the existence of the
self, cannot be conclusively established by reason, but we accept them anyway because of their basis
in instinct and custom, a hard-line Empiricist attitude verging on complete Skepticism.

But Hume's Empiricism and Skepticism was mainly concerned with Epistemology and with the limits
of our ability ot know things. Although he would almost certainly have believed that there was indeed
an independently existing world of material objects, causally interacting with each other, which we
perceive and represent to ourselves through our senses, his point was that none of this could be
actually proved. He freely admitted that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any
possible experience (through the operation of faculties such as custom and the imagination), but he
was entirely skeptical about any claims to knowledge on this basis.

Central to grasping Hume's general philosophical system is the so-called “problem of induction”, and
exactly how we are able to make inductive inferences (reasoning from the observed behaviour of
objects to their behaviour when unobserved). He noted that humans tend to believe that things
behave in a regular manner, and that patterns in the behaviour of objects will persist into the future
and throughout the unobserved present (an idea sometimes called the Principle of the Uniformity of
Nature). Hume argued forcefully that such a belief cannot be justified, other than by the very sort of
reasoning that is under question (induction), which would be circular reasoning. Hume's solution to
this problem was to argue that it is natural instinct, rather than reason, that explains our ability to
make inductive inferences, and many have seen this as a major contribution to Epistemology and the
theory of knowledge.

Hume was a great believer in the scientific method championed by Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei (1564
- 1642) and Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727). However, the application of the problem of induction to
science suggests that all of science is actually based on a logical fallacy. The so-called induction fallacy
states that, just because something has happened in the past, it cannot be assumed that it will
happen again, no matter how often it seems to happen. However, this is exactly what the scientific
method is built on, and Hume was forced to conclude, rather unsatisfactorily, that even though the
fallacy applies, the scientific method appears to work.
Closely linked to the problem of induction is the notion of causality or causation. It is not always clear
how we know that something is actually caused by another thing and, although day always follows
night and night day, there is still no causal link between them. Hume concluded that it is the mental
act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation (although different commentators differ
in their interpretation of Hume’s words on the matter, varying from a logical positivist interpretation
to a skeptical realist or quasi-realist position).

Hume’s views on personal identity arose from a similar argument. For Hume, the features or
properties of an object are all that really exist, and there is no actual object or substance of which
they are the features. Thus, he argued, an apple, when stripped of all its properties (colour, size,
shape, smell, taste, etc), is impossible to conceive of and effectively ceases to exist. Hume believed
that the same argument applied to people, and he held that the self was nothing but a bundle or
collection of interconnected perceptions linked by the properties of constancy and coherence, a view
sometimes known as “bundle theory”, and one in direct opposition to Descartes's "I think therefore I
am" assertion.

Hume's anti-Rationalism, however, was not confined to his theory of belief and knowledge, but also
extended into other spheres, including Ethics. He asserted that “reason is, and ought only to be, the
slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. Thus,
he severely circumscribed reason's role in the production of action, and stressed that desires are
necessary for motivation, and this view on human motivation and action formed the cornerstone of
his ethical theory. He conceived moral or ethical sentiments to be intrinsically motivating, and to be
the providers of reasons for action. Thus, he argued, given that one cannot be motivated by reason
alone (given that motivation requires the additional input of the passions), then reason cannot be
behind morality. His theory of Ethics, sometimes described as sentimentalism, has helped to inspire
various forms of non-cognitivist and moral nihilist ethical theories including emotivism, ethical
expressivism, quasi-realism, error theory, etc.

In his "A Treatise of Human Nature", Hume definitively articulated the so-called “is-ought problem”,
which has since become so important in Meta-Ethics, noting that claims are often made about what
ought to be on the basis of statements about what is. However, Hume pointed out, there are
significant differences between descriptive statements (about what is) and prescriptive or normative
statements (about what ought to be), and it is not at all obvious how we can get from making
descriptive statements to prescriptive. In line with his ingrained Skepticism, he advised extreme
caution against making such inferences, and this complete severing of "is" from "ought" is sometimes
referred to as “Hume's Guillotine”.

As an Empiricist, Hume was always concerned with going back to experience and observation, and this
led him to touch on some difficult ideas in what would later become known as the Philosophy of
Language. For instance, he was convinced that for a word to mean anything at all, it had to relate to a
specific idea, and for an idea to have real content it had to be derived from real experience. If no such
underlying experience can be found, therefore, the word effectively has no meaning. In fact, he drew
a distinction between thinking (which concerns clear ideas which have a real source in experience)
and just everyday talking (which often uses confused notions with no real foundation in experience).

This reasoning also led him to develop what has become known as "Hume's Fork". For any new idea
or concept under consideration, he said, we should always ask whether it concerns either a matter of
fact (in which case one should then ask whether it is based on on observation and experience), or the
relation between ideas (e.g. mathematics or Logic). If it is neither, then the idea has no value and no
real meaning and should be discarded.

Like Thomas Hobbes before him, Hume sought to reconcile human freedom with the mechanist (or
determinist) belief that human beings are part of a deterministic universe whose happenings are
governed by the laws of physics. Hume’s reconcilation of freedom and determinism (a position known
as compatibilism) involves a more precise definition of Liberty ("a power of acting or not acting,
according to the determinations of the will") and Necessity ("the uniformity, observable in the
operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together"), and the argued
conclusion that not only are the two compatible, but that Liberty actually requires Necessity.
Furthermore, he argued that, in order to be held morally responsible, it is required that our behaviour
be caused or necessitated.

Hume wrote a great deal on religion, although, due to the rather repressive religious climate of the
day, he deliberately constrained his words (as it was, the Church of Scotland seriously considered
bringing charges of infidelity against him). He never openly declared himself to be an atheist, and did
not acknowledge his authorship of many of his works in this area until close to his death (and some
were not even published until afterwards).

However, it is certainly true that, in works such as "An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding”
(1748) and "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” (written between about 1750 and his death in
1776, and published posthumously in 1779), he attacked many of the basic assumptions of religion
and Christian belief, and he found the idea of a God effectively nonsensensical, because there was no
way of arriving at the idea through sensory data. Some consider it his best work, and many of his
arguments have become the foundation of much of the succeeding secular thinking about religion.
Having said that, though, it is likely that Hume was, true to his most basic inclinations, skeptical both
about religious belief (at least as demanded by the religious organizations of his time) and of the
complete Atheism of such contemporaries as Baron d'Holbach (1723 - 1789), and his position may
best be characterized by the term "irreligious".

Hume argued that it is impossible to deduce the existence of God from the existence of the world
because causes cannot be determined from effects. Although he left open the theoretical possibility
of miracles (which may be defined as singular events that differ from the established laws of Nature),
he cautioned that they should only be believed if it were less likely that the testimony was false than
that a miracle did in fact occur, and offered various arguments against this ever having actually
happened in history.

He gave the classic criticism of the teleological argument for the existence of God (also known as the
argument from design, that order and apparent purpose in the world bespeaks a divine origin - see
the Arguments for the Existence of God section of the Philosophy of Religion page for more details),
arguing that, for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are
observed only when they result from design (whereas, on the contrary, we see order in presumably
mindless processes like the generation of snowflakes and crystals). Furthermore, he argued that the
design argument is based on an incomplete analogy (that of the universe to a designed machine), and
that to deduce that our universe is designed, we would need to have an experience of a range of
different universes. Even if the design argument were to be successful, he questioned why we should
assume that the designer is God, and, if there is indeed a designer god, then who designed the
designer? Also, he asked, if we could be happy with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind, why
should we not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world?

When faced with Leibniz's contention that the only answer to the question "why is there something
rather than nothing?" was God, and that God was a necessary being with no need of explanation,
Hume responded that there was no such thing as a necessary being, and that anything that could be
conceived of as existent could just as easily be conceived of as non-existent. However, he was not
willing to propose a convincing alternative answer to the riddle of existence, taking refuge in the
argument that any answer to such a question would be necessarily meaningless, as it could never be
grounded in our experience.

Hume’s Political Philosophy is difficult to pinpoint, as his work contains elements of both
Conservatism and Liberalism, and he resisted aligning himself with either of Britain's two political
parties, the Whigs and the Tories. His central concern was to show the importance of the rule of law,
and stressed, in his "Essays Moral and Political” of 1742, the importance of moderation in politics
(particularly within the turbulent historical context of 18th Century Scotland). In general, he thought
that republics were more likely than monarchies to administer laws fairly, but the important point for
Hume was that society be governed by a general and impartial system of laws, based principally on
the "artifice" of contract (Contractarianism). He supported freedom of the press; he was sympathetic
to elected representation and democracy (when suitably constrained); he believed that private
property was not a natural right (as John Locke held), but that it was justified because resources are
limited; he was optimistic about social progress arising from the economic development that comes
with the expansion of trade; and he counselled strongly against revolution and resistance to
governments except in cases of the most egregious tyranny.

Although best known today as a philosopher, Hume also developed many of the ideas that are still
prevalent in the field of economics, and Adam Smith, among others, acknowledged Hume's influence
on his own economics and Political Philosophy. Hume believed in the need for an unequal distribution
of property, on the grounds that perfect equality would destroy the ideas of thrift and industry, and
thus ultimately lead to impoverishment. He was among the first to develop the concept of automatic
price-specie flow, and proposed a theory of beneficial inflation, which was later to be developed by
John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946).

Hume was also famous as a prose stylist, and pioneered the essay as a literary genre, publicly
engaging with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith,
James Boswell (1740 - 1795), Joseph Butler (1692 - 1752) and Thomas Reid (1710 - 1796).

But it was as a historian that Hume finally achieved literary fame. His immense 6-volume "History of
England” (subtitled "From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688”), written between
1745 and 1760, is a work of immense sweep, running to over a million words. It became a best-seller
in its day and became the standard work on English history for many years.

JOHN LOCKE
John Locke (1632 - 1704) was an English philosopher of the Age of Reason and early Age of
Enlightenment. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of Epistemology and Political
Philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential early Enlightenment thinkers.

He is usually considered the first of the British Empiricists, the movement which included George
Berkeley and David Hume, and which provided the main opposition to the 17th Century Continental
Rationalists. He argued that all of our ideas are ultimately derived from experience, and the
knowledge of which we are capable is therefore severely limited in its scope and certainty.

His Philosophy of Mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the self".
He also postulated, contrary to Cartesian and Christian philosophy, that the mind was a "tabula rasa"
(or "blank slate") and that people are born without innate ideas.

Along with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was also one of the originators of
Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), Contractarianism refers to both the theory in Political
Philosophy on the legitimacy of political authority, and the ethical theory concerning the origin, or
legitimate content, of moral norms.

Both were developed from the concept of a social contract, the idea that the people give up some
rights to a government and/or other authority in order to receive, or jointly preserve, social order.
Social contract theory provides the rationale behind the historically important notion that legitimate
state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed, where the form and content of this
consent derives from the idea of contract or mutual agreement.

Contractarianism suggests that people are primarily self-interested, and that a rational assessment of
the best strategy for attaining the maximization of their self-interest will lead them to act morally and
to consent to governmental authority. which formed the theoretical groundwork of democracy,
republicanism and modern Liberalism and Libertarianism. He is sometimes referred to as the
"Philosopher of Freedom", and his political views influenced both the American and French
Revolutions.

Life

Locke was born on 29 August 1632 in the small rural village of Wrington, Somerset, England. His
father, also named John Locke, was a country lawyer and clerk to the Justices of the Peace in nearby
town of Chew Magna, and had served as a captain of cavalry for the Parliamentarian forces during the
early part of the English Civil War. His mother, Agnes Keene, was a tanner's daughter and reputed to
be very beautiful. Both parents were Puritans, and the family moved soon after Locke's birth to the
small market town of Pensford, near Bristol.

In 1647, Locke was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London (sponsored by the local MP
Alexander Popham) as a King's Scholar. After completing his studies there, he was admitted to Christ
Church, Oxford. Although a capable student, Locke was irritated by the largely classical (Aristotelian)
undergraduate curriculum of the time, and found more interest in the works of modern philosophers
such as René Descartes, and the more experimental philosophy being pursued at other universities
and within the embryonic Royal Society.
Locke was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1656, and a master's degree in 1658. He was elected
lecturer in Greek in 1660 and then in Rhetoric in 1663, but he declined the offer of a permanent
academic position in order to avoid committing himself to a religious order. During his time at Oxford,
he also studied medicine extensively, and worked with such noted scientists and thinkers as Robert
Boyle, Thomas Willis, Robert Hooke and his friend from Westminster School, Richard Lower. He later
obtained a bachelor of medicine qualification in 1674.

It was through his medical knowledge that he obtained the patronage of the controversial political
figure, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper (the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury), and in 1667 he moved to
Shaftesbury's London home to serve as his personal physician. He was credited with saving
Shaftesbury's life afer a liver infection became life-threatening. In London, Locke continued his
medical studies under the tutelage of Thomas Sydenham, who also had a major influence on Locke's
natural philosophical thinking.

During the 1670s, Locke served as Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and Secretary to
the Lords and Proprietors of the Carolinas, helping to shape his ideas on international trade and
economics. Locke became more involved in politics (and further developed his political ideas) when
Shaftesbury, a founder of the Whig movement in British politics, became Lord Chancellor in 1672. It
was also during this time in London that he worked on early drafts of his "An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding", eventually published in 1690 and considered one of the principal sources of
Empiricism in modern philosophy.

After some time travelling across France following Shaftesbury's fall from favour in 1675, he returned
to England in 1679 (when Shaftesbury's political fortunes took a brief positive turn), and began the
composition of his famous work of Political Philosophy, the "Two Treatises of Government", which
was published anonymously (in order to avoid controversy) in 1689, and whose ideas about natural
rights and government were quite revolutionary for that period in English history.

In 1683, Locke fled to Holland, under strong (but probably unfounded) suspicion of involvement in the
Rye House Plot. He did not return to England until 1688's Glorious Revolution and the overthrow of
King James II by the of the Dutchman William of Orange (King William III of England), which Locke saw
as the ultimate triumph of his revolutionary cause. The publication of "An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding", the "Two Treatises of Civil Government" and "A Letter Concerning Toleration" all
occurred in quick succession upon his return from exile. His "Essay" in particular brought great fame,
and Locke spent much of the rest of his life responding to admirers and critics by making revisions in
later editions of the book.

In 1691, he moved to his close friend Lady Masham's country house at Oates, Essex. During this
period, he became something of an intellectual hero of the Whigs, and he discussed matters with such
figures as John Dryden and Sir Isaac Newton. He continued to work at the Board of Trade from 1696
until his retirement in 1700.

However, his health deteriorated, marked by regular asthma attacks, and he died on 28 October 1704,
and was buried in the churchyard of High Laver. He never married, and had no children.
Work Back to Top

Locke wrote on philosophical, scientific and political matters throughout his life, in a voluminous
correspondence and ample journals, but the public works for which he is best known were published
in a single, sudden burst in 1689 - 1690.

The fundamental principles of Locke's Epistemology are presented in his monumental "An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding" of 1690, the culmination of twenty years of reflection on the
origins of human knowledge. In it he argued the empiricist approach that would be adopted by the
British Empiricism movement: that all of our ideas, whether simple or complex, are ultimately derived
from experience and sensory input. The knowledge of which we are capable is therefore severely
limited in its scope and certainty, in that we can never know the inner nature of the things around us,
only their behaviour and the way in which they affect us and other things (a kind of modified
Skepticism). One of the ways in which they affect us is through our senses, giving us experiences (or
representations or images) of their properties or qualities.

Locke saw the properties of things as being of two distinct kinds. Their real inner natures derive from
the primary qualities, which we can never experience and so never know. Our knowledge of material
substances, therefore, depends heavily on their secondary qualities (by reference to which we also
name them), which are mind-dependent and of a sensory or qualitative nature. He therefore believed
in a type of Representationalism, that these primary qualities are "explanatorily basic" in that they
can be referred to as the explanation for other qualities or phenomena without requiring explanation
themselves, and that these qualities are distinct in that our sensory experience of them resembles
them in reality.

He claimed that "the mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone" (an idea being something
within the mind that represents things outside the mind). However, he also argued that a proper
application of our cognitive capacities is enough to guide our action in the practical conduct of life,
and that it is in the process of reasoning that the mind confronts the raw ideas it has received (an
approach not dissimilar to the Dualism of Descartes). His definition of knowledge might be stated,
then, as the perception of the relationship between ideas.

Where Locke differed markedly from Descartes and other predecessors, though, was in the status he
granted to the senses. Descartes held that the senses incline us to have certain beliefs, but that this
alone does not amount to actual knowledge (which requires interpretation and explanation by reason
and the intellect). For Locke, however, the senses themselves are a basic and fundamental faculty
which deliver knowledge in their own right. Indeed, his whole conception of an idea differed from
that of Descartes: for Descartes, an idea was fundamentally intellectual; for Locke it was
fundamentally sensory, and all thought involved images of a sensory nature.

In later editions of the treatise, he also included detailed accounts of human volition and moral
freedom, the personal identity on which our responsibility as moral agents depends, and the dangers
of religious enthusiasm.

With his "Two Treatises of Civil Government", published anonymously in 1690 in order to avoid
controversy, Locke established himself as a political theorist of the highest order. The "First Treatise"
was intended merely to refute Sir Robert Filmer's support of the Divine Right of Kings, arguing that
neither scripture nor reason supports Filmer's contentions. The "Second Treatise", however, offered a
systematic account of the foundations of political obligation. In Locke's view, all rights begin in the
individual property interest created by an investment of labour. The social structure (or
"commonwealth") depends for its formation and maintenance on the express consent of those
governed by its political powers (the so-called Social Contract or Contractarianism). He believed that
majority rule thus becomes the cornerstone of all political order, although dissatisfied citizens reserve
a lasting right to revolution.

Like Thomas Hobbes before him, Locke started from a belief that humans have absolute natural
rights, in the sense of universal rights that are inherent in the nature of Ethics, and not contingent on
human actions or beliefs (a kind of Deontology). However, much of his political work is characterized
by his opposition to authoritarianism, and particularly to the tendency towards Totalitarianism
advocated by Hobbes. Locke believed that no one should be allowed absolute power, and introduced
the idea of the separation of powers, whereby the Church and the judicial system operate
independently of the ruling class. Totalitarianism refers to an authoritarian political system or state
that regulates and controls nearly every aspect of the public and private sectors. Totalitarian regimes
establish complete political, social, and cultural control over their subjects, and are usually headed by
a charismatic leader. In general, Totalitarianism involves a single mass party, typically led by a
dictator; an attempt to mobilize the entire population in support of the official state ideology; and an
intolerance of activities which are not directed towards the goals of the state, usually entailing
repression and state control of business, labour unions, churches and political parties. A totalitarian
regime is essentially a modern form of authoritarian state, requiring as it does an advanced
technology of social control.

Totalitarian regimes or movements tend to offer the prospect of a glorious, yet imaginary, future to a
frustrated population, and to portray Western democracies and their values as decadent, with people
too soft, too pleasure-loving and too selfish to sacrifice for a higher cause. They maintain themselves
in political power by various means, including secret police, propaganda disseminated through the
state-controlled mass media, personality cults, the regulation and restriction of free speech, single-
party states, the use of mass surveillance and the widespread use of intimidation and terror tactics.

In particular, he defined our civil interests (those which the State can and should legitimately protect)
as life, liberty, health and property, specifically excluding religious concerns, which he saw as outside
the legitimate concern of civil government. If much of this seems familiar from the American
Declaration of Independence, that is no coincidence as the American founding fathers freely admitted
their debt to Locke's Political Philosophy.

His "Letter Concerning Toleration" of 1689 came in the wake of King Louis XIV of France's revocation
of the Edict of Nantes (and the religious persecution which followed it). It argued for a broad (though
not limitless) acceptance of alternative religious convictions, as well as a strict separation betwen
Church and State. In his 1695 "The Reasonableness of Christianity", he argued that the basic doctrines
of Christianity are relatively few and entirely compatible with reason.

In 1693, Locke produced his contribution to the Philosophy of Education, his influential "Some
Thoughts Concerning Education". In it, he claimed (influenced by Avicenna and the Medieval
Avicennist movement) that a child's mind is a tabula rasa (or blank slate) and does not contain any
innate ideas, nor anything that might be described as human nature. Thus, all men are created equal,
and each of us can be said to be the author of our own character. These ideas flowed logically and
seamlessly from Locke's underlying belief in Empiricism, that all human knowledge derives from the
senses and that therefore there can be no knowledge that precedes observation.
According to Locke, the mind was to be educated by a three-pronged approach: the development of a
healthy body; the formation of a virtuous character; and the choice of an appropriate academic
curriculum. He maintained that a person is to a large extent a product of his education, and also
pointed out that knowledge and attitudes acquired in a child's early formative years are
disproportionately influential and have important and lasting consequences.