Behaviorism

While Behaviorism has become a sort of bad word in the cognitive sciences, very broadly construed, it would be difficult to overstate the importance which the movement has played in even modern day psychology which is still described by some as a “behavioral” science. In this post we will briefly consider three forms of Behaviorism: methodological, crude logical and sophisticated logical. We will also consider some of the objections which have been brought against them.

Metaphysical Dualism

Metaphysical Dualism, though hardly invented by Rene Descartes, will forever be associated with his name. In this post we will review Descartes’ arguments in favor of Metaphysical Dualism as well as the various forms of such which have been advocated over the centuries. Afterwards, we will consider the attack which Raymond Smullyan brings against Dualism in the thought experiment which he presents in his paper An Unfortunate Dualist. In the end, we will see that while Dualism does indeed suffer from some serious shortcomings, Smullyan’s criticism is, for the most part, wide of the mark.

Cesare Beccaria

While the name of Jeremy Bentham is fairly well-known in intellectual circles, it is unfortunate that the primary influence, and in many cases the actual author of Bentham’s ideas, Cesare Beccaria, goes largely unknown. In this post we will examine the ideas of Beccaria, ideas which would later be picked up by not only Bentham but by the American Founding Fathers as well, concerning law, government, morality and theology.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau

We now come to the place in Western intellectual history occupied by Jean-Jacque Rousseau, a Lockean deist who strongly opposed the ideas of progress in the arts and science, a theme which had taken center-stage in the Enlightenment. Indeed, progress by way of learning what had never been learned before, as described in Bacon’s Novum Organum, is precisely what set the New Philosophy apart from that of Aristotelian Scholasticism, the latter being concerned more with seeking a moderate harmony in what had already been learned in the past. In this post we will see how Rousseau, while not advocating any kind of ideals native to pre-Enlightenment society, took serious issue with the most central tenet of the Enlightenment, namely that of progress by way of culture, science and art.

Adam Smith

We have already seen how in Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees the individual vices of the people, self-interest being the most prominent one, can actually serve to benefit the society at large. These influences will be more than obvious in Adam Smith’s account of how the self-interest of individuals, properly constrained, combined with a division of labor can, as if guided by an invisible hand, produce large amounts of unintended cooperation and prosperity. In this post we will discuss Adam Smith’s ideas concerning economics as well as whatever implications such a view might hold for morality in a capitalist society.

Thomas Reid

This will be the second of three consecutive posts dedicated to the most famous of Scottish philosophers: last post we dealt with David Hume, in the next we will treat Adam Smith. In this post, however, we will discuss the most successful contemporary critic of David Hume’s writings, namely Thomas Reid. We will see that Reid offers a number of criticisms and corrections to the epistemological thought of all his predecessors in general, but that of David Hume in particular. He will also take aim at Hume’s ideas concerning causation, ethics, consciousness and language.

David Hume

The man who was arguably the greatest thinker in modernity and without a doubt the greatest philosopher to have ever written in the English language was David Hume. While it seems a crime, especially to a Hume admirer such as myself, to even attempt to summarize Hume in one post, this is exactly what I plan to do. So as to not drag this post out for a dozen pages or so, we will limit ourselves almost entirely to his ideas concerning epistemology, morality and religion. We will see that Hume’s brutal attacks against many of the ideas which we think we “know” leave him sounding like a skeptic, although such would probably be a misreading of him. Perhaps the best way of approaching him for the first time would be to see him as attempting to place human knowledge upon a firmer foundation.

Voltaire

Perhaps the greatest and most influential popularizer of philosophy to have ever lived was Voltaire. After having been banished from France to England, Voltaire came to idealize British religious, political, commercial and intellectual liberty, seeing it as superior to French life in almost every way, the latter being seen by Voltaire to be intolerant, anti-commercial, aristocratic and despotic. What Voltaire is most well known for today would be his biting criticisms on religion, especially Catholic life as he saw it in France. In this post we will also consider Voltaire’s strong attacks on philosophical optimism, the view that this is the best of all possible worlds.