Table Of ContentThe Great Ideas of
nd
Philosophy, 2 Edition
Part III
Professor Daniel N. Robinson
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Daniel N. Robinson, Ph.D.
Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University
Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown University
Daniel Robinson is Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown University, where he taught from 1971 to 2001.
He is a member of the philosophy faculty of Oxford University and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Columbia
University. Although his doctorate was earned in neuropsychology (1965, City University of New York), his
scholarly books and articles have established him as an authority in the history and philosophy of psychology,
history of ideas, philosophy of mind, and kindred subjects.
Dr. Robinson’s books include The Enlightened Machine: An Analytical Introduction to Neuropsychology
(Columbia, 1980), Psychology and Law (Oxford, 1980), Philosophy of Psychology (Columbia, 1985), Aristotle’s
Psychology (1989), An Intellectual History of Psychology (3rd edition, Wisconsin, 1995), and Wild Beasts and Idle
Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present (Harvard, 1996). He has served as principal
consultant to PBS for the award-winning series The Brain and the subsequent nine-part series The Mind. He is past
president of two divisions of the American Psychological Association: the Division of the History of Psychology
and the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Dr. Robinson also serves on the Board of Scholars of
Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, is a member of the American
Philosophical Association, and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.
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Table of Contents
The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition
Part III
Professor Biography............................................................................................i
Course Scope.......................................................................................................1
Lecture Twenty-Five Francis Bacon and the Authority of Experience........2
Lecture Twenty-Six Descartes and the Authority of Reason.....................4
Lecture Twenty-Seven NewtonThe Saint of Science.................................7
Lecture Twenty-Eight Hobbes and the Social Machine................................9
Lecture Twenty-Nine Locke’s Newtonian Science of the Mind.................12
Lecture Thirty No Matter? The Challenge of Materialism..............15
Lecture Thirty-One Hume and the Pursuit of Happiness.........................17
Lecture Thirty-Two Thomas Reid and the Scottish School.....................19
Lecture Thirty-Three France and the Philosophes.....................................22
Lecture Thirty-Four The Federalist Papers and the
Great Experiment.....................................................25
Lecture Thirty-Five What Is Enlightenment? Kant on Freedom.............28
Lecture Thirty-Six Moral Science and the Natural World.....................31
Timeline.............................................................................................................34
Glossary.............................................................................................................39
Biographical Notes............................................................................................43
Bibliography...............................................................................................Part V
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The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition
Scope:
This course of 60 lectures is intended to introduce the student to main currents and issues in philosophical thought
from the founding of the subject in ancient Greece to more contemporary studies. The lectures are organized around
three abiding problems: the problem of knowledge (epistemology and metaphysics), the problem of conduct (ethics
and moral philosophy), and the problem of governance (political science and law). Each of these has by now
evolved into a specialized subject treated rigorously in professional texts and journals. But even in these more
technical projections, the problems remain largely as they were when the schools of Plato and Aristotle dealt with
them and imposed on them the features they still retain.
More than a series of lectures on the great philosophers, this course is designed to acquaint the student with broader
cultural and historical conditions that favored or opposed a given philosophical perspective. Attention is paid to the
influence that scientific developments had on the very conception of philosophy and on the scientific rejection of
“metaphysics” that took place when the “two cultures” began to take separate paths.
Needless to say, the vast terrain that philosophy seeks to cover extends far beyond what can be explored in 60
lectures—or in 200 lectures! Entire areas of active scholarship have been ignored. But still other areas have been
more carefully examined than is customary in an introductory course: philosophy of law, philosophy and aesthetics,
evolutionary and psychoanalytic theory. The hope and expectation is that, informed by these lectures, the interested
student will press on, will fashion a fuller curriculum of study, and will return to these lectures for the more general
framework within which the specialized knowledge ultimately must find a place.
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Lecture Twenty-Five
Francis Bacon and the Authority of Experience
Scope: Francis Bacon (1561–1626) would come to be regarded as the “prophet” of Newton and the father once
removed of the authority of experimental science. The Elizabethan Age, which nurtured his earlier years,
was an epoch of imperial expansion and growing confidence, and in his philosophical works, Bacon
deploys his great literary style—and a depth of thought at once original and powerful—to argue for a Great
Instauration, or “new beginning” of knowledge.
In his groundbreaking Novum Organum, Bacon establishes the authority of observation in discovering the
nature of the external world—the authority of experimental method as the way to select the correct from
competing theories of causation.
Less a critic of antiquity than one who recognizes its deadening effect on the present, Bacon would lead his
contemporaries and successors along the path less taken. Disinterested and objective inquiry, with the
results added steadily to the Table of Discovery, will alone enlarge our understanding and, at key points,
raise theoretically rich and revealing possibilities.
Outline
I. Experimental science is not “play” for individuals who just want to keep their hands busy, following a template
or model that is used in higher science.
A. In experimental science, all the “good” thinking should be done before one goes into the lab. The work in
the laboratory is where one finally settles on one of several possibilities—all of which are equally plausible
at the start—and determines what conclusion the experimental findings favor.
B. When the writers of the 18th-century Enlightenment looked back at the preceding century, they judged it to
be the dawn of the new age of science, the age of the great Isaac Newton, whose name is frequently paired
with that of Francis Bacon. Bacon is considered to be a prophet of Newton. The Renaissance can be seen
as an age in transition, looking for inspiration both forward and back. Bacon and the Elizabethans were
firmly looking toward tomorrow.
C. The Elizabethans and Elizabeth herself believed that her reign was a singular one, out of which something
new would come. If the Renaissance was an age in transition, the age of Elizabeth was an age that
understood itself and saw itself largely in futuristic and evolutionary terms; this was an age looking toward
tomorrow, not being distracted by the celebrated achievements of the past.
D. Bacon’s Novum Organum—“New Method”— is central to a Great Instauration, or “new beginning.”
Bacon is not setting out to disparage but to move on from what he takes to be the ancient world. The
Novum Organum proclaims the epistemological authority of experimental science.
E. Bacon truly does offer a more modern conception of the nature and promise of a developed experimental
science. The foundation of modern experimental science can be found in what Bacon calls the Table of
Discovery, a set of disciplined and systematic observations.
F. Even Bacon’s powerful prose style urges us to prepare for a new age. His considerable eloquence as a
moral and legal essayist is put to use prosecuting the agenda of what is recognizable to us as science.
II. What, then, is Bacon’s new method? Is it more than mere fact-gathering? The right method by which to
uncover nature’s secrets is the experimental method, which can be divided into two categories.
A. The experimenta lucifera are the “light-shedding” experiments, alerting us to factors operative in the causal
matrix that brings things about.
1. In and of themselves, these studies are mere exercises in fact-gathering—systematic studies of the
influence of A on B; the routine mechanical, causal relationships that one observes among events in
the external world. The results are stored in the ever-expanding Table of Discovery.
2. Nothing is off limits! Things that are “mean and sordid” may be explored (including dissection of
corpses). “What there is” is what the experimenta lucifera are all about.
3. The gradual expansion of the Table of Discovery leads inevitably to telling questions regarding basic
laws.
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B. This expansion, however, does not necessarily lead to useful new conclusions. The experimenta fructifera
are designed to permit us to choose between competing accounts of the facts on hand. These experiments
are consequential and look forward to Karl Popper’s 20th-century criterion of falsification, which
essentially states that no number of experiments will ever confirm a universal law, because such a law
refers to an infinite number of possible outcomes. However, one instance of falsification is enough to
prove a universal law invalid.
III. Science has no reason to stop short of examining the mental workings of the scientist himself. Bacon calls this
study “human philosophy”; we refer to it as psychology. Bacon understood that there are observations that will
tell for or against certain theories of human behavior. There are two branches of this science, one segregate and
one aggregate.
A. One branch of the science of humanity is patterned on the model of the Hippocratic physicians. Bacon
recognizes that a systematic scientific psychology will, to some extent, be a physiological or medical
psychology. The study of the individual or “segregate” person is an essentially biological or medical mode
of inquiry into the manner in which the body functions.
B. The study of the “aggregate,” however—of mankind—is in the patrimony of Aristotle, in whom Bacon
finds an appreciation of the fact that a developed psychology is, at once, politics, ethics, moral thought, and
biology. In this branch of the science of humanity, man is very much a product of experiences, of social
and moral interpersonal influences.
IV. In what sense can we say that Bacon’s method and attitude depart from that of the ancients and point to
Newton? He did not dismiss previous scientific discovery; science was going on apace in the ancient Greek
world.
A. Hippocratics were aware of systematic observation and were favorably referred to by Bacon himself.
B. By the 2nd century A.D., Galen provided ample evidence of a sophisticated understanding of how
experimental science is conducted. Galen’s record of surgical studies is prolific, if grimly unkind. His
biological discoveries rendered him the authority in medicine for centuries, well into the Renaissance.
C. When Francis Bacon talks about a new method, he’s not referring to something new to the world. Instead,
he’s referring to something new given the most recent traditions of knowledge gathering, as we see it in the
Scholastic period and in the “natural magic” of the Renaissance. When he urges the development of a
science of humanity, it should be no surprise that he reaches back to Hippocrates and Aristotle.
V. Bacon does initiate a Great Instauration: the invitation to a method to extract secrets from nature that was not
unknown to antiquity but was long in disuse and was available now in new and more rigorous forms. The light
of experience and the discipline of experiment are the right means by which to address the problem of
knowledge. It is not by philosophical chatter that we uncover the laws of nature: “Words are but the images of
matter.…To fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.”
Recommended Reading:
Bacon, F. Novum Organum, edited and translated by P. Urbach and J. Gibson. Open Court, 1994.
Quinton, A. Francis Bacon. Hill and Wang, 1980.
Robinson, D. An Intellectual History of Psychology. 3rd ed. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, chapter 7.
Questions to Consider:
1. Explain the difference between mere busywork and Bacon’s experimenta lucifera.
2. Conclude whether we have a Table of Discovery.
3. Summarize what would it mean to say that mind is subject to “the laws of matter.”
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Lecture Twenty-Six
Descartes and the Authority of Reason
Scope: René Descartes (1596–1650) is one of the fertile minds in the history of ideas. He discovered analytical
geometry, was an important contributor to the physical sciences, and was perhaps the most important figure
in that branch of philosophy called philosophy of mind.
Like Bacon, he was in search of a reliable method. He was alive when Bruno was burned at the stake
(1600) and an accomplished scholar when Galileo was called before the Inquisition (1633). He was well
aware of the superstitious excesses of the “natural magic” group that dominated Renaissance science.
Then, too, always fashionable forms of skepticism and vulgar materialism were enjoying the usual
following.
In his deliberate, rather geometric fashion, Descartes sought an axiomatic method of proof capable of both
establishing incontrovertible propositions and defeating radical skepticism. His commitment was to accept
no product of his own thought until it reached a level of clarity and indubitability that could not be
reasonably challenged.
Outline
I. The philosophical power of Descartes is a matter of record. In some accounts, the modern period of philosophy
is said to begin with Descartes (1596–1650). His was among the most fertile imaginations in the scholar’s
pantheon. He is the recognized founder of analytical geometry and made important contributions to optics and
physiology.
A. Descartes’s mother died within a year of his birth. The grandmother who then took responsibility for him
passed on when Descartes was 10 or 11.
B. On his grandmother’s death, Descartes was enrolled in the new Jesuit school at La Fleche, where he
remained for nine years. During this time, he was also in regular correspondence with the leading lights of
the European intellectual and scientific community and was seen by them as a force to be reckoned with.
C. He earned a law degree at Poitiers and, at the age of 22, fought as a mercenary in the Dutch army’s war of
independence against Spain. This service introduced him to a prominent Dutch mathematician, Isaac
Beeckman, who encouraged Descartes to compose a mathematically based treatise on music.
D. In 1619, while serving as a mercenary in the army of the Duke of Bavaria, Descartes had three vivid
dreams, which he took to be a summons to create an original and daring path to knowledge, a mirabilis
scientiae fundamenta.
II. What Descartes finds in the Scholastic lessons of his early schooling is a logical rigor with no power of
discovery. Renaissance “science” is merely dogma posing as knowledge. Thus, like Bacon, Descartes looks for
a method of scientific discovery. He summarized his method in two monumentally influential works, published
four years apart: Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
A. Diversity of opinions and tendency toward error arise not from unequal or insufficient rational power but
from faulty methods of inquiry and discovery. Every factual claim grounded in perception is subject to
distortion.
1. The study of history removes one from the very context in which the demands for knowledge are most
insistent. No two historical events are ever precisely the same, and all that can be gleaned from that
kind of inquiry are generalities subject to interpretation.
2. Philosophy doesn’t have a single method; the great philosophers of history scarcely agree with one
another on any major point.
3. Mathematics can formulate indisputable truths at a certain level of abstraction but cannot be a method
of discovery.
B. It is the purpose of the Discourse on Method to reveal how Descartes has fashioned a mode of inquiry
designed to save himself from error. For him, the right method begins with an utterly skeptical position and
a profession of ignorance.
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1. This standard essentially rules out the objects of perception.
2. Perceptions and feelings aside, there is another activity of the soul—thinking.
III. “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes’s well-known but misunderstood “proof” of his existence, is actually a
summary of the grounds on which he would base all valid knowledge claims.
A. Descartes began by assuming that one cannot say, with epistemic authority, that one is an extended thing, a
res extensa, because descriptions about actions one takes or physical characteristics clearly could be
subject to self-deception or deception by a malignant demon.
1. One might never be able to distinguish between reality and a dreamed reality.
2. All empirical modes of verification are vulnerable to the same demonic deception.
3. Nothing external to the mind, as such, will count against this demon theory.
B. The one thing that clearly is inseparably bound up with the reality of one’s being is thought. In this, one
cannot be deceived, because it is only insofar as an individual is a thinking thing that he or she is subject to
deception.
C. This is the point of cogito ergo sum. It is not a device that Descartes needs in order to deduce his existence.
What Descartes searches for is the necessary precondition for skepticism, which turns out to be thought
itself or, more generally, the reality of the mental, which is affirmed even in the act of doubting it.
IV. Descartes arrived at his discovery through a form of rational analysis, a kind of axiomatic method, not unlike
what one finds in mathematics and geometry, which is outlined in his Discourse on Method. There are four
main points set forth in the work:
A. Accept nothing as true except what presents itself with a clarity and vividness that is irresistible.
B. Divide each problem into as many smaller steps as possible.
C. Work from the solution of the smallest problem to the solution of problems of greater complexity.
D. Test the general solution with persistence, assuring yourself that it suffers from no exceptions.
V. Fortified with a method of inquiry, Descartes would turn his attention productively to what comes down to us
as philosophy of mind, the nature of the relationship between a res cogitans and a res extensa. What can an
extended thing and a thinking thing have in common? If they have nothing in common, how can one influence
or in any way interact with the other?
A. In sharply distinguishing between the res extensa and the res cogitans, Descartes gave the fullest modern
expression to the mind/body problem, either not appreciated by earlier philosophers or not directly
addressed by them.
1. How can a material body cause the mind to think?
2. How can an unextended immaterial mind cause a material body to move?
B. Descartes’s perceptual and motivational theories are unabashedly physiological.
1. Fine fluids or spirits move in the body to bring about motion hydraulically. The mind can, in some
fashion, move the body— this can be proved by lifting your arm.
2. The physics of motion can account for rudimentary sensory-motor functions but cannot be the cause of
definitive mental events and the purely abstract features of mental life.
C. Descartes offers a thought experiment our age would describe as one involving artificial intelligence:
Given that so much of our behavior and perception are easily explained mechanistically, might we be able
to make a device indistinguishable from a human being?
1. Such a device would never attain the idea of God.
2. It would never be able to traffic in abstract reasoning, such as is common in mathematics.
3. It would never be able to use language in a creatively discursive fashion.
VI. Descartes is famous (and infamous) for espousing “innate ideas,” over which even his contemporaries argued
with him. According to his theory, some things that are obviously and universally known, and could not
possibly be known as a result of experience, can be accounted for only on the basis of the existence of some
innate, or intuitive, rational power.
A. In countering a caricature version of his thought, Descartes explicitly denies in print that he ever
subscribed to such a notion.
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B. There is, however, at least one thing known—and known certainly to everyone—that could not have been
acquired by way of learning.
1. If our own experiences are all that possibly could occupy the mind—namely, the sensory
experiences—there would be absolutely no basis for assuming that there is an external material world
that is causally bringing these sensations about.
2. Nonetheless, everyone in fact does know that sensations and perceptions are the consequence of an
external material world impinging on the organs of sense. Nobody is doubtful about the existence of
an external material world.
3. Now we can put these two facts together: Everyone knows that there is an external material world. No
one could arrive at the idea of “matter” from the phenomenology of experience. How, then, from the
facts of experience, do we reach the understanding or possess the certain knowledge that our
experiences are, in fact, experiences of a material something?
VII. Descartes’s new method begins as skepticism and uses reason and rational argument systematically. This
presents an axiomatic, analytical approach to solving the problem of knowledge, characteristic of developments
in mathematics and now brought to bear more generally on affairs of life and the mind. The modern age is upon
us, replete with a new and different interest in the subtle operations of mind itself.
Recommended Reading:
Cottingham, J., et al., eds. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols. Cambridge, 1988.
Questions to Consider:
1. Summarize what makes an idea “clear.”
2. Explain why the evil demon can’t simply deceive us into thinking an idea is “clear.”
3. Conclude whether science is the sort of “bottom-up” process advocated by Descartes.
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