[Lecture Nine] Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume

by Dr. Leonard Peikoff

Total Time: 2 hours, 55 minutes

Course summary: Presented as two complementary twelve-lecture courses—Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume and Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present—The History of Philosophy covers the whole of western philosophy from its discovery in Ancient Greece to the twentieth century, including Objectivism. Dr. Peikoff argues that philosophy is the means by which we can understand any human culture and, more broadly, the history and changing course of a civilization. Read more »

In this lecture: The birth of modern philosophy is explored in the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. The materialist, empiricist, and nominalist approach of Hobbes influenced his metaphysical and epistemological views and led ultimately to his deterministic ethics and authoritarian politics. Descartes birthed the fully modern approach to philosophy with his method of doubt that leads to rationalism, his dualism in metaphysics, and his primacy of consciousness approach in epistemology.

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Study Guide

This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.

How does Hobbes arrive at his metaphysical materialism?

Explain how Hobbes’s empiricism leads to his nominalism.

What is the causal theory of perception? The representative theory?

How do nominalism and sensualism imply each other?

Explain how Hobbes’s view of man leads to his determinist ethics and authoritarian politics.

What is the Cartesian method of doubt?

What is Descartes’s basis for certainty?

Explain Descartes’s unique proof of God.

How does Descartes escape the problem of demonic deceit in his epistemology?

What are the innate ideas according to Descartes?

Explain Descartes’s dualism in metaphysics.

Q&A Guide

Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.

2:29:03	Isn’t it clear that the concept of time—or of a mat, for that matter—is a reasoned abstraction and its difference from the concept of “mortal” is only of degree, not of kind? In other words, why does Hobbes distinguish between two types of truths since all truths depend upon concepts and definitions?
2:30:36	Do you agree that there are some things man cannot conceive of, even in the Walt Disney sense? For example, matter without primary qualities.
2:32:39	In light of Hobbes’s position that reason is conditioned, is he then the major forebearer of the German polylogist systems?
2:34:19	Why does Hobbes place such a value on the absence of social strife? Why should Hobbes’s whim be binding on anybody else?
2:35:12	Hobbes starts his philosophy by appealing to the method of mathematics and ends up denouncing mathematics as being detached from reality. How does he reconcile those two?
2:36:34	Would Objectivism agree with primacy of the will over the intellect since man’s free will consists in focusing his mind and therefore the will comes first?
2:38:11	What if a man defined man as a “featherless triped.” Wouldn’t Hobbes be able to call this definition false on the basis of sense perception?
2:39:14	Would you give some examples of Descartes’s application of mathematics to philosophy?
2:40:14	Since the metaphysical and epistemological principles of modern science are heavily Aristotelian, why did modern science adopt a skeptic-subjectivist ethics?
2:44:08	Did Hobbes believe that men should voluntarily give up their power to a king?
2:45:22	Can you explain the relation, if any, between nominalism and the modern empiricist view that all knowledge or induction is “probable, never certain”?
2:46:47	What has the role of man’s awareness of his own mortality played in philosophy?
2:48:48	Would you please describe the modern view of the meaning of Occam’s razor?
2:49:54	Were there no philosophers in history before Ayn Rand who made any significant attempt to provide an objective base for values?
2:52:42	If Aristotle’s philosophy had been completely consistent, with no traces of the primacy of consciousness, so it could not have been integrated with Christianity at any point, would it have had more or less impact on the Medieval period?