[Lecture Ten] Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 45 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 journey from rationalism to skepticism is explored in the philosophies of three followers of Descartes. Two rationalists, Spinoza and Leibniz, extended and completed the Cartesian project by presenting a more purely idealist metaphysics and rationalist epistemology. The reaction of the empiricist tradition reaches its height in John Locke’s epistemology and metaphysics, but which continued to separate reason from reality.
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 did Spinoza push Cartesian rationalism to a more extreme form? |
| What was Spinoza’s unique proof of God in his metaphysics? |
| Explain Spinoza’s pantheism. |
| How can Spinoza reconcile the seeming differences between mind and matter as a monist? |
| How did Leibniz arrive at his theory of monads? |
| What made Leibniz not a pure rationalist despite his extreme idealism? |
| What are the two classes of truth in Leibniz’s system? |
| Explain Locke’s three arguments against innate ideas. |
| What are the sources of experience from which we can build our ideas? |
| In addition to the sensory qualities, why do entities need a substratum according to Locke? |
| Since Locke rejects direct perception of reality, how does he think we can know reality? |
| What positive points are there in Locke’s ethics and politics? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:19:06 | What is the fallacy of distinguishing as Leibniz does between the “logically possible” and “the real”? |
| 2:21:10 | If observation is invalid, how does Spinoza show that his basic axioms are true? He can’t deduce them from anything more primary. |
| 2:23:43 | Wasn’t Spinoza an advocate or champion of individual freedom even though he didn’t believe that individuality was real? |
| 2:23:43 | What were Spinoza’s ethics? |
| 2:33:30 | I’ve always heard determinism expounded in relation to a divinity or man’s genes as the causal factor. Considering Spinoza’s pantheism and lack of individuation, I don’t understand how determinism applies. |
| 2:34:28 | Was the mysticism of the continental rationalists resisted by the scientists of the time? Was this a factor checking the immediate popularity of continental rationalism? |
| 2:36:20 | An altruist does not respect the rights of others. There is no reason therefore for others to respect the rights of the altruist. This means there is nothing wrong with killing the altruist. Do you agree? |
| 2:39:46 | If the dichotomy of necessary and contingent facts is false, how does one apply this to human actions? Is it wrong to imagine that a man could have acted differently than he has? |
| 2:41:09 | Is Leibniz’s reasoning correct that there must be ultimate, indivisible substances composing reality? |
| 2:41:58 | Did “pre-established harmony” imply determinism? |
| 2:42:36 | Would Plato’s form of the good or Plotinus’s “the One” necessitate a “best of all possible worlds” since perfection, which was also perfectly good, must radiate or emanate in the best or most perfect of all possible ways? |
| 2:44:55 | Is there any likelihood that you will teach the second half of the course “live” within that next year? |