Do We Have Free Will?: Compatibilist View. The
Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes believes that the kind of freedom that is necessary for moral responsibility is consistent with determinism. As he says with characteristic terseness, "Liberty and necessity are consistent." Contemporary...
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Hobbesian Materialism and the Mind
Seventeenth century materialists, led by British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, object to the idea of mind as a non-physical substance. For Hobbes the universe consists of "matter in motion," nothing else. If dualism struggles to account for how body an...
Do We Have Free Will?: Theory of Determinism, The
The theory of determinism contends that human behavior, like every other physical phenomenon in the universe is determined by the laws of cause and effect rather than free will. The scientific advances of the 17th century and the work of Sir Isaac N...
What is Real?: Idealist's View of Reality,The
Writing somewhat later in the Scientific Revolution, Bish George Berkeley sought to crush the threat that materialism posed to religion by arguing that reality is made up entirely of ideas. Since we know about the world only through the ideas or sen...
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: John Locke's Empiricism and Its Troublesome Gap
John Locke and later empiricists dispute the rationalists' claim that pure reason could grasp truths about the world. They argue that all knowledge of the world must come through the senses and experience. Locke compares the mind at birth to a tabul...
Is Reason the Source of Knowledge?: Religious Conviction of Rationalists
Major rationalists share a profound religious conviction. They believe that God created the universe with an underlying order that can be grasped through the power of reason. Both Descartes and Leibniz take the view that the human mind is made in th...
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Berkeley's Solution to Locke's Gap
George Berkeley, the next major empiricist after Locke, makes the gap between the external world and our mental images of it central to his philosophy. Berkeley's solution is to say that bodies are simply collections of ideas that exist in the mind....
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Hume and Causal Relationships
Consider the motion of billiard balls on a table. Can reason analyze how they will move a priori without previous experience as rationalists contend? Hume insists that the only way we know about patterns like cause and effect is by seeing certain ev...
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Hume and the Necessity of Experience
David Hume, the third major empiricist starts from the premise that all knowledge of the world must come from experience. He underscores this point by emphasizing how much more vivid sense impressions are than the copies we make of them by merely th...
What Justifies the State?: Right to Dissent, The
Philosopher John supports the people's right to dissent against tyrannical regimes. The major problem Locke attributes to the state of nature without government is the difficulty of protecting personal property. The kind of government that is create...