(Review background of development of Mathematical orientation) - Hobbes hits it at age 40: certainty of geometric demonstration
Civil War: 1642 - 1649 - execution of Charles I
Cromwell
1660 Monarchy revived, Charles II
* residue of medieval view
Despite orientation towards mathematics - model for ? remains the same - one supreme science
(?Plato) shift from Aristotle/Thomas, a pluralism that includes teleological view as ultimate - but not exclusive of mechanism to mathematical/mechanistic view that does exclude
1. follows from doctrine of double truth;
2. positivism/ See p. 121 exclusion of theology, etc.
Conception of reason - see p. 121 - quantifiable/mathematical
________
Second day - 1. Linguistic solution to question of identity
1.a. truth as analytic - p. 133
Mechanics as Metaphysics - arbitrary, relativist consequences of starting point - See p. 125
casual relations - phantasms 2. empiricist ? -
association of ideas
Does it answer the question:
1. Why - motion is experienced as a sensation at all, - and why are motions experienced as middle C and another as red.
2. ?
3. Problem with overly deductive account of Science
4. Problem with political theory;
1. need for reason vs. determinism
2. descriptive becomes normative
Notice the finite/infinite distinction used as the basis for setting up an either/or - p. 123
Physics - Matter & its Motion - billiard ball conception of universe
Notice that his account of language & science (current & ? articles):
1. follow the Euclidean model
2. cuts loose from any correspondence theory of truth - no possible way of confirming/disconfirming, but only checking on what we have agreed to call things, and what follows analytical from definitions (see p. 133) (According to Jones - misunderstood the relation between hypothesis/experiment)
3. "relativism"
4. How do we determine the correctness of our system? a) Power
- 134 (the equivalent of political ?) (comment on magic)
b) need for certainty
- requirement of absolute sovereign to compel agreement among what otherwise would be absolute individualism. Account of religion - reconstitution of why people believe what they believe in the terms of the new physics
Account of voluntary motives -
endeavors - (appetite, desire - good)
" - (aversions - evil)
(emotionism)
? of his failure 1. fails to account for intentionality to deduce his 2. Why should this be the case? theories
(mathematical
paradigm)
- Makes science of psychology possible
Notice, however, that the resulting psychology (140 J.) is a justification of Machiavellian conceptions of the individual and political theory.
War of each against all.
NECESSARY CONTEXT FOR MASTERY AND POSSESSION OF NATURE THEME?
(Nature is simply one more obstacle to the satisfaction of our desires;; we need to have power over it as well.)
- Notice the account of religion in Materialistic terms (reminds us of Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Stories)
- example of reductionism
Again - in perfectly consistent fashion, - power is decisive: truth is determined by power - in this case, the power of the Sovereign
Politics
The state is likewise an object of Scientific analysis Ambiguous drives: "So far as men try to get the better of those who have the power to ? them, fear of death leads to competition". But - can also lead to surrender to one who guarantees to protect their lives.
love of competition
? resign themselves to having less than they hiring would like, in order to hold on to what they have.
rights in the state of nature - to preserve "his own life and if doing anything, which in his own judgment, and reason, he shall conceive to be the greatest means thereunto." (145)
Laws of nature = those acts which are the aptest means - rights to every other thing, even to one another's body war of each against all or unconditional abbreviation of rights - by transferring them to another
- contract, Covenant defines justice, injustice as performing the Covenant
conflict in theory between:
a) insistence on selfishness - chaos - need for Sovereignty
b) need of rationality to see need for sovereign and enter the
contract
_
MAN
Cogitating motions
Phantasms as "the knowers of motions," as the way in which certain motions, occurring in the brain, are experienced. What the determinate bodies out there cause in the determinate body called my brain is nothing but motion; yet these motions are not experienced by me as motions. They are experienced as "things" and "qualities." (128)
But, as Jones points out, if we mean that an account or theory is to "explain" particular items by deducing them from "the principles of first philosophy," this theory of phantasms provides no such explanation:
Why a motion should be experienced as a sensation at all, and why one motion is experienced as middle C and another as red, are, and remain, compete mysteries as far as first philosophy goes. Since Hobbes's goal was to explain everything by deducing it from the principles of first philosophy, his attempt to establish a purely mechanical philosophy breaks down almost at the outset. (128f.)
In short, there is the problem of "why a motion should be experience as what it is not (a sensation) instead of what it is (a motion)." (129)
--> further embarrassment: how does a motion get experienced at all?
Hobbes disguised this difficulty from himself by covertly introducing an observer; but since he explicitly maintained that only matter is real, he is reduced to the very odd position that one motion somehow experiences another motion. Clearly, experience implies consciousness, and Hobbes's system cannot admit consciousness - either as an "accident" of matter or, still less, as the activity of an immaterial reality, mind. (129)
Further difficulties:
Hobbes, fitting in with the Anglo-American tradition, is an empiricist: "the data of sense are the bases from which 'all the knowledge we have is derived.'" (129) Problem:
Though Hobbes naturally wished to hold, in agreement with common sense, that the phantasm somehow knows the world and reports truly about its nature, it follows from his basic thesis that what the phantasm thinks it knows is actually only "a tumult of the mind, raised by external things that press the organical parts of man's body." Thus perception, far from being knowledge, is sheer delusion to the extent that men are taken in by it: "Whatsoever accidents or qualities our sense make us think there be in the world, they be not there, but are seeming and apparitions only: the things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And this is the great deception of sense." (129)
This also leaves no possibility for correcting sense experience. We can ostensibly correct mistakes within the system -- i.e., the stick in the water as bent, as one perception, can be corrected by others (i.e., other perceptions of the stick as straight). But how can there be any correction of sense experience as such? Since sense experience is the deterministic result of external motion, we are simply stuck with the collection of impressions forced upon us by external motion. There is no external reference point outside the system that we might use to correct our misimpressions.
Indeed -- this illustrates, in my terms, the metaphysical dimension of Hobbes' apparent empiricism. The deceptive character of sense experience is not, in this light, a "fact" -- rather, it follows deductive from the first principle that all reality is matter in motion -- and in that sense, it is a philosophical claim or assumption which is not directly demonstrated by an appeal to sense experience.
SENSATION
It is here that we see another frequently emerging feature of modern philosophy -- the tendency of materialistic theories to become reductionistic.
According to the traditional philosophy, the mind has various powers -- it perceives, thinks, imagines, remembers, and so on. According to Hobbes, these are all simply motions in our bodies. The most elementary of these motions is perception (or "sense"). The rest are "derived from that original." (130)
"Imagination, for instance, is 'decaying sense.'" And, because of Hobbes' assumption of a deterministic universe, he further assumes that "There is, then, a regularity to the way in which various phantasms succeed one another; what is more, phantasms that succeed one another in sense tend to succeed one another in imagination." (131) --> his version of what is later called the "law of association of ideas."
WHAT IS IMPORTANT HERE IS THAT HOBBES IS "attempting to observe the behavior of thoughts, just as Gilbert had observed the behavior of magnets, or Tycho Brahe the behavior of planets in their paths, in order to find the 'laws of their behavior.'" (132) Jones criticizes this account from the standpoint of a more modern "stream of consciousness" approach, in contrast with Hobbes' atomistic and mechanical conception of "a series of hard, self-enclosed units that have to be compounded or separated, as the case may be." (132)
THOUGHT DISTINGUISHED FROM SENSATION
"The distinguishing mark of thought, in contrast to sensation, is the capacity to give names 'or other voluntary signs' to the felt tates, and this capacity itself conforms to the law of association." (133)
This emphasis on naming, notice, leads to Hobbes' discussion of what amounts to analytic truth, and his nominalism: (quoting Hobbes)
And from hence it is evident, that truth and falsity have no place but amongst such living creatures as use speech....
From hence also this may be deduced, that the first truths were arbitrarily made by those that first of all imposed names upon things, or received them from the imposition of others. For it is true (for example) that man is a living creature, but it is for this reason, that it pleased men to impose both these names on the same thing. (133)
[for more on nominalism in Hobbes, see the association between nominalism and relativism in Hobbes, and the parallel association between nominalism and anti-rationalism in Hobbes;
cf. my Notes on Realism, Nominalism, and Conceptualism, and
nominalism in David Hume]
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
Reasoning is but reckoning, adding and subtracting of the consequences of general names -- and science is the name of the kind of knowledge obtained as a result of reasoning.
This follows the mathematical paradigm - but it also means that the truth of science is conditional: it depends on what first principles one starts with. These cannot, notice, be verified, say, by an appeal to sense-experience -- since on his own showing, sense-experience is illusory.
So why prefer Hobbes' axiomatic system to any other (e.g., Thomas')? Because "the theorems derived from them [Hobbes'] enabled me to exert more effective control over their environment." (134)
Hobbes' place in the history of philosophy:
"Hobbes is important...because of the almost brutal way in which he exposed the crucial problem of finding a place for value in a world of physical fact, the world conceived of as the new science conceived of it." (153)
Hobbes had adopted, in his commitment to the new scientific method, the premises attractive to other thinkers of the age:
Their problem was to show how they could accept a physical theory similar to his without being led, as he was to conclusions that offended men's religious sense and committed them to a purely amoral and secular conception of life. How was it possible, Hobbes's successors had to ask themselves, in the neutral world of matter in motion that physics disclosed, to find a place for the reality of purpose, for the spontaneity of human conduct, for the significance of human life, for the validity of thought? (153)
On Jones' view, then, the
Medieval view is one extreme, and Hobbes another -- with subsequent
philosophy an effort to find a middle ground between the two.