28. The theory of substance: pluralism and pluralistic theories

• The many-substance-view is reffered to as pluralism. The best known though highly improbable and and eccentric example of pluralism is the system of monadology created by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. According to Leibniz the only existing things are so called monads – ultimate elements of the universe

• Monads are centers of force; each monad possesses its own degree and kind of force;

• God is a monad (the highest one) and every human soul is a monad too but they do not interact – as Leibniz used to say they are windowless, their activities are coordinated according to a divine preestablished harmony (harmonia prestabilita) like perfectly synchronized clocks ticking in unison.

• Monads are centers of force; substance is force, while space, matter, and motion are merely phenomenal.

29. What is the ultimate source of our knowledge? Nativism vs.Empiricism

“What is the ultimate source of our knowledge?”

• those who claim that some notios are innate are reffered to as nativists.

• those who claim that there are no innate ideas nad that experience is the only and ultimate source of our knowledge are widely known as empiricists

• (the word empiricis from Greek empeiria – experience)

30. Locke’s tabula rasa and the critique of nativism

• Locke identified experience as the source of knowledge. The mind, he said, is at birth a tabula rasa or “blank slate”, on which the world of experience gradually imprints itself in a series of descrete sensations.

• Locke: if so called innate ideas are already imprinted in our minds at the moment of birth how can we explain the lack of certain ideas in the minds of children, idiots or so called savage people?

• Nativists argued that the general laws of logic are commonly shared by all the humans because our minds simply have them. Locke replied that Indians cannot understand neither the idea of one God, nor the idea of identity. What’s more, we cannot have an innate sense that God should be worshipped, when we cannot even agree on a conception of God or whether God exists at all. One of Locke's fundamental arguments against innate ideas is the very fact that there is no truth to which all people attest.

31. Locke: primary and secondary qualities

• Primary qualities, such as shape, motion or number are independent of our experience of them;

• secondary qualities, such as color and taste, depend on our individual perceptions.

• Locke saw primary qualities as actual attributes of the perceived object rather than sensations. While Locke was an empiricist.

• Primary qualities (shape, hardness, position, number) are actually present within an object and are not easily divorced from it. Secondary qualities are those that have the power to produce a sensation in the observer (color, scent, taste, sound).

32. Berkeley: “esse est percipi” and phenomenalism

• Berkeley maintained that the objects of perception exist only in our experience of them.

• what we do not perceive does not exist and what we do perceive exists only by virtue of our perception.

• He called this view immaterialism and summed it up in a phrase “esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived).

• In Berkeley’s theory, the objects of our perception are “ideas” that cannot exist outside our concsiousness; there is therefore no material world as such.

• Berkeley did not believe, however, that the world dissapears when we close our eyes; these ideas also exist in the mind of God, who guarantees the continued existence of things that escape fallible, temporary human perception. An omniscent, ever-vigiliant God must exists in fact, to preserve the stability and continuity of the universe.

• Phenomenalism – a version of empiricism also realted to skepticism.

The theory states that we can have knowledge only of pehenomena we perceive, that the reality of a thing depends on our perception of it and that therefore we cannot be certain of the true nature of reality. Matter exists, so far, as we can know for sure, only if and when we perceive it. If there is a fundamental reality beyond the world of phenomena it is unknown and therefore not worth of speculating about

• Berkeley distinguished between “being” and “being perceived” and maintained that the objects of perception exists only in our experience of them.