Descartes himself made a statement on truth and falsity in the fourth meditation; ”During these past few days, I’ve accustomed myself of living away from the senses, and have realised that few things are known about the corporeal world are true.”
→ there is a hierarchy of what is fully knowable
→ for Hume this is entirely flipped on its head.
For Descartes it is about the dignity (or nobility, from Aristotle) of a thought. The more something is ”I” in material, the more it is knowledgable for itself. In itself, anything is the most intentional. Anything that is involved with matter are only imperfectly intelligible by themselves. Matter in the premoderns is seen as a kind of resistance to intelligibility.
The first 3 meditations give Descartes the core of what is most knowledgable. What follows is the rest of the world, in short.
In the 3rd meditation, there are some hidden aspects. (A version of the ontological argument). Descartes always has a clear syntagma. He says that when he thinks and reflects on that content, some of that content is clear and distinct. Upon these things, there is no reason to doubt. This means that there is only a possibility to doubt these ideas if God would trick me about them. Descartes mirrors what Anselm does in the proslogion.
After the radical doubt that left thinking and existence safe, there is a kind of evidence given by the nature of the idea, that they are clear and distinct, which makes up a kind of intuitive element, which can be reenacted by the reader as clear and distinct presumably. Clear and distinct does not refer to two different properties but define a kind of primordial evidence. After Descartes, Leibnitz uses this kind of terminology, however splits the ”clear” and the ”distinct”. For Leibnitz ”clear” means what Descartes means by ”clear and distinct”, ie. Evident to my mind as long as God did not make my mind so clumsy that what appears unblurred is actually blurred in reality. ”Distinct” refers to an additional property meaning that one has knowledge of the chain of causes that brought the idea to mind (the same as the effect of a cause). If one has an effect which is clear, it could lack a clear cause still.
Alexander Baumgarten, in the footsteps of Leibnitz, writes the first actually treatise on aesthetics. Baumgarten also wrote an important book of metaphysics which Kant used to teach metaphysics. He defines aesthetics as the real of philosophy, as ideas that are clear but not distinct. Aesthetics is this part of philosophy of ideas which are clear, but we do not know why they are clear. The terminology of Descartes takes on new qualifications from epistemology to aesthetics.
If there is an evil spirit that deceives me, it cannot have created my mind. But it cannot deceive me of the fact that I think due to my mind being greater than it, and other things are fully clear to me, overcomes the doubt of the evil deceiver. But, if the cause of my mind would deceive me, how could I overcome that? There is no way. What appears evident to me can just be the effect of a mind created to be structurally deceived. Thus, Descartes’ doubt remains in suspense. There are thus two kinds of doubt, the radicalisation of the doubt of the first meditation in the second meditation. Then there is the evil spirit, which is doubted in the third meditation, through the most radical of all doubts, as the creator of all things, if he exists, could have made the entire world unsteady in its foundations and thus it would be impossible to be certain of anything. He puts the doubt in suspense, and goes on with his demonstration anyways, and does a kind of phenomenological analysis ”the whoever”. Descartes analyses his thinking into certain different genera, and finds three kinds of ideas. Ideas that seem to have a cause external to my mind (adventitious ideas). Other ideas are made by myself or inborne in me. And among the innate ideas there is an idea of the infinite and perfect; God. It is in this analysis which he pretends to make neutral, that we all carry an idea of actual infinity and perfection. (The Greeks, when they think of infinity, often think of it is a potential infinity, whilst Descartes argues for perfect infinity.) The idea of perfection became crucial to exclude deception. Once you realise that God, the thing that is infinite perfection is so, not only must it exist, since each effect must have a cause that is bigger than the effect, and the idea of the infinite must have an infinite cause. And God is perfect thereby, and thus not able to deceive because it is a privation of perfection. This is a kind of a priori argument based on the notion of God.
It is absolutely fundamental to Descartes’ argument as his entire systematisation collapses if God is actually a deceiver. However, God cannot deceive as He is perfect. And if God cannot deceive, those things that appear clear to me, are clear in reality because there is no being that can deceive me.
What is fundamental here is also the impact of what precedes his argument. The doubt that lingers in the beginning of the 3rd meditation, thus disappears.
If you follow Descartes’ argument you tend to believe him, but there are still things that are weirdly presumed.
He says that about corporeal things, we cannot really know much. About incorporeal things like the Mind, we can know a lot more, and even more about God. Ie. He presumes that what is immaterial is highly knowable, a kind of argument of nobility, ie. That what is immaterial is more noble.
The persuasive strenght of his argument relies tacitly on the tradition of the argument of nobility. It was a sort of obvious assumption at the time. It was never needed to argue for.
Sometimes there is a focus on the argument for God which is entirely scrutinised, but this argument rests on no arguing at all.
eg. Wittgenstein in his book ”On certainty”, each argument is just the door which you need to pass from one room to another. The door can be opened and closed, the arguing, but the door has hinges on which it stands, but they cannot be opened or closed. Of course you can make the door bigger and thus move the hinges, but the door will still be conditional on the hinges. Thus by analysing these hinges of an author, we can understand important things about the past and philosophical systems themselves.
The cause is the idea of God, but God is also the Cause of any other cause.
Thus Descartes concludes that the idea of God is innate in himself and thus also exists.
When God is demonstrated, he redoes the job, incase there is a kind of option, but excludes this possibility because God is the only real thing properly found innate within the mind. This innateness however allows for the possibility that other innate ideas can be found through God.
Descartes provides a phenomenological argument, making a catalogue of all the ideas he has. He withdraws away and tries to not rely on his senses and attempts not to be distracted. In doing this catalogueisation, there is a group of ideas that seem to be entirely innate, not produced by me, but not deriving from outside me. Thereby they are inborn and one of these is infinity and perfection.
At the end of the 3rd meditation, he comes back and turns the argument around, and shows that what he described at first is also necessary due to the nature of these ideas. Eg. the idea of the self, or mathematics, is inborn into the person, because they are clear and cannot be manipulated by me. The sense of the self seems impossible to change, whilst the
(In Kant ideas do not have a cause like in Descartes. He speaks of regulative ideas, which are not an effect of a cause, they can be assumed without causes. What is interesting is that all modern thinkers speak of Ideas a lot. And all of these authors have their own determination of an idea. Thus we should not be be translating them back and forth in the same word usually. But for Kant, we have to put together the projects of rationalism and emprism.)
What is typical in Descartes is a kind of solipsistic thinking where a brackets the existence of the external world and its minds, they cannot be known thus far, and so he finds that the innate idea of God is something that mainly exists in him and that is what matters for him. As long as God-exists-for Descartes, he can prove the rest of the world.
We are reading a review article of Hume published anonymously, which functioned as a kind of abstract to the treatise on human nature. The abstract usually praises Hume, but is also a very reliable summary and so has been published with it often.
Until the 30s, two economists who were also bibliophiles (John Maynard Keynes and the guy that Wittgenstein liked, Pierros Raffa). Keynes and Raffa put together a lot of information about printers and it became clear that the anonymous author of this abstract was no less than Hume himself. It seems Hume was trying to give a spin to his own publication as no one cared for it while he was alive.
Hume thought that reading history was very important for women. Hume was mainly celebrated as an hisotorian, and general polymath. Hume as an historian is not consistent with Hume the philosopher. As a historian, he has no problem to make recourse with causality. Hume the philosopher however thought that causality has no actual reality, and that it is only a habit of our mind. However, he doesn’t claim that history has the possibility of revealing reality, rather it is a kind of fun, which women can take part of (okay…).
For Hume, the principle of cause and effect is just a habit of the mind. And so of course ideas cannot be a kind of effect. Instead, they are what remains of impressions; so weak impressions.
An idea presupposes an impression, an an impression is all kinds of sensible perception. The sensible perceptions leads to impression which in turn lead to ideas. When I no longer have the vivid impression under my senses, the thing I remember is the idea. The idea is no longer as strong as the impression but traces itself back to it.
This gives the criteria to establish when an idea is legitimate or not. He makes a test. If an idea cannot be traced to any single or multiple impression(s) (some ideas can be a combination of multiple impressions) it is not legitimate. Thus it is a kind of pseudo-idea. We cannot explain why it is in our mind. We need to be rid of these ideas. The idea of Substance is not something which exists, because we cannot have any impression of the substance. Thus, everything is a kind of accident, because we cannot perceive substance.
The idea for Hume is a radically empirical notion because it has to be traced to an empirical impression.
For Hume, a lot of earlier problems in philosophy are simply not legitimate. The idea of God is not legitimate, just like substance, because we can never see God with our senses.
Any concept is legitimate as long as it does not imply any kind of pseudo-idea.
What remains from Descartes is still the foundational approach however. We have to establish a general notion, and then build ourselves up from there.
The aim of all late philosophers according to Hume, is to anatomise human nature into a regular manor, and promises to draw no conclusion except what is authorised by experience. There is a kind of analogy with Descartes. Thus, Hume and Descartes have the same method, but a different source of epistemology.
The first point Hume wants to present is the criticism of the principle of causality. He calls perception everything that can be present to the mind, which in turn is defined into impressions and ideas. Impressions are lively and strong, whilst ideas are fainter and weaker. Strong vs. Weak perception.
All ideas are derived from impressions. This proposition seems to be equivalent with Lockes idea that no ideas are innate. Innate ideas are impossible in Hume. He admits that there is something innate to ideas, ie. The feeling. He gives a very nice description of social envy. Pride is one of the fundamental emotions that drive human action. Pride is something inborn, but is not an idea or an impression, it is a sort of structure of how we perceive things. It is the way to think, and if we want to obtain something we have to use this element of pride in everything we do.
He gives interesting descriptions of society and the place of recognition in society. These are ideas that are actually quite original in Hume (though also quite present in Pascal, who however focuses on Leisure).
In the first pages he speaks of the test on how to know whether we are talking about an idea.
For Descartes, to use the perception to make ideas clear is entirely impossible, a heresy so-to-speak. For Hume, to see what is clear and precise, we must ask from what impression an idea is derived. This is a sort of test of the reduction of ideas into impressions.
From what impression does the idea of the cause derive? Hume uses an example of billiard ball, it is clear that you are adressing people who are familiar with billiard, his readership is well-educated Scottish people in the Scottish enlightenment. If we think that the movement of the first ball is the cause of the movement of the other balls, what we see is that there is the first ball, then the second ball; the first ball comes close to the second, but we do not see any passage of force from one to the other. We just see ball A, continuity, and then ball B moving. Thus we never perceive causality. We just see movement which happens in succession. There is a constant conjunction of this which we see repeatedly, but it still does not give me a perception causes. I just see two consecutive contiguous movement which are kept together by a priority and a posteriority in time. Oc post hoc. Why do we think that there is a cause? Because these perceptions have some features which bring them together in a constant repetition, and which form a habit, a custom. Because I have a custom of thinking like that, I continue to think like that, despite it being wrong. WHY do we think there is causality. It is because there is a custom and a contiguity of perception. So it is not removed completely, but is put into the reality of psycholoigal habit rather than being some kind of ”real” thing.
Perception is for Hume an original notion that does not have any causal happening, it just about being present to the mind. This presence can be very lively and vivid, impressions, or can have become weaker and are thus ideas.
Hume intentionally analyses very simple cases, using a minimum of assumptions, which make the argument more attractive as we do not really have to admit to much to follow it. But this sort of poverty of elements is what then brought a lot of questions, such as in the analysis of consciousness. For Hume, there is no self. The self is the addition according to a given line of continuity between a series of acts. The reason my self is different from yours, is because the series of our actions are not overlapping. But this is not something that actually give us any proof of a sign. According to Hume, an amnesiac is not the same person as they were before loosing their memory, and this is true of all people. Thus identity, is something that is entirely socially constructed rather than existing in reality.
The merit in Hume is the merit that Kant recognises however. Without Hume, Kant would not have elaborated his own philosophy. Hume is someone who sleeps in a dogmatic dream, and Kant is the awakening of that dream.
You also see a mention in the text of Descartes. Hume, from what we have seen, have a lot of differences. However there is one difference that Hume himself explicitly says: that Descartes maintains that thought is the essence of the mind, not this thought or that thought, but thought in general. This seems entirely unintelligible as everything that exists is entirely particular. There is not something like a mind existing as a unity. The mind is not a substance in which perception takes place. The thought or perception in general is thus not the essence of the mind.
He uses the word perception differently. Initially of his own idea of perception.
In Descartes there are primary and secondary qualities, objective and subjective qualities. For Hume, all qualities are the same, and the association of those qualities is what I can know. Even biology is impossible in Hume’s perspective. It is possible only as a kind of practical discipline that creates some kind of model, but there is no grasp of reality.
The second part of Hume is probably the most interesting for us to read actually. eg. He develops a fully fledged theory of testimony and witness. It is even a core element of his epistemology. Testimony is the idea that what we know is from the testimony of someone else. There is an idea in Hume that testimony is a genuine source of knowledge, because we cannot know without it. Without testimony life turns into a kind of nightmare through which we cannot interpret anything. However, it is a kind of reductionist model, as someone in justified in believing that some statement P is true iff the witness, ms. T, about P is evident. I am allowed according to Hume to use testimony as a source of knowledge only if I have known testimonial evidence that the witness is reliable. So ms.T is an established doctor who made groundbreaking research in cancer-therapy, and she tells us that there is a new therapy against Y, and this gives me reason to believe her due to her reputability. The evidence is not only on the content, but on the trustworthiness of the witness.
It is interesting, because after Hume, non-reductionistic models are created, because he is actually the first who brings this issue to the forefront. Thomas Reid will create a non-reductionistic account of testimony. I am justified in taking for truth what Ms. T says, as long as I do not have any evidence that she is untrustworthy. If I have no reason to doubt, I shouldn’t doubt. This is a kind of criterium of default trust. If I have no evidence that what I am told is untrustworthy, the sound reaction is to take it as truth.
In the 18:th century you have these two models, and Hume’s is predominant. Maybe in the last 30 years, the epistemology of testimony has actually gotten a resurgence as an interesting idea and there is an explosion on the theory of expert testimony. One paragraph in a text by Hume led to vast research now.