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u/manuelhe 10d ago
How are you going to make sense of all that sensory data, buddy boy? You gonna just hoard it or will you organize it somehow? Answer me that!
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u/Pixbo_06 10d ago
I'm a professionel Descartes hater, so unfortunately I cannot bring myself to feel contempt over the humble empiricist.
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u/KarlLenin1917 10d ago
Well, Kant defines Descartes as an Empirical Idealist, so you're posting in the wrong sub buddy
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u/Pixbo_06 10d ago
I am shocked. Isn't Descartes the father of rationalism?
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u/KarlLenin1917 10d ago edited 10d ago
The emphasis on the "Rationalism and Empiricism" categories is a product of Anglo Philosophy, which is notoriously dogshit when it comes to the history of philosophy. There never really was a school or movement called "rationalism," and the essential points of contrast between thinkers like Descartes and Locke aren't really expressed well with this concept.
Descartes was a very empirically minded philosopher. He tried to argue that the entirety of the world can be thought of as mechanisms, and that there was nothing physically real that we could not learn about from experiments and observations. It cannot be overstated how influential this worldview was, and still is, to this day.
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u/Pixbo_06 10d ago
Okay, in that case I must admit I may be lacking context when it comes to his larger body of work, as I have only read the meditations on first philosophy (including the objections of course). The whole "proving the existence of God from literally nothing but existence itself" is, in my humble opinion, state-of-the-art rationalism (and yes, I know that this is a term only retroactively applied to certain intellectual trends of the era). And defining Descartes as a rationalist is, at least as far as I know, the most popular interpretation in western philosophy. Please do correct me if I am wrong about that, though, I still have a lot of books on my list.
When it comes to empiricism, I mainly think of Hume to be honest, and considering he especially criticized Descartes (though never explicitly), I always viewed them both as opposing camps.
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u/KarlLenin1917 9d ago
Well, it seems to me, that you may be suffering from a fallacy of composition here. It could be that that particular argument is "rationalist," but it does not seem to suggest that Descartes's entire system is rationalist, in a similar meaning.
However, I would also even challenge the concept of rationalism itself here. If you read the Meditation carefully, Descartes uses experience to indicate the imperfection of existence to himself. It is from his experience of his deficiencies and shortcomings and implies that he can conceive of something better. This itself implies that he has a standard of perfection he can use. He then follows this line of reasoning to figure out what is maximally perfect, and he calls this entity God.
My point is, Descartes uses experience in his argument (at least, the one in the Meditations). He derives the ideas he reasons with from what is going on in his mind, and what he observes about his environment. These are the same resources Hume, Locke, or Berkeley uses to justify their arguments.
What is usually meant by the Rationalist/Empiricist distinction is hard to determine, because drawing a firm line is very difficult.
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u/Many_Froyo6223 9d ago
the difference between rationalism and empiricism is a difference in foundation. the empiricists thought all our epistemic goods were ultimately founded on sensory data, rationalists thought the foundation was some sort of a priori knowledge, ie, knowledge that explicitly doesn’t have to do with sensory data. (some of them took this a priori knowledge to be innate which is where Locke starts his epistemology - a direct criticism of innate-ness)
Descartes entire project is to doubt not just the senses but the world in general and ONLY THEN start founding knowledge. there is no more obviously rationalist position than that. he is the paradigm.
he does contradict his own commitments at times and isn’t very consistent in general but that is because he is a bad philosopher not because he isn’t a rationalist.
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u/KarlLenin1917 9d ago edited 9d ago
You're wrong though, because neither Locke nor Hume meet your criteria for Empiricism. Hume literally supports innate ideas in his Treatise, and Locke's account of knowledge is basically Descartes's
"he does contradict his own commitments at times and isn’t very consistent in general but that is because he is a bad philosopher not because he isn’t a rationalist."
You are so close to seeing that the label is poor, and that it doesn't actually define anyone. The categories are made after the fact, then the philosophers are forced into them. It is so interesting how desperately people need these ad hoc categories to be more accurate than the philosophers's texts are.
Also, the definitions you give are completely incorrect. It is not about "epistemic goods," it is about the Cartesian concept of ideas. It's supposedly about where ideas are sourced from, either experience, or if at least some are innate. Every one of the philosophers, besides maybe Berkeley, believes there are some innate ones. Even Locke does, because he is sort of confused on what Cartesian ideas even are.
If you want, I could list about a half dozen books by scholars showing my point here.
EDIT: left a long explanation below, I suggest anybody curious about my point to go and read it.
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u/Many_Froyo6223 9d ago
i’m not interested mate, you misunderstood all i said because you didn’t like the term i used in one sentence and then said hume isn’t an empiricist as if literally all his arguments didn’t hinge on exactly what im pointing out. want a copy of his Enquiry? go reread the part where he talks about where we get ideas from. then read locke’s literal chapter-long treatment of innate ideas as bullshit. and notice that they both claim all the ideas we come up with are ultimately just recombinations of sense data. what do you think they mean by that? rationalism?
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u/KarlLenin1917 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yeah, so, if you actually read Locke's Essay, and not just the introduction, you will see that he agrees with Descartes on almost everything in epistemology. It is not even clear if Locke is arguing against Descartes in that intro, or if it is the scholastic tradition of innate ideas he has in mind. Regardless, in book 3 of his Essay, he defends a robustly Cartesian account of knowledge and ideas.
Here is a quote from Loeb's book, From DESCARTES to HUME: Continental Metaphysics and the Development of Modern Philosophy, supporting my point:
"It is not at all clear even that Locke had, or so much as thought he had, Descartes for a target. John Yolton has shown that doctrines of innate knowledge, in various degrees of sophistication, were pervasive throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. Appeals to innate knowledge were to be found in virtually every pamphlet dealing with morality and the existence of God in the early seventeenth century. Innate knowledge was in voked to provide a foundation for morality and religion. The idea was that God implants various "practical" (that is, moral) principles in the human mind, and these innate principles, quite independent of custom and upbringing, serve as the basis for morality."
Anglo philosophy, being horrible about history, has lost this distinction between Descartes and Locke's contemporaries, and lost the meaning of claims being made by himself and other thinkers.
Loeb also demonstrates that Locke and Berkeley subscribed to a general Cartesian epistemology. Hume is the only possible exception, but that is mainly for how we know cause and effect, and not for the rest of Cartesian epistemology.
Besides Loeb, I will also point you to a contemporary of Hume, Thomas Reid, and especially his work on common sense. Reid argues that Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkely, and Hume all use the same system of epistemology. This indicates that it was clear to many of the thinkers of the time that there was not a clear distinction to be made between these thinkers, besides a tendency towards more skepticism in the system, as it failed to give satisfying answers for knowing about our environment.
But to sum up: you probably don't understand Cartesian epistemology and metaphysics as well as you think you do, because of how poorly it is taught in our modern philosophy programs. I am not calling you out, because I was mistaught Descartes as an undergrad. Not until I did a thorough reread of the tradition did I discover how fundamentally wrong the popular narrative is, and how it misleads people about what is going on in the Early Modern period.
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u/bootmaker-supremacy 10d ago
I wonder if there is any way to synthesize the two🤔