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Enlightenment

 

The Minds of the Moderns: Rationalism, Empiricism, and Philosophy of Mind by Janice Thomas (McGill-Queens) Taking Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume in turn, Janice Thomas presents an authoritative and critical assessment of each of these canonical thinkers' views of the notion of mind. The book examines each philosopher's position on five key topics: the metaphysical character of minds and mental states; the nature and scope of introspection and self-knowledge; the nature of consciousness; the problem of mental causation; and the nature of representation and intentionality. The exposition and discussion of their positions is informed by present-day debates in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology, enabling the reader to get a clear sense of the importance of these philosophers' ideas, many of which continue to define our current notions of the mental.

Time and again, philosophers return to the great early modern rationalist and empiricist thinkers for instruction and inspiration. Those working on the philosophy of mind are no exception and Janice Thomas makes clear that earlier philosophers have much to offer contemporary debates.

"An excellent book. Its single greatest strength is the ease with which Thomas weaves into her text contemporary scholarly discussions among historians of philosophy and philosophers of mind." --Charlie Huenemann, Utah State University

The roll call of great early modern Western philosophers trips readily off any undergraduate's tongue: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume — the rationalists and the empiricists. Again and again, professional philosophers and students alike come back to these figures for instruction and inspiration. The main objective of this book is to set out clearly views on the philosophy of mind held by each of these six figures. Each thinker has a distinct stance on the nature of mind that can be found in his central text or texts. So I shall be mainly looking at Descartes's Meditations and Discourse on Method, Spinoza's Ethics, Leibniz's Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous and Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (especially Book I).

Students of the history of philosophy will be well aware that most commentaries give some attention to the views on mind held by their subject. However, this discussion is usually restricted to a thinker's position on the metaphysics of mind. My intention here is to go beyond this and try to discover what each of the six philosophers has to say that is relevant to four topics that have been of strong interest to philosophers of mind in recent years. So, in each of the six parts to come, the discussion follows the same pattern. I look first at what each thinker takes to be the metaphysical character of mind (in some cases also mentioning personal identity). But then in the second and third chapters, respectively, I turn to the scope and nature of self-knowledge followed by the nature of consciousness Final* the fourth and fifth chapters ofeach part are devoted to the problem of mental causation and then the nature of representation or intentionality. In the remainder of this introduction I shall give a brief outline of the general concerns and problems to be examined under each of these five topic headings.

The metaphysical character of mind: are minds substances and if so what kind?

The word "substance" in non-philosophical parlance usually signifies a kind of stuff like chalk or cheese, treacle or tea. In philosophical writing, however, the term "substance" has a tradition in Western thought, which goes back at least to Aristotle, in which the word is reserved as a technical term for whatever a particular thinker regards as most fundamental in reality. There are two central Aristotelian criteria of substancehood. First of all, substances are those things that have ontological primacy, which is to say they are things that do not depend for their existence on the existence of anything else.

Substances are "the fundamental entities in the universe, the ultimate objects of natural science") They are the things on which other things depend for their existence. Secondly, substances for Aristotle have logical priority in the sense that items in other categories - qualities, quantities and so forth - are predicable of ("said of") them whereas substances are always subjects. They are never predicated of (or "said of") anything else.

According to Aristotle, substances are also genuine individuals or unities not just collections, even collections of parts. They are what might be called "free-standing" things capable of existing and persisting independently in a way that neither their properties nor their parts could do. They can survive change, retaining their identity intact through many kinds of alteration, just so long as they retain those features essential to being the kinds of things they are. For Aristotle two paradigmatic examples of substances - things for which, in each case, it seems to him that all the characteristics mentioned so far are true - are the individual man and the individual horse.

By the time Berkeley came to mount his notorious attack on the hypothesis of material substance the Aristotelian criteria for applying the term "substance" had come apart to some extent. Or, rather, some writers highlighted one aspect, while others concentrated on another. For a number of Locke's immediate predecessors "substance" carries much less of a concern for individuality and unity, at least where material substance is concerned. Instead, the term occurs in debates about how many sorts of fundamental kinds of stuff reality consists in. This change of emphasis is due, of course, to Descartes, whose very influential view that there are two (but only two) sorts of created substance - material substance and rational souls or minds - was at the centre of his metaphysics. Each type of substance has its essential attribute. Material substance, or res extensa, has extension in length, breadth and height. The rational soul, or res cogitans, is essentially the unextended subject of thought.

Once Cartesian substance dualism has been propounded, the attempt to decide what in reality deserves the honorific title "substance" becomes largely the question whether it is dualism, materialistic monism or idealistic monism that best represents the fundamental character of reality. This is to emphasize, almost to the exclusion of the others, the first of Aristotle's criteria of substancehood, according to which substance is what is independent in existence. For Descartes, matter and minds each depend for their existence on nothing other than God, who could, if he wished, create either in the total absence of the other. For Spinoza the interdependence that exists between each thing and the next and that unites each thing with its neighbours and its surroundings is so thoroughgoing that nothing short of the whole of reality qualifies as an independent substance although that one substance is both extended (material) and ideal (mental). On the other hand, for Leibniz, individuality is paramount in deciding which things are substances: only his immaterial monads have the simplicity, indivisibility and persistence to count as genuine individuals and thus, for him, substances.

When we come to Locke a different facet of the character of the independence that bestows substancehood comes to the forefront; or at least many of Locke's readers, including Berkeley, found this aspect or emphasis in what Locke says of substance. While Locke explicitly endorsed a dualist metaphysical position recognizing both material and immaterial substance (as well as the one divine substance) he also made the following, and other similar, remarks about "substance in general", describing it as "something ... though we know not what it is" (Essay II.xxiii.3, 297), and "the supposed, but unknown support of those qualities we find existing" (II.xxiii.2, 296).

Many readers (including Leibniz) took these "something, we know not what" remarks as evidence that substance, whether material or immaterial, was or should have been for Locke, an in-principle-unknowable thing, a kind of "prime matter", necessary because properties cannot exist unsupported, but itself featureless, an impenetrable mystery at the heart of reality.

To Berkeley it seemed that Locke's view was: (i) that the only things whose existence we are certain of, and about which we have knowledge, are the ideas that come to us in sense experience; but (ii) that we are nonetheless

constrained also to accept that there is an additional unknown realm or world F mind-independent things that act as the unknown causes of those sensible leas. We can have no contact with that additional realm of material substance since it is beyond the reach of sense) and can thus know nothing about it: Lot even how it accomplishes its supposed task of subtending or causing our ideas of sense. Berkeley thinks philosophers are left to fruitless puzzlement about what could possibly be the nature of the relationship of "inherence" that sensible qualities presumably have to the unknown substance that supports diem and the equally mysterious relation of "supporting" or "having" that substances bear to the qualities that inhere in them.

Now it may well be that Locke did not in fact believe material substance in particular to be the in-principle-unknowable, explanatorily impotent thing Berkeley and others took him to subscribe to. I shall look at this question in more detail in Part IV as a preliminary to looking at the relationship Locke recognizes between minds or selves and immaterial substance. For now, it only remains to round off this survey of attitudes to substance throughout this period by noting that Hume joined Berkeley in rejecting the idea of material substance and then went him one better by rejecting immaterial substance as well.

In the chapters that follow I shall be asking, about each philosopher in turn, why he gives the answer he does to the question whether individual created minds are or are not substances and looking at the case that each thinker makes for his position. I want to trace the impact of the early modern period's growing scepticism about substance on its evolving theories aboutthe nature of mind.

Self-knowledge and the transparency of the mental

The term "self-knowledge" covers at least two areas. On the one hand, it is often used to mean knowledge of the existence and fundamental or metaphysical nature of an individual mind or self by that self; on the other, it can be used to cover knowledge of what is going on in a particular mind, that is, what that mind is doing, its mental states, activities and contents, its ideas, sensations, thoughts, capacities, beliefs, wishes, fears, hopes, desires - in fact, its whole history of current and past experiences.

In recent philosophy of mind there has been considerable debate about the latter sort of self-knowledge: what is sometimes called "first-person authority" about conscious mental contents. This is the supposedly unchallengeable and non-evidence-based knowledge each of us has of what he or she believes, intends, wants and so forth. It seems that our self-knowledge of at least the conscious contents of our own minds has three significant features - salience, immediacy and authority:

• If I believe dinosaurs once roamed the earth or if I intend to have a pork chop for dinner I do not need to be told that I believe and intend these things. My belief and intention are salient for me.
• I know that these are my present belief and intention without considering any evidence from my behaviour, without having to figure them out fromthe context or do anything to discover them. My belief and intention areimmediate.
• And, as already said, I am authoritative with respect to that belief and that intention. I not only know without evidence that this is what I believe and that is what I intend, but I know in a way that cannot be challenged. No one can tell me that I do not have the conscious mental contents (beliefs, intentions, hopes, fears or whatever) that I sincerely claim to have.

These three features can seem to pose a puzzle: how can any sort of knowledge be correctly so characterized? How can there be knowledge that is in this way salient and immediate for its subject, that does not require evidence and that need not be supported by any justification?

We can ask, of each of our philosophers in turn, whether he thinks we possess either kind of self-knowledge: either self-knowledge of our own nature and existence or the sort of self-knowledge of our own mental contents described above. We can also ask how each philosopher thinks that the sort of self-knowledge he ascribes to human minds is obtained and what justifies our claim to have it. Is it a product of introspection? Or is it gained from some other source, for example, some kind of inference?

Descartes would say that we have both sorts of self-knowledge. For him, certainty of his own existence as a thinker who is essentially an immaterial substance or rational soul comes before all other certainties. He also takes himself to have, if not complete and infallible knowledge of, at least access to, everything going on in his mind. For Descartes, there are no such things as unconscious thoughts.

As we have just seen, Hume stands in sharp contrast to Descartes in that he rejects the very idea of substance. For him, there could not be self-knowledge in the sense of knowledge of the existence of a substantial self. Hume is persuaded of this on empirical grounds: he says that he can find no such thing as a self in introspection. But he does not consider himself as lacking full awareness of what is going on in his mind: "since all actions and sensations of

the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear" (T I.iv.ii, 190).

So, however great the distance between Descartes's and Hume's verdicts on the existence of a substantial self they are agreed in subscribing to the view that has been dubbed "the transparency of the mind" or "the transparency of the mental". This is the view that there are no hidden corners in the mind, no ideas or thoughts, sensations or feelings, or any other mental functions happening there that are unavailable to the mind in which they occur. In fact, all the philosophers examined here, except Leibniz, subscribe to some part (or version) of the doctrine of the transparency of the mental. All five would reject scepticism about our capacity to know at least a good portion of what goes on in our own minds. However, we should look closely at each thinker's views on mental transparency. Some (both Leibniz and Locke come to mind in different ways) look with sympathy on the common-sense view that there are times when deep sleep or anaesthetic robs us of conscious thought.

For Spinoza, individual human minds or selves, like everything else in nature, are through and through knowable since each mind consists in ideas of its body and ideas are nothing if not knowable. Knowability, however, does not guarantee knowledge. Spinoza is persuaded that considerable effort is required to gain the self-knowledge that a contented and indeed moral life requires. Leibniz, too, believes that we have access to our minds and thus self-knowledge. We have a kind of (self-)consciousness (which Leibniz calls "apperception") that informs us of both the nature of the individual self or spirit and the perceptions and thoughts that it is having.

Like the three rationalists, Locke thinks that we have self-knowledge both in the sense of knowledge of the existence of the self and in the sense of knowledge of the nature and contents of the mind. This knowledge, which we shall look at in detail in Chapter 17, is not knowledge of a substance, whether material or immaterial. Self-knowledge for Locke comes from "that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking" and it is knowledge of a "person" or "thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places" (Essay II.xxvii.9, 335).

Commentators disagree about the amount and type of self-knowledge of which Berkeley thinks we are capable. He certainly says that he has a notion of the self, soul, mind or spirit (these are interchangeable terms for Berkeley) and that that notion is gained in reflection or "by a reflex act" (D III, 232).4 In Chapter 22, I shall examine some of the differing interpretations and arguments and try to reach a decision about whether or not Berkeley is really committed to knowledge, not just of the existence, but also of the individual nature and mental contents, of the self.

Finally, to return to Hume, it should be noted that despite his rejection of the notion of the self he never says - nor could he coherently do so - that there is no such thing as a mind. And, as I began this section by saying, nor does he deny that we are able to know what is going on in our minds, what perceptions we are experiencing, whether we are sensing or remembering, thinking about real things or entertaining ideas of a fictional or fanciful kind. There is much to explore in Hume's philosophy of mind notwithstanding his dismissal of the idea of a self and his notorious scepticism about personal identity over time. Self-knowledge is ruled out for him only in that he rejects the term "self" and the notion of an immaterial substance as the principle of identity of that individual bundle of impressions and ideas each of us calls "myself".

Consciousness

The puzzle about consciousness that has so perplexed and fascinated philosophers of mind over the past two or three decades is the puzzle of how to account for the difference between those physical things that are uncontroversially lacking in any kind of consciousness, such as rocks, and those that are beyond dispute conscious, such as human beings. What is consciousness and what philosophical analysis can we give of it? Is it a single sort of thing or are there different types of consciousness? Does it consist in some form of internal monitoring, higher-order thought or special kind of inner sense or self-consciousness? Does it depend on the body for any or all of its features?

For Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley - each in his own highly distinctive way - it is the existence of a rational soul or mind (and, for Descartes, the rational soul's relationship to its physical body) that accounts for the consciousness enjoyed by individual human beings.

For Spinoza, Locke and Hume - again, each for very different reasons and in different ways - consciousness cannot or should not be accounted for by designating it as the activity of a particular substance. Spinoza recognizes individual

human minds or consciousnesses but for him they are not substances. On the other hand, we must look at the question whether Spinoza's one substance has, as its mental aspect, what could be regarded as a single "world-mind" or a "collective consciousness" or, alternatively, a "divine mind".

For neither Locke nor Hume is consciousness to be identified with, or explained as the activity of, an individual substance. Locke thinks it is in principle possible that a single consciousness could be associated successively with more than one mental (or physical) substance. And Hume, as has been pointed out several times already, does not recognize the existence of any substances at all, whether mental or physical.

The problem of mental causation

We automatically look to an individual's feelings, desires, wishes, fears and hopes, reasons, thoughts and beliefs for an explanation of that individual's actions and behaviour. But do mental items of the sorts just listed literally cause actions? Does my thirst cause me to pour a glass of water and drink? Does my fear of the approaching Alsatian literally cause me to cross the road out of its path? Is it the murderer's decision to kill (is it that very state of his mind) that causes him to pull the trigger? It seems to be common sense that feelings cause the behaviour designed to alleviate them; that wishes literally prompt actions thought likely to fulfil them; that decisions produce actions in line with those decisions.

However, this common-sense view about the mind's role in our actions has encountered a strong challenge that present-day philosophers of mind have tried to address in a number of different ways. This challenge is the so-called "problem of mental causation", one version of which goes as follows:

(i) When I pour myself a drink of water "because I am thirsty" (as I would say), there is a whole state of my body, brain and nervous system that is responsible for initiating and carrying out the muscle movements that move my left hand to pick up the glass and my right to pick up the pitcher and pour.

(ii) But this whole, entirely physical, set-up, if it were preceded by the same causal history of neural and other physical events, would produce the water-pouring activity even without the mental state (i.e. even if I did not feel thirsty).

(iii) And, also, without this brain and body state and physical causal history, the pouring would not take place no matter how thirsty I was.

(iv) So it seems that the physical causes and conditions on their own are sufficient (and some such physical causes and conditions are necessary) to produce my action while my mental state, my thirst, has no causal role in the event that is my pouring the water. The would-be mental cause - my thirst - is actually impotent.

This argument is also sometimes called "the physical exclusion problem" because it maintains that the causal sufficiency of physical properties excludes the causal efficacy or potency of mental properties.

Our six philosophers all believe that human minds and their thoughts, feelings, choices and decisions have a genuinely causal role in human actions. But for each of them there are specific obstacles in the way of justifying this belief. Descartes, notoriously, has great difficulty accounting for any sort of mind-body interaction, including, therefore, causation of physical actions by (wholly mental) beliefs or desires. For both Spinoza and Leibniz there are difficulties explaining how an individual human agent could intervene causally in the rigorously determined or pre-ordained course of history: how a wish or belief or decision by an individual could literally be (part of) the cause of an event that already has a complete explanation in terms of prior circumstances or divine creative will.

Locke clearly believes that individuals merit moral praise or blame for their actions and this can only be fair if the choices and decisions of the individuals in question have some genuine causal role in the motivation of the actions judged. But how is such causal power to be accounted for? Berkeley is convinced that minds are the only causes there are but he has been widely thought to be unable to explain how created minds can even initiate movement in their own bodies let alone make changes in their external environment. Hume, too, seems both convinced of our ability to make moral choices and act on our beliefs and decisions and, yet, to lack a substantial response to the question how exactly mental items are able to affect physical realities. We need to explore whether any of our six philosophers has a substantial answer to the problem of mental causation, one that could defend itself successfully against its critics.

Representation and intentionality

A state of affairs that has seemed to many modern day philosophers of mind and psychology to cry out for philosophical explanation is the way thoughts or ideas, items that ordinary speech would describe as "in the head", can stand

for or represent things in the world. It is not as if I decide that one of my ideas will stand for something, in the way I can decide to let the pepper shaker stand for the referee's assistant when trying to explain the offside rule at the dinner table. The pepper shaker can be made to stand for or represent something for present purposes and it will thus acquire what philosophers' jargon calls "intentionality" or "aboutness", albeit temporarily. I can create something whose whole purpose is to represent or stand for something simply by drawing a symbol on a map and announcing that that symbol is to stand for, say, a hospital. But these two examples are both examples of what has been called "derived intentionality". The pepper shaker and the symbol on the map have their intentionality, their aboutness, bestowed on them by a mind. It is not an intrinsic feature of either to represent what it represents. It seems, however, that ideas or thoughts in a subject's head do not need to be made the representatives of what they are thoughts or ideas about. Without being made representatives by any action of their possessors, they just do represent the things they stand for or represent. They have "intrinsic" or "original" intentionality. But how?

What is intrinsic intentionality or "representativeness"? Descartes, like Locke, sees ideas as kinds of "natural" representatives of the things and features in the world that they stand for in thought. Spinoza sees ideas as intrinsic aspects of the portions of the one substance that they represent in our minds. For Leibniz, every monad or basic substance, whether or not endowed with conscious perception, has innumerable representations of everything else in the universe whose representational character is given by God in the pre-established harmony.

Berkeley sees sensory ideas as themselves parts of the external world rather than representatives of things outside the mind, although ideas that are copied from sensory ideas can, in a way, represent what they are copied from. Hume thinks ideas are copies of impressions that they represent although they do not represent anything extra-mental.

This is the final puzzle from recent philosophy of mind that I wish to examine in the context of the views of each of the six major early modern philosophers in turn. Here, as with the previous topics, I hope it will not be thought that I am approaching the subject like a prospector revisiting an old seam and hoping to find golden nuggets missed by previous miners. No one should expect to find, simply lying about in Leibniz's Monadology or Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, novel, fully worked-out answers to modern philosophical questions expressed in a modern idiom or directed explicitly at modern concerns. It is always wise to be careful not to read modern answers to modern problems back into classic works whose authors were addressing quite different problems in quite different terms.

On the other hand, the topics and questions I have chosen all have timeless elements at their core; it would be surprising if they found no echo in the writings of six classic philosophers all of whom were deeply concerned with the nature of minds, knowledge, thought, causation and ideas. It certainly seems worth taking the trouble to try to discover what light each thinker might have to shed on any of the puzzles, even if what we unearth is more likely to be a number of interesting hints and exploratory ideas rather than any full-blown (let alone incontrovertible) solutions.

 

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