The Reflective Self:Early Modern Psychologies

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

DISCOURSE ONMETHOD

(1637)

RATIONALIST:DEDUCE FROM

FIRST PRINCIPLES

“But I soon noticed that while I thus wished to think everything false, it was necessarily true that I who thought so was something. Since this truth, I think therefore I am or exist (cogito ergo sum), was so firm and assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were unable to shake, I judged that I could safely accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.”

(Discourse on Method, Fourth Part, p. 24)

Descartes’ Dualism

res cogitans —Mind Substance immaterial

Rational Soul

res extensa —Bodily Matter

material

extended in space

…..

Descartes’ depiction of themechanics of the response

to fire

(Treatise of Man, Figure 7)

Descartes, Treatise of Man [1662] (Prometheus Books, 2003), p.76

Brain and Pineal Gland (H)

D

Pineal Gland (H)

John Locke (1632-1704)

• Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

• Part of the Tradition of Moral Philosophy

• Child’s Mind as Blank Tablet, or Tabula Rasa

• Stressed the importance of Education

David Hume (1711-1776)

EMPIRICIST:KNOWLEDGE

COMES THROUGH THE SENSES

Treatise of Human Nature,Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of

Reasoning into Moral Subjects 1739-40

Hume’s Doubts“The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread?”

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 316-317

What is the Self?

Hume writes, we:

“are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

(Hume, Treatise, p. 300).

HUME’S SOLUTION: BACKGAMMMON!“Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour’s amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

Treatise of Human Nature, p. 316.

It is evident that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature…To explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a complete system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security…and the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.”

(Hume, Treatise p. 123).

Impressions: sensations of the world

Ideas: less vivid copies of sensations— we might call them memories or images

Principles of Association• Resemblance—items are

associated that share qualities: picture of a man to man himself

• Contiguity—items that are near one another in space: the Saint of a village

• Causation--items that are seen to effect change: ball hitting another ball

Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and Common Sense Philosophy

• Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow beginning in 1764.

• Succeeded Adam Smith

• Called Hume’s skepticism “metaphysical lunacy.”

• Wrote, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, 1764

“Because bodies are effected only by contact and pressure, we are apt to conceive, that what is an immediate object of thought, and affects the mind, must be in contact with it, and make some impression upon it. When we imagine any thing, the very word leads us to think that there must be some image in the mind, of the thing conceived. It is evident, that these notions are drawn from some similitude conceived between body and mind, and between the properties of body and the operations of mind.”

Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man p. 51

Difficulties of Psychological Reflection, acc. to Reid

1) there are a great number of operations of the mind.

2) reflection is not habitual (and needs to be practiced).

3) it is difficult to attend to the process of imagination as it is not a thing.

4) sometimes the operation ceases as we watch it.

.

Faculty PsychologyThomas Reid

• Active Powers (Will): self-esteem,

friendship, sexual affection, emulation, duty, veneration, beauty, imagination—35 in all

• Intellectual/Cognitive Powers: five senses, perception, size and novelty, memory, judgment and reason, abstraction, conception and moral taste.