PHI022: Early Modern Classics

NOTE

Most notes are simply obtained by paraphrasing or summarizing lecture handouts. I also didn’t feel like making notes for some lectures.

Week 2-4: Epistemology

epistemology

• W2 - Cartesian epistemology
• W3
  • Locke (Locke’s empiricism, Locke’s solidity)
  • Descartes’s nature of body
• W4 - Hume (problem of induction)

Week 5: God

• Descartes (Descartes’s theory of ideas, Descartes’s cosmetological proof of God, Descartes’s ontological proof of God)
• problem of evil
  • problem of suffering
  • problem of cooperation

Week 6: Mind and Body

• dualism
  • Descartes’s argument for separability of mind and body
  • Elisabeth’s challenge to Cartesian dualism (i.e. substance dualism)
  • Cartesian mind-body union
• mind-body interaction
  • Cartesian interactionism (mind can cause body to move)
  • occassionalism (Malebranche)
  • Hume’s argument against mind-body causation

Week 7

• Locke on personal identity
• Hume on free will

Week 8

• Hobbes on origin of rights
• Hobbes on state of nature
• Rousseau on origin of moral inequality

Week 9-11

• Leibniz on justice
• Leibniz on slavery