Transcript Philosophy 1050: Introduction to Philosophy

Philosophy 1050:
Introduction to
Philosophy
Week 9: Descartes and the Subject
Augustine and Self-Consciousness:
Summary
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According to Augustine, both our senses and our
understanding and reason play a role in what we
know.
Because we have an inner sense that puts everything
together, we may be conscious of ourselves or selfconscious.
The idea of self-consciousness is the idea of
subjectivity. We can distinguish the subjectivity of
our sensations, opinions, feelings, and perceptions
from the objectivity of what exists for all of us and
can be known through reasons or reasoning.
Augustine and subjectivity
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To help define the nature of the self, Augustine
distinguishes between things that are
subjective (or dependent on the self-conscious
subject) and those that are objective (or
independent of the self-conscious subject).
Our problem (and Descartes’ problem): What
is the relationship between the subjective and
the objective?
Subjectivity and Objectivity
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“By ‘our own’ and ‘personal,’ I mean that
which each one of us consumes for himself
and what each alone perceives in himself as
belonging properly to his own nature. By
‘common’ and, as it were, ‘public,’ I mean
what is perceived by everyone who perceives,
without its being changed or destroyed.” (p.
53).
Subjective and Objective
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Subjective:
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Sensations and
Impressions
Opinions
Pains and feelings
Experiences
Memories
Value judgments
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Objective:
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Trees
Houses
Bodies
Things located in space
outside me
Numbers
Shapes
Colors
Rene Descartes
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1596-1650
Born in France, travels
as a young man to
Holland and Germany
to serve in the army
In 1618, has a series of
dreams that he interprets
as telling him he will
found a new science
Descartes and the
Copernican Revolution
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In 1543, Copernicus
proposed that the motion
of the planets could be
explained by placing the
sun at the center of the
solar system
His ideas were developed
by Galileo Galilei, who
lived at almost the same
time as Descartes
Descartes and Subjectivity
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Building on ideas already suggested by St.
Augustine, Descartes will make the subject
and the experiences it has the center of the
new science and a whole new way of thinking
of knowledge, reason, and the world.
He does so by testing what he knows to find
out what is truly reliable and what is not.
Descartes and Subjectivity:
Knowledge and Foundations
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“Several years have now passed since I first
realized how numerous were the false opinions
that in my youth I had taken to be true, and
thus how doubtful were all those that I had
subsequently built upon them. And thus I
realized that once in my life I had to raze
everything to the ground and begin again from
the original foundations.” (17)
Descartes and Meditation
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Descartes undertakes to test all of his opinions
to see if they are really knowledge. To do so,
he will ask himself if they are based on a
secure foundation: that is, whether they are
certain and immune to doubt.
He considers various possibilities of doubt or
skeptical scenarios to see whether he really
knows what he thinks he knows
Descartes: Radical Doubt
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Descartes considers three skeptical scenarios
or possibilities of radical doubt:
 1) Senses can be deceptive, for instance
when I mistake something far away
 2) I could be dreaming
 3) God, or an “evil genius,” could be
deceiving me by “feeding in” my thoughts
and experiences
The Brain in a Vat
(a modern version of skepticism)
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If we are brains in vats, we
may think we are having
experiences such as being
outside, walking in the sun,
feeling the warmth on our
faces, etc.
But we are really just brains
wired up to electrical
stimulators, perhaps
controlled by a computer
Philosophy: The Matrix
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NEO: This isn’t real?
MORPHEUS: What is real?
How do you define ‘real’? If
you're talking about your
senses, what you feel, taste,
smell, or see, then all you're
talking about are electrical
signals interpreted by your
brain.
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How do we know that we are not dreaming?
How do we know that we are not being
deceived by an evil genius more powerful than
ourselves?
How do we know that we are not brains in
vats?
IF any of these SKEPTICAL SCENARIOS are
TRUE, then what (if anything) might we STILL
know and hold on to?
Descartes and subjectivity:
Re-building knowledge
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If any of the skeptical scenarios holds true,
then we apparently do not know of the
existence of anything outside us. We do not
know whether the things that we seem to see
actually exist or even that we exist as the
beings we seem to be.
Is there, nevertheless, anything that we can
still be certain of?
Descartes and Subjectivity:
Re-building Knowledge
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“…I have persuaded myself that there is
absolutely nothing in the world: no sky, no
earth, no minds, no bodies. Is it then the case
that I too do not exist? But doubtless I did
exist, if I persuaded myself of something …
Thus, after everything has been most closely
weighed, it must finally be admitted that this
pronouncement ‘I am, I exist’ is necessarily
true every time I utter it or conceive it in my
mind…” (25)
Descartes and Subjectivity:
Re-building knowledge
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Having undertaken to doubt everything he can,
Descartes finds that he cannot doubt that he exists as
a thinking thing:
“Here I make my discovery: thought exists; it alone
cannot be separated from me. I am; I exist – this is
certain…At this time I admit nothing that is not
necessarily true… I am therefore precisely nothing
but a thinking thing: that is, a mind, or intellect, or
understanding, or reason…” (27)
Descartes and Subjectivity:
Re-building knowledge
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By the end of the Second Meditation,
Descartes has discovered that he exists as a
thinking thing or a subject:
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“But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is
that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms,
denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and
senses.” (28)
Descartes and Subjectivity:
Re-building knowledge
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By the end of the second Meditation,
Descartes still does not know of the existence
of any object outside himself. Yet he does
know:
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That he exists as a thinking thing; and
That his actual processes of thinking, imagining,
seeming to see and seeming to perceive actually
exist as well.
“Seemings:” The Way of Ideas
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“…For although perhaps, as I supposed before,
absolutely nothing that I imagined is true, still the
very power of imagining really does exist, and
constitutes a part of my thought. Finally, it is this
same ‘I’ who senses or is cognizant of bodily things as
if through the senses. For example, I now see a light,
I hear a noise, I feel heat. These things are false, since
I am asleep. Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear, and
feel warmth. This cannot be false. Properly speaking,
this is what in me is called ‘sensing.’ But this,
precisely so taken, is nothing other than thinking.” (p.
29)
Descartes and Subjectivity:
The Way Of Ideas
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At this stage, Descartes does not know
whether anything outside him exists, but he
knows that he himself and his own processes
of thinking do exist
These processes of thinking – the way things
seem – can be called “ideas.” For instance,
Descartes does not know that the sun really
exists, but he does know at least that his idea
or impression of the sun does.
Descartes and Subjectivity:
Summary
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Trying to test all his beliefs for reliability, Descartes considers
three skeptical scenarios according to which much or all of
what he believes could be false. If anything survives these
scenarios, it will be true and certain no matter what.
He discovers that even if the skeptical scenarios hold, still he
exists as a thinking thing or subject that can think, doubt,
reason, and have experiences.
Even if nothing in the external world is known for sure, this
thinking thing or subject can be known to exist, with absolute
certainty, together with all its processes of thinking, imagining,
reasoning, and so forth. Even if we do not know whether any
things in the external world actually exist, still we can know
for certain that our own representations or ideas of them do.