He lived -460 to -370, was materialist, and founded atomism, with Leucippus.
Epistemology
Objects have weight, texture, shape, and size {primary quality, Democritus}, which people can perceive. Objects have distance and identity {secondary quality, Democritus}, which people can understand. Atoms themselves are imperceptible. Qualitative features depend on atom quantitative properties. Perception happens when images, which are infinitely small object copies, travel to body and contact sense fire-atoms. Senses have special fire-atom motions and arrangements. People can only perceive images matching senses. People with different senses perceive different things. Perceptual states are violent, surprising, and unclear. Dreams are weak images. Belief in gods comes from images of gods.
Thoughts are images of sizes and spaces between atoms. Thought images are gentle in motion and hard to know. This gentle motion gives true happiness, because soul is calmest and in harmony with absolute images.
Ethics
Good is soul's pleasures. Happiness is inner peace.
Metaphysics
Atoms are unchanging and indivisible particles that constantly move in empty space under mechanical laws. Infinitely many atom types exist. Objects are groups of atoms in different proportions. Inertia, density, and hardness depend on atom sizes and spacings. All other physical properties depend on atom mixtures, arrangements, and motions. Atoms started with uncaused motions, but now atom motions and collisions determine everything that happens. Collisions are the only atom interactions and result only in motion changes.
Mind
Mind or soul has highest and most active atoms {fire-atom}.
He lived -427 to -347, founded the Academy [-387], wrote about Socrates, studied grammar, solved law problems, and helped draft laws.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is about the beautiful and the good. The beautiful is good. Beautiful things approximate their Idea or true Form closely.
Art imitates nature {mimesis, Plato}.
Epistemology
Minds can be aware of the ideal forms {Idea, Plato} of objects or object groups. Whenever one term can apply to a group of particular things, the corresponding Idea exists in mind. True, clear, and stable knowledge is about Ideas. Mind does not create the Ideas. Ideas are innate. People can discover or remember the Ideas in themselves {anamnesis, Ideas}, using intellect, not senses.
Unlike Ideas, opinion and perception are confused, unclear, imitative, and changeable. An analogy {cave analogy} is prisoners in a cave, who see only shadows on the wall, perceptions instead of reality.
Material motions cause thoughts and perceptions.
Things can be unlearnable, because people need them to learn {Meno's puzzle}.
Hypotheses or making categories and distinctions can define things.
Education
Education is important for everyone because knowledge leads to excellence and virtue. Education builds character. Knowledge is about Ideas, and so curriculum is unchanging.
All children should receive practical knowledge. Social classes receive education suited to purposes. People learn virtue and should be happy, because they reach the greatest virtue they can have.
Education is also to make good state. Society selects some boys and girls to become soldiers. Future soldiers should learn arts and physical education and live together in school community in which they share everything. From future soldiers, society selects some to become rulers. Future rulers should learn philosophy.
Educators have special duty and should not try to be like or coddle pupils.
Ethics
Personal virtues are industry, achievement, knowledge, honor, autonomy, courage, temperance, and piety. Other-directed virtues are justice, benevolence, and fidelity. People can acquire virtues by becoming aware of the Ideas. However, people can refuse to acquire knowledge and virtue and so reject freedom, responsibility, and control.
The three parts of mind {psyche, Plato} should be in harmony. Reason should be for wisdom, spirit for courage and striving, and appetite for moderation and control. Psyche harmony makes life good, virtuous, happy, and prosperous.
The psyche's duty is to be just and upright.
Joy in the beautiful, pleasure in good artistic Idea-of-the-Good imitations, understanding of math, practical skill, general knowledge, and well-ordered life are proper Reason uses.
Highest life state is to contemplate the Ideas, indifferent to material world. Lover of Ideas goes to heaven. Others reincarnate.
"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" {Euthyphro problem, Plato}. Either piety has no reason or has reason, but authority does not apply in either case.
The true and the beautiful are good.
World is good, because God created it.
Linguistics
Nouns are proposition subjects. Only Ideas can be sentence subjects. Verb is about proposition action or quality. Verb and adjective are similar.
Metaphysics
Reality is Ideas. Ideas are both universal categories and object essences {third man argument, Plato}. Ideas are eternal, a priori, unchanging, absolute, and immaterial, with absolute and unqualified properties. Ideas include Good, Bad, Beautiful, Ugly, and such ideas as Tableness. Ideas, such as Infinite, have opposites, such as Measurable, so Ideas form a hierarchy. The highest or greatest Idea is Good, which is purpose of reality for both material and ideal worlds and comes from love of ideal beauty.
Objects in nature have Ideas {ideal form} as essence and are like Idea copies or imitations. Objects share in or have part of Idea. Things cannot have opposite properties simultaneously. Objects are empty space shaped by Ideal geometrical figures. Empty space has no substance and no definition. Material things are both non-being, such as space, and being, such as Idea. Objects are thus contradictions and not real.
World-soul causes all motions and changes, which have relations and are unity.
The world creator {demiurge} was pure good, which molded already existing matter to bring order out of chaos.
Mind
Psyche is in body, is same as personality, and is changeable but is also unitary, indivisible, and eternal, because it is both material and Idea. Psyche receives images of Ideas before birth. The presence of Ideas in psyche causes people to seek Ideas and love wisdom. Psyche has appetitive, emotional, and rational parts. Rational part is ability to know Ideas. Emotional part is spirit or will, which wants to find Ideas. Appetitive part is desires. Psyche thus perceives, wills, and knows. Psyche causes movement and life. Psyche can separate from body.
Politics
States are about principle of justice. Justice results when classes do work with virtue. All state principles and actions should be ethical.
States express the Idea of people as a whole and so are about people and their relations.
States have best order with three classes, corresponding to the three psyche parts: rulers with rational psyche, soldiers with emotional psyche, and merchants and laborers with appetitive psyche. Philosopher-kings from ruler class should lead states. Rulers or guardians should have training in goodness, truth, and beauty and so have wisdom. Military and public officials should have training for administration, war, and police work and so use spirit and do their duty. To exercise self-control, merchants should perform commerce, and common people should work, produce, and obey leaders.
People showing that they have souls dominated by one psyche part or another can change classes. Upper classes should give up all property, have communal family life, and serve state. All people should suppress private emotions and desires and live out Idea of the Good.
He lived -384 to -322, studied under Plato, and was Realist. He tutored Alexander the Great. He founded Peripatetic School at Lyceum [-335]. He was the Stagirite or Peripatetic Philosopher.
In logic, he studied grammar, developed logic of terms, and defined the syllogisms. He studied deduction methods and invented non-contradiction, excluded-middle, and bivalence laws. He considered modus ponens, modus tollens, tautology, permutation, and summation. He studied Sophist fallacies, existence, definition, statement, axiom, postulate, premise, conclusion, hypothesis, theorem, converse, inverse, contrapositive, corollary, lemma, necessary condition, and sufficient condition.
In mathematics, he used method of exhaustion, rather than infinitesimals, to find limits. He used parallelogram of forces.
In biology, he studied nature, performed animal dissections for research, and studied evolution from simple to complex life.
Aesthetics
Art imitates nature and portrays particular objects as universals, emphasizing object Forms. Thus, art is knowledge that gives pleasure.
Art is productive thought.
Art has classes depending on materials used or objects imitated.
Art's purpose is to excite passions, to remove them and so purify soul. Tragic drama imitates life and excites fear and sympathy, which it then relieves {catharsis, Aristotle}. Catharsis is good for virtue, because it results in lower emotions, allowing more reason.
Formal literary elements, involving one location, one time, and one theme {Unities, Aristotle}, make good play.
Artists impose Form on matter, causing material change with purpose, to cause art development.
Epistemology
Philosophy must consider opinions of the people or of wise people {doxa}.
True knowledge is about object Forms, not objects.
Sensation is passive thought. Reason is creative thought. Thoughts are both objects and essences. Contents and thought processes are separate and have categories.
Quantity can be universal or particular. Quality can be positive or negative.
Opposition or contradiction and conversion or entailment can happen.
Concepts used in judgments come from general concepts by adding distinguishing characteristic or difference {definition, Aristotle}.
Knowledge fields have most general concepts, found by moving from examples to general concept {abstraction from specific to general}, opposite to definition. For example, logic has contradiction principle.
The ten basic-concept categories are quantity, quality, relation, space, time, action, passion or passivity or affection, position, state or condition, and substance.
The four cause types are matter or physical or bodily cause {material cause, Aristotle}, form or essence or idea {formal cause, Aristotle}, immediately preceding cause or motion {essential cause}, and end or purpose {final cause, Aristotle}. Something extra {accident, cause or effect} can happen along with causes and effects.
Brain senses shapes, sizes, and motions {primary quality} directly. Brain perceives other sense qualities {secondary quality}, which are not fundamental to object {accident, sensation}, indirectly. Sense apparatus moves and changes as it receives object, causing body physical change {phantasm, sensation}. Physical motions caused by sensations are imagination-faculty objects, so imagination depends on sensation. Imaginations are thought-objects, so thought depends on imagination.
Mental faculty compares and associates shapes, sizes, and motions from all senses {common faculty, Aristotle}.
Human desires and beliefs, which are thoughts, cause all human actions.
If proposition is possible, the proposition is true at least once {principle of plenitude} {plenitude principle}.
The highest thought level is to behold the pure Forms and reach blessed feeling without will or action.
Ethics
Ethics is making proper choice when one is free to choose and knows consequences. External circumstances can hinder or help reason and self-realization. Bad reasoning, bad purposes, weak will, compulsions, passions, or wrong choices can cause people's actions to be irrational {akrasia}. To make proper choices, one needs to know which act or thought is lawful or right, act consequences, means, ends, desire effects, motive effects, and self. Without this knowledge, people do not know what they are doing and cannot control their actions.
Successful and virtuous activity based on reason leads to happy, good life and well-being. Happiness is life's goal or purpose, because it expresses people's true nature. Virtue is the way to attain happiness.
Freedom depends on knowledge and on absence of external forces or mental pressures.
People are responsible for their actions when they have alternatives from which to choose, they know situation, and they face no external constraints on choice. Then consciousness is action's sufficient cause and other factors, such as motivation, do not lessen responsibility. Punishment can only be for actions for which people are responsible {justice, Aristotle}.
Goods {good-in-itself} {intrinsic good} can be for their own sake, such as intelligence, senses, and health. Goods {extrinsic good} can be for consequences.
Action {praxis} is doing something, as opposed to making something. Action {animal soul, Aristotle} should improve habits and character. Exerting self-control against desires trains will to act using reason. Moderation {Golden Mean, Aristotle} {doctrine of the mean} balances appetite/emotion and reason. Using rational mind to follow the Golden Mean is good.
People want happiness based on virtue {eudaimonia, philosophy}, the objectively good life. Pleasure is necessary for, but not the same as, happiness.
Friendship is good, because it is common striving for the good and beautiful.
Law
Law flows from order of nature {natural law, Aristotle}. Law has Forms. People should judge human laws by how well they conform to natural law.
Usury is bad.
Landowning and private property are good.
Strong family is good.
Linguistics
Spoken or written words are mental-state signs. Verbs indicate time {tense}. Verbs and adjectives are similar. Nouns can be about named things {proper noun, Aristotle} or types {common noun, Aristotle}.
Logic
Formal logic is process to prove knowledge true and to understand reasoning.
Things or groups have names and distinguishing characteristics. Defined things can be sentence subjects. Subjects can have different quantities: "all", "some", "no", "one", or "only one".
Sentence subjects can have properties {predicate, Aristotle}. Predicates {essential predicate} can be true of all category objects. Predicates {predicable predicate} can be true of only some category objects and so be non-essential. Predicates {property predicate} can be non-essential but true of all category objects {proprium}.
Statements have subjects and predicates. Statements can be true or false {contradiction law}. Subjects and predicates cannot have truth-values.
Statements {proposition, Aristotle} can have form that makes them necessary or impossible {apodeitic}.
Reasoning from particulars to generalities {induction, Aristotle} is proof method. Reasoning from generalities to particulars {deduction, Aristotle} is proof method.
Deduction depends on having one or more general statements {premise, Aristotle} about basic concepts. People must accept such premises as true but cannot prove them. Induction and dialectic to analyze opinions and perception can find such premises. After analysis, such premises should be immediately apparent and certain to everyone. Other premises come from general premises. Premises can use different sentence types: categorical, conditional or hypothetical, alternative, and disjunctive.
All deductions are either syllogisms or inferences from single premises. The conclusion must be less general than the premises.
People can prove statement {conclusion, Aristotle} relating subject to predicate {judgment} if two premises relate third concept to subject and to predicate {syllogism, Aristotle}. If people know that premises are true or false, they can combine them by removing third concept to prove conclusion {excluded middle law}. The third concept can be in first-premise subject and second-premise predicate {first figure}, in both subjects {second figure}, or in both predicates {third figure}.
Syllogisms can use sentences with different subject quantities and premise types and can use three moods. Syllogism moods include categorical syllogism, conditional syllogism or hypothetical syllogism, alternative syllogism, and disjunctive syllogism. Syllogisms {categorical syllogism, Aristotle} can use all subject quantities. Main moods {Barbara mood} can use universal affirmative in all three statements. Main moods {Celarent mood} can have universal negative premise, universal positive premise, and universal negative conclusion. All other moods can transform into Barbara or Celarent mood {reduction of moods} {mood reduction}.
Reductio ad absurdum proves some moods. Negative individual instances {ekthesis} are counterexamples that prove the positive conclusion, and this method proves some moods.
Syllogisms {perfect syllogism} with complete sentences need nothing more to be valid arguments. Syllogisms {imperfect syllogism} with assumed premises or premise parts require more information to be valid.
Metaphysics
Only individual physical objects are real. Objects have essential invariable Forms {Form, Aristotle}, about purposes. Forms are common properties or predicates of different same-class objects. Object Form determines state and relations to other objects, makes unified whole, and places object in class. Forms are not universals and cannot exist by themselves. If Forms are universals, it is necessary to explain how Forms relate to individuals {third man argument} and how object relates to itself. Geometric forms, shapes, and sizes are physical-object aspects and do not have independent existence.
Ability to define objects does not prove existence. To show existence, something must construct object.
Matter has potential or possibility that becomes physical particular object when combined with Form {hylomorphism}. Forms follow laws. Forms are only potential until realized in matter. Object Form stays the same, but matter can change. Matter and objects are potentially infinite, but this differs from actually infinite. Motion results from union of form and matter.
Lower-thing forms make higher-thing matter, making a hierarchy of objects, classes, classes of classes, and so on. Forms have values. Forms can be Ends, causing other Forms. The class hierarchy leads to highest Form, which never combines with matter. Highest Form is prime mover and has no cause and indirectly causes all motion and change. It is unmoving, because only matter can move. It is perfect, eternal, unchangeable, indivisible, mental, spiritual, and independent. It is real, with no possibilities. It is the most general concept, thought about thought, and pure self-consciousness. It has no goal or purpose except itself and is sufficient in itself.
Organisms grow and develop {development, Aristotle} as Form realizes itself in matter through time, also causing purpose changes.
Objects have inessential features {accident, object} that arise by chance and do not relate to Form. Accidents have mechanical causes and have no laws. Accidents in matter can oppose expression of Form in object.
Stars and planets have circular motion and are ether.
The four elements are earth, fire, water, and air. The material world has the four elements. Elements have quality pairs: warm or cold and dry or moist.
Mind
Mind forms concepts automatically {passive intellect} and can reason using concepts {active intellect}. Active intellect can be non-physical, independent, and eternal.
Mind {psyche, Aristotle} animates body to cause motion and so causes sensation, imagination, and thought. Soul or mind is the Form for individual body.
Souls {vegetative soul} can be for body mechanical and chemical changes, like reproduction, growth, and repair. Plants have only this soul.
Souls {animal soul} {appetitive soul} can allow motion, feelings, and sensation. Spontaneous motion arises from desire, which is to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Desire and sensation both depend on object sensed, so seeking or avoiding automatically happens. Animal souls can unite all sense perceptions into collective perceptions about objects as wholes. This forms images and memories, allows body-state knowledge, and allows number, position, and motion perception.
From the matter of the first two souls, souls {reason} {rational soul} {nous} can arise and make desires into will and perception images into knowledge. Only such souls are eternal, divine, and impersonal and can know reality. Reason is pure contemplation. Reason is the same in all people, so reason unites people into a class.
Politics
Justice or equality is the basis of states. Justice can depend on need, effort, deservingness, history, achievement, or contribution.
Justice {corrective justice} {diorthotic justice} {remedial justice} {rectificatory justice} can compensate for contract breach or tort. Justice {distributive justice} {dianemetic justice} can take and disburse goods and services among parties.
Justice assigns punishments, which whole society administers for crimes, with no individual revenge.
The state should organize to allow natural laws to work.
A society goal is the good life for all citizens, including stability and community. Constitution's highest goal is community well-being.
A state purpose is to train citizens ethically, emphasizing morals. Citizens, as opposed to subjects of kings or tyrants, have civic duties, requiring sacrificing private life, and rights, allowing them roles in public and private life.
Kingdoms have one authority. Aristocracies have several authorities. Polities have many authorities. Tyrannies have one ruler. Oligarchies have several rulers. Democracies have many rulers.
Rule by one person can be good {monarchy, Aristotle} or bad {despotism, Aristotle}. Rule by few can be good if based on culture and character {aristocracy, Aristotle}. Rule by few can be bad if based on property or birth {oligarchy, Aristotle}. Rule by all can be good if based on laws and order {republic, Aristotle}. Rule by all can be bad {mob-rule} if based on demagoguery {democracy, Aristotle}. Because things held in common have no value, communism is bad.
Democracy is better than oligarchy, because more people contribute to decisions. Struggle of oligarchy with democracy causes revolution.
States arise from first family and then village.
States should be self-sufficient. Small states are better.
Lending money and trading are bad.
Excess, more than want or need, causes tyranny and crime.
He lived -341 to -270 and founded Epicurean School at the Garden [-306].
Ethics
Soul pleasures contemplate thoughts and expect bodily pleasures. They are more valuable than bodily pleasures alone. The ideal pleasure is freedom from distraction, which people can achieve by philosophy study and mind control, to achieve a happy life.
Fear of supernatural is distraction. Natural and physical mind and soul explanations remove fear of supernatural.
Prudence and self-control are good.
The private life is best.
Belief in determinism disallows criticism of people that do not believe in determinism, because both beliefs have predetermination {Epicurean objection}.
Metaphysics
Reality is only different atoms forming and disintegrating into different groups by motions in empty space. Atoms and universe are eternal.
Mind
Body and mind unify in special atoms. No afterlife exists.
Will
Chance, and will's free choice, show that nature has uncaused events. Will's free choice is the only explanation of good and evil, because God is surely able to remove evil from the world.
He lived ? to 98 and was Neo-Pythagorean and mystic.
He lived 204 to 270, was Platonist, studied under Ammonius Saccas, and emphasized monism and rationalism.
Metaphysics
God is the good, perfect, supreme, unified, and free being. God, the Good, has no consciousness, no form, and no activity. God is the basis of Reason, Mind, and Being but is beyond them. God has no human traits.
Mind or divine spirit of God {divine consciousness} is self-acting and self-created and sustains material world. All things are imperfect copies or imitations of the good and perfect {emanation system} {system of emanation}. God overflows into the world, which reflects him as rational Mind {Nous} in matter and as Soul {Psyche, soul} in living things. The light of God makes all Ideas: being, rest, motion or change, identity, and difference. Ideas are God, soul, or spirit thought contents, because both are immaterial. Mind makes actual world, affecting Soul to make it form matter based on Ideas. Matter is Void, not material or spiritual but negation and non-being, with only possibility. Matter is absolute desire and is evil. However, evil does not actually exist, because it is non-being. Material world mixes Void and light of God, and so mixes good and evil.
Things in the world are in spheres around God. Farthest sphere is matter. Nearest sphere is divine Mind or reason.
Mind
Individual souls are Ideas and eternal. Souls can concentrate on either desire or reason. Contemplating Beauty moves toward spirit. The final step unites soul with spirit. All matter and souls try to reunite with God.
Human souls form self-consciousness and body from Mind and Ideas. Self-consciousness results when mind actively thinks about itself or its states.
Mind actively synthesizes and unifies perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, and does not just passively receive images from outside. Mind acts by taking conscious notice and doing something with perceptions. Body sensation is separate from consciousness of object or feeling.
He lived 354 to 430, was Bishop of Hippo Regius (now Annaba, Algeria) [396 to 430], favored monasticism, and argued against pagans, Manichees, Pelagius, and Donatists. He was Neo-Platonist, from Plotinus' ideas, and Apologist. He united Patristic and Greek philosophy, using the psychological principle of internality.
Epistemology
People can infallibly know that they exist, because they can think rightly or wrongly. Sensations postulate perceivers. If people doubt perception content, it proves there is doubter. To be in error, people must exist.
People cannot doubt existence of perception about which they have doubt {method of doubt, Augustine}. Therefore, people know that they have consciousness. Knowing, willing, remembering, living, motivation, thinking, and judging are actions included in doubting and so must exist, too.
People can know their inner experiences: feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. Mental-state self-observation and analysis can lead to truth.
People can doubt that perception contents are real, because they use criteria that they have in themselves: logical laws, standards of good and beautiful, and other truths not derivable from sensation. These criteria are the same for all people and are universally valid. The criteria exist, though they are not material. They are the Ideas of God, in whom they unite. Reason perceives these Ideas, so man has reason. People cannot know how Ideas unite in God and cannot know all Ideas.
People cannot know if they are moving, are at certain place, or are single or multiple.
Senses and reason can know matter and spirit, which unite in self-consciousness.
Becoming conscious of sensation is an act of will, as is realizing an inner state. Will directs memory, imagination, and judgment or reasoning.
To judge or reason, mind receives illumination or revelation from God, because cause must be more active than effect. Truth is gift of God by grace.
Language reflects mind's workings.
Time is subjective, because past is in memory and future is in expectation, which both are in the present.
Ethics
Faith is more important than good deeds. Because there is original sin, man should seek the grace of God and union with God.
Will directs people to be good in general and worthy of grace. Will is free to choose, independently of understanding or knowledge. The only cause of will's choice is itself. Will determines its purposes. Will strives after happiness, and only beholding the truth of God satisfies it. People should lead strict lives to fight evil and help God. People should have faith that reward will be peace in eternity, when person's will suppresses into will of God.
People are responsible for acts done by will. God has foreknowledge of acts but does not cause them or force choice. It is like God remembers them.
Evil is spirit's wrong action, so even intending or desiring to sin is evil. Sin of Adam corrupted all human will, so people are guilty, because will turns toward evil. No one is capable of good on his or her own. This is people's punishment for original sin. Only by the grace of God can people be good or have redemption. No one is worthy and no one can complain. Good only comes from God. The will of God determines which people do good and which evil. Souls have predestination.
Metaphysics
God is highest Being, highest Truth, highest Beauty, and infinite personality. God is omniscient about Ideas. God is omnipotent, because God is all Being. God is completely good, because God is complete attainment of will. God is not in time. Categories used to describe finite nature cannot apply to God, who is indescribable.
Reality has objects, souls, and God. Objects are in space and time. Souls are only in time. God is outside time and space. Universe depends on Ideas, life, and God's will. God makes all things, including time and space. World is matter and spirit.
God makes only good things. Decay causes bad things.
Mind
God causes people to have understanding or enlightenment. Consciousness is unified personality or soul and has one basic activity, which is self-consciousness. Soul has three parts. People's ideas are memories of Ideas. Life is making judgments based on Ideas. Will is motive or force behind life and striving for happiness in God.
Faith, which is assent by will, must precede knowledge, because will prepares self for illumination.
He lived 803 to 873, was first Arabic philosopher at the Academy, was neo-Platonist, and used logic to prove religious truths. Universe is whole knowledge system {architectonic}. All humanity has one active intellect.
He lived 1115 to 1180.
Epistemology
Sensation and perception involve judgment.
Passions unite new sensations with remembered ones. Pleasure and pain result from these unions.
The fundamental mental state is imagination or perception. From perceptions come opinions. Knowledge comes from opinion comparisons. Will added to knowledge causes belief. When will has faith, people attain final state, of contemplation.
Mind
All soul's activities have unity.
He lived 1126 to 1198, commented on Aristotle's works, which had just become available in Europe, and developed non-theological Arabian philosophy {Averroism}, which influenced later European philosophers. People can use religious truth, and philosophers can use rational truth {double truth, Ibn Rushd}. Only intellect is immortal. Intellect is impersonal.
He lived 1224 to 1274, was Dominican and Aristotelian, and unified Catholic dogma with Aristotle's ideas and logic {Thomism}.
Epistemology
Faith and reason are not contradictory. Both can gain knowledge.
Forms present in someone's mind are concepts and differ from forms present in external things. People can link objects to mind concepts, to make rational judgments. Concepts that exist in mind are true. People can know essences and concepts are universals. Falsity applies only to poor correspondence between thing and mental representation.
Physical organs or organisms have no self-conscious awareness and cannot form or use concepts.
External objects produce sense impressions {phantasm, Aquinas}, in body, that refer to non-perceptual entity {common sense, Aquinas}, which stores and combines sense impressions {cogitative power} to make object-characteristic concepts {image, Aquinas}. Soul becomes conscious of image presence. Memory stores object mental concepts and uses them for sensory recognition. Mind does not know objects, only object mental concepts.
Understanding involves abstracting intelligible essence or form from sensory impression {agent intellect}. Human mind builds from constituent forms of objects that caused sensory impressions. There are no innate ideas. Mind's thoughts and wills are about things, which have intelligible forms or essences.
Animal instincts apprehend things and events as beneficial or harmful.
People can know God through reason, revelation, and intuition. Revealed theology explains doctrines of Trinity, Incarnation, and Last Judgment, which people must accept by faith. Natural theology explains existence of God and soul's immortality, which reason can prove.
Ethics
People can freely have intentions, deliberate, act, and make choices, though God knows past, present, and future. God knows all but is outside time, allowing people free will. Will is power to strive towards the rationally good or desirable and requires intellect to determine the good and desirable. All things are attractive in some respects and unattractive in others, so wills can choose freely among all things.
God created people, and their reason and purpose for being is to return to God. People have other purposes in accord with God's purposes and with natural law.
People must act to gain happiness, though they do not necessarily know what to do. Pursuit of wisdom is the best life course, because wisdom is knowledge of universe purposes, which are the good and the true.
People should contemplate God without will or desire. Happiness is contemplating God.
Secondary causes cause evil, which is unintentional. Evil-act initiating causes are always good. Evil is not an essence.
Prayer is good, but fate is inevitable.
Divine law is to love God and people.
Metaphysics
Because traversals require beginning points and endpoints, traversal of the infinite cannot happen, and universe began a finite time ago.
Universals are real and manifest themselves in individual objects, which are quantitative and exist in space and time. Individuals thus participate in higher reality but are separate from it. Same-species individuals have same essence.
Five ways can prove God's existence by arguing from effect back to cause: prime mover, first cause, supreme being, perfection or highest good, and highest purpose.
However, because people cannot know God's essence, except by analogy with people's essences and thoughts, one cannot argue from cause to effect.
God's knowledge is what creates things. All things that exist, in world or mind, are true. The reason that anything exists is that necessary being, which cannot not exist, exists.
Because God has no parts, God's essence and existence are the same. God has no qualities and is indefinable. God is eternal, unchanging, immaterial, pure activity, good, intellectual, and Truth itself.
God knows all things, but some ideas do not actually exist. God knows singular and particular things, not-yet-existing things, all time, all infinities, all wills, all minds, all evil, and all good. God knows singular and particular things because God is their cause. God knows not-yet-existing things because God is their creator. God knows all time as if it is present time. God knows all good because evil is opposite of good.
God has will that is pure-activity essence. God is object of God's will. God wills universe by reason but without causes or purposes except God, so God can perform miracles but cannot will contradictions. God's will depends only on itself and so is free. God wills Good because God is good and the only good. God acts rationally, so people can know the good through reason.
God cannot sin, change past, make another God, stop itself from existing, or fail. God cannot be body, tire, forget, repent, be sad, or be angry. God has no hate. God is happy. God is its own happiness.
Mind
Living things have souls, which are their essences {substantial form}, but only human beings have spiritual soul. Body has nutrition, growth, and reproduction from one essence {vegetative principle}. Body has sense activity and locomotion from another essence {sensitive principle}. Body has reason and will from a third essence {intellectual principle}.
Spiritual soul connects material and spiritual. Spiritual soul is lowest form with pure intelligence and highest form that can form matter and that realizes in matter. Spiritual soul permeates body and is immaterial, unchangeable, and immortal. Human intellect is in spiritual soul. Spiritual souls are individual, and God creates them at conception. Because soul is purely spiritual, it comes directly out of nothing.
Law
Laws come from God through natural law of morality and society. Natural law does not apply to property. Law must contribute to public good.
Politics
States contribute to God's plan, preparing for the community of believers after the redemption. States are subordinate to church, because states exist to help people reach virtue. Rulers have duties, with no natural right to rule.
He lived 1266 to 1308, was Scholastic and Franciscan, and developed Augustine's ideas in psychology {Scotism}.
Epistemology
Concepts develop from nature observation. Such concepts also apply to God. Evidence types are objects and event experiences, bodily actions, and principles, all of which people know directly. The first ideas and perceptions are confused and imperfect. Will makes some clear and perfect. Ideas that wills do not understand die out. In this way, wills control intellect.
Philosophy is for material world and is theoretical. Theology is for practical life and is spiritual. Only revelation gives truth.
Metaphysics
Individual objects and properties are distinct.
God is the efficient cause that keeps universe in being and keeps it from nothingness.
Mind
Will is independent of reason. The intelligent and immaterial soul links to material body by the life-force, which is the Form for body.
Theology
God impregnated Jesus's mother (Immaculate Conception).
He lived 1260 to 1337 and based his Mysticism on ideas of Realism.
Metaphysics
Being and Knowledge are the same. God is beyond being and knowledge. God has three parts: generating essence, creation itself, and part beyond all things and creating. God creates by expressing Ideas in itself, out of nothing. God does not create by will, because will is in time.
Mind
Soul is like the part of God beyond creating and essence and is timeless. Body is in time. Human mind approaches God by reducing plurality to unity. Soul then reaches purity, withdraws from world, and ceases to be self.
He lived 1401 to 1464 and influenced Council at Basle and later Council of Florence. He combined Thomist scholasticism, Eckhart's mysticism, and science to develop a religious metaphysics.
Epistemology
People cannot know God {docta ignorantia, Nicholas of Cusa} [Nicholas of Cusa, 1440].
Metaphysics
God is one and infinite, uniting all opposites, such as essence and existence. The infinite can realize all possibilities.
World is plural, finite, and filled with opposites.
Mind
Individual person and divine essence are the same.
He lived 1596 to 1650, was Catholic, and was "father of modern philosophy". In mathematics, he studied analytic geometry, slope, rectangular coordinates, Cartesian products, absolute value, sign rule, undetermined-coefficients principle, and logarithmic spirals.
Epistemology
God's purposes cannot explain anything, because people cannot know those purposes.
Senses and opinions cannot be true, because they can change and often deceive. People cannot know if they are asleep or awake and so they can be incorrect about image or thought {dreaming argument}. An evil demon {malin genie} or outside agent can perpetually deceive people. Because people can always perceive deceptive things, people cannot be certain about personal experiences or actions or about mathematical propositions and tautologies. Doubting everything is suspending judgment. One can doubt existence of all physical objects. However, the act of doubting implies consciousness, so people cannot doubt their existence as thinking faculties or consciousnesses with thoughts {method of doubt, Descartes} {cogito argument}. People cannot doubt doubting, so "cogito ergo sum" or "I think therefore I am".
However, ability to doubt that thing possesses some feature does not prove that thing can exist without feature.
Doubting, affirming, denying, understanding, willing, hating, imagining, and feeling are consciousness parts. Consciousness or soul essence is thinking, which happens even in deep sleep.
The method of doubting demonstrates a fact about truth: If a statement is as clear and distinct as the truth that the doubter exists, the statement must be true. Such statements must be as clear as tautologies and as distinct as exact meanings. Such truths {innate idea} are true by themselves and do not require deduction from other truths. Therefore, people can know clear and distinct statements. They can know them by reason, which comes from God. Mind passively receives cause mental effects. However, because body can cause unclear ideas, mind has to actively find clear and distinct truths.
Facts and theories do not and cannot lead to truth. Rather, analysis or induction methods should reach one and only one basic and certain principle. From that principle, deduction and synthesis can explain everything. All knowledge can connect in logical systems.
Cause must have more reality than effects. People have an idea of perfect being. However, people are finite and not perfect and so cannot themselves conceive of perfect things. Only a perfect being can put ideas of perfect things into consciousness. Therefore, God must exist, and "God exists" is clear and distinct.
Because God is perfect and so is truthful, God never creates people so they always have error. People can therefore believe in knowledge that is clear and distinct. Most truths have clarity and distinctness and do not need deduction. For example, mathematical truths are clear and distinct. Deduction only corroborates them. People can believe bodies exist, though mind knows only their extension, number, flexibility, and motion. Qualitative judgments and sense perceptions are mental signs, are not clear and distinct, and so are not truths.
Total motion in cause equals that in effect {conservation, motion} {motion conservation}.
Ethics
Rational thinking about clear and distinct ideas results in proper willing and action. Will can judge clear and distinct ideas in only one way and so is not free in those cases. Error in willing and action can arise when ideas are not clear and distinct and will is free in those cases. Sin arises from will's incorrect choice in unclear or indistinct cases.
Feelings and desires are mental disturbances caused by body. Only humans have feelings, because only they combine mind and body. Feelings and desires come from fundamental feelings: wonder or admiration, love, hate, desire or want, pleasure or joy, and pain or sadness. The mind's duty is to control body effects on mind.
Metaphysics
There must be a first cause for all things and especially for the whole. Reality has God, souls, and matter. The mental, non-material, and spiritual world, which has mental activities or consciousness, is entirely separate from physical world. Only one mental level exists. Mental or soul substance {res cogitans} does not extend in space and is indivisible. Physical substance {res extensa, Descartes} extends and is divisible. Material objects in motion fill space and follow deterministic motion laws. The physical world is the same everywhere. Living things are complex mechanical objects with no animating force. Math and physics can apply to body {iatrophysicism} (Giovanni Alfonso Borelli).
Mind
Soul and body are two independent things but interact. Psychological properties differ from physical properties {attributive dualism}, and psychological descriptions cannot be physiological descriptions.
School had followers of Descartes and included Louis de la Forge, Clauberg, Cordemoy, Arnout Geulincx, Gibieuf, and Nicolas Malebranche. Mental events occasion physical events, and physical events occasion mental events {Occasionalism}. People have subjective experience, which they know perfectly but no one else can know. Mental experience is not quantitative.
He lived 1588 to 1679 and was materialist, rationalist, and determinist.
Epistemology
Reason is about long-term goals and means to reach them. Emotions are about short-term goals.
Sense impressions are body motions and are the only consciousness contents. Imagination and dreams are decaying sense impressions. Sense impressions combine and transform {association, Hobbes} to give thoughts and memories. All thoughts are deterministic, either by association or by purpose.
Feelings and will result from combining pleasure, pain, self-preservation desires, and sense impressions.
True knowledge is mathematical and symbolic. Mathematics gives rational knowledge of material world. Object motions in space follow geometry. Perceptions are about object motions in space. Mind thinks by combining symbols, which are perceptions and words. Rational thought uses only words.
Mind uses space and time, but physical existence has no space and time.
Laughter comes from comparing self, or superior, to inferior {superiority theory}, to build up self and disparage inferior [1651].
Ethics
Pleasure is desire for more, and pain is aversion to something already present. Desire or love determines what is good for people. Aversion or hate determines what is evil. Therefore, morality is relative. People are mostly concerned with their desires and aversions and try to do what is good for themselves to stay alive and healthy. People have absolute right to take personal action for self-defense. Therefore, people's desires conflict. Morality is the means to achieve peace. Society must impose it. People accept it to maintain peace.
Will is desire or aversion that causes action. People always will the strongest desire or aversion. Different action choices are available, and wills choose among actions, but choices are deterministic. Freedom is only the fact that choice is available and that people have ability to act.
Fear causes religion.
Happiness is always succeeding or prospering. Happiness is only process, not state.
Law
Laws can gain peace and avoid war and crime, which are the main threats to individual lives.
People have right of self-defense but no other individual liberties.
Metaphysics
Universe contains only physical things. Religious and spiritual things are separate from material world.
Mind
Mental or psychological properties are about body matter motions.
Voluntary movements begin with insensible motion {endeavor}. Motion toward something is desire, and motion away is aversion.
Politics
People's main interest is self-preservation. State prevents continual war of self-interest among people and so is necessary for self-preservation. In state of nature, without law, there is no right or wrong. Left alone, state is anarchic. State's goal is order and stability.
The best way to achieve peace is in society with sovereign assembly or monarch. Sovereign makes and enforces laws to guarantee peace and maintain lives.
Sovereignty comes from the people, because power depends on the people's will. State is contract between ruler and people. People, who are all equal, agree among themselves to yield all power to one authority, the sovereign, chosen by majority. People give rights to sovereign to protect themselves. After this, people have no power or rights, except of self-defense and refusal to fight. People yield power to get more security and liberty. Otherwise, anarchy occurs.
After agreement, people do not have right to change it. Therefore, civil war never has justification.
Political-authority basis is sovereign authority. Sovereign powers and rights must be supreme. People must fear authority and so obey.
Sovereigns must be just, because people must follow law. States must use power to maintain rule of law and must use any means to reach this end {end justifies means}. Power provides stability and physical security for citizens. With no such power, person is against person, and life is "nasty, brutish, and short."
Monarchy has less favoritism, fewer private interests, secret advice, and stable policy, compared to legislature or multiple rulers. Honest monarchy keeps order and protects people.
There should be state religion and monarch or ruler should control church, because religious belief is arbitrary.
He lived 1632 to 1677 and was determinist. He derived Cartesian philosophy from axioms and definitions. He used Scholastic concepts for axioms and definitions.
Epistemology
People know God through intuition. People can know the parts of God {doctrine of modes}.
The physical can explain the mental, and vice versa. Physical and mental worlds exhibit parallelism. Ideas have objects or relations and essence of God.
Ideas and thoughts all logically connect, and understanding and reasoning mind perceives that fixed logical relations are between all objects and events, so all determines each. Effects are cause or premise logical consequences. All actions and objects are necessary and sufficient. No cause hierarchy exists, only a systematic whole. Causes and effects do not just happen in time.
Sense perceptions and emotions are body processes. Perceptions are external-object representations used by mind as it tries to maintain existence and perfect itself. Perceptions and emotions can become perfect in mind by clear and distinct understanding of their causes.
Purpose is human idea that does not apply to God's actions.
Ethics
Only finite minds see evil. Because everything is necessary, world as a whole has no evil.
Because everything is necessary, free will does not exist.
Man should seek order, give up passion, and try to find and understand God's plan. Attaining clear and distinct understanding improves mind's reasoning powers and allows more activity and freedom. Freedom is the understanding that God grants existence to people to act in predetermined ways manifesting God's power and law. The highest state of living, insight, and understanding {intuition, Spinoza} is intellectual love of God, union of thought and emotion, and joyful realization that all is eternal necessity under control of God, not contingent on time but determined by laws. Virtue is acquiescence in this knowledge and living life based on it.
People start with emotion and experience, then learn to reason, and eventually become free through insight, if they are perfectly active, not reactive, in oneness with God and nature.
Because the future is certain, hope, anxiety, repentance, and fear are not real but are passions based on inadequate knowledge. Other passions are effects of outside world. Passions distract from vision of God and unity of all.
True freedom is feeling and acting self-determination. Control from outside is bad. Reason is outside time and is certain. Knowledge leads to proper necessary action, and error leads to wrongdoing.
Self-preservation governs all behaviors. Fundamental desires are desire or appetite, pleasure, and pain or sadness. Self-preservation requires only these.
Metaphysics
Substance needs only itself to exist {substance monism}. Physical and mental are different perspectives on same reality {anomalous monism, Spinoza} {double-aspect theory, substance} {dual-aspect theory} {dual-attribute theory, Spinoza}. Substance has God as essence and nature as laws, is infinite, and has an infinite number of attributes, such as thinking and spatial extension.
All finite things, such as minds and bodies, are not substances but are only substance parts, manifestations, fragments, states, or expressions {mode, Spinoza}. Finite things maintain their being {conatus}, perfect their existence, and are aware of pleasure and pain. Finite things can be more active or more reactive.
Nothing can be different than it is, because everything results from God, who is necessary and eternal being. God is cause and essence of all things. Actual world and all knowledge derive from God, and this unifies them. All infinite attributes unite in God's reality, whose essence involves its existence. God has no qualities, no consciousness, no will, and no body. All things are God modifications, and God is in all things.
Mind
Soul and body exhibit parallelism. Mind is thoughts of body. Body is mental matter. Mind and body are different aspects of Nature or God.
Politics
States should control the church. However, each age changes religious dogma, so state should not force dogma upon people. State religion should be about ethics, not dogma. Social life comes from individual interests. State is an agreement that unites people into group with common interests, to ensure their interests. Agreement makes people give up some rights to authority to enforce laws. Aristocratic republics are best.
He lived 1632 to 1704 and founded empirical psychology and empiricism. William Molyneux helped him and corresponded with him.
Epistemology
Mental objects are sense-data about sensations, memories of sensations or ideas, or concepts {idea}. Sensation is the way objects present to understanding when thinking. Ideas can be simple or complex. People cannot analyze simple ideas or construct them. Mind is passive as it receives simple ideas from appropriate stimuli. Mind cannot prevent or select simple ideas. The two simple-idea sources are sensation and reflection. Sensation ideas result from observing external objects. Reflection ideas result when observing mind's operations. Simple ideas come from sensations or reflections by resemblance, nearness in space and time, and cause and effect {associationism, Locke}.
Idea associations can be false or true. Human action or nature connects true associations. False associations happen by chance or custom.
People construct and analyze complex ideas, such as objects, relations, and forms, from simple ideas using consciousness. Complex ideas combine simple ideas consciously using mathematical and logical operations to rearrange words, abstract, demonstrate, prove, and construct. Words are signs for idea contents, and general ideas are mental structures using words. Complex concepts find common features among objects or events or subtract space and time from objects or events {abstraction from examples}. Mind is active while attending, remembering, discriminating, comparing, combining, enlarging, and abstracting complex ideas.
Knowledge relates ideas perceived by reason. Opinion depends on observation.
Cause and effect is the major idea.
All ideas originate in experience. At birth, mind is blank page {tabula rasa}, waiting for experience to fill. A priori knowledge, such as tautology, does not exist. Because babies and primitive peoples do not know them, there are no innate ideas or universally true or known ideas, even of God or mathematics. Because soul or mind has to later formulate them and judge them, which it does for all ideas anyway, ideas cannot reside in soul for future use. Because people must learn words and grammar first, clear and distinct or intuitively certain ideas cannot be innate. Because the most-profound truths can be so abstract that they are not intuitively certain, they are not innate.
In demonstrative knowledge, necessary formal idea is substance that holds qualities or modes. People can be certain about their ideas and sensations through reflection, but they can know nothing about thing itself, essence, soul, or soul's relation to body. The only possible knowledge is of mind and its contents.
Will a blind person that knows shapes by touch recognize shapes if able to see {Molyneux problem, Locke}?
Understanding cannot perceive itself. Sense organs cannot perceive themselves.
Ethics
God is lawgiver and has rewards and punishments to induce people to conform to law. God's law is also nature's law, so following law leads to good results and breaking it leads to bad results in world.
Public opinion and state are two other law sources, and both have rewards and punishments to induce people to conform to law.
Moral judgments can conform to known ethical laws or not, so moral judgments are demonstrative knowledge.
Metaphysics
Matter is atom groups and has properties. Properties {primary quality, Locke} can be about atoms {corpuscular theory}: mass or solidity, figure, motion, and number. Properties {secondary quality, Locke} can be about atom relations. Tertiary qualities are about object perceptions.
Mind
Mind can sense objects and events {outer sense, Locke} and think about experiencing objects and events {inner sense, Locke}, making two knowledge kinds.
Politics
Kings have no divine right to rule. Hereditary succession to power is not right. Absolute monarchy makes king both judge and accuser.
Primogeniture is unjust.
People have many basic rights. Mothers have rights the same as fathers.
Before government, men follow natural law, which comes from reason and is God's law. All people are equal and free. People judge for themselves and rely on themselves for remedies. There is no anarchy. If all people are prudent, consider their overall interests, not just current ones, and are pious because they fear hell, society needs no law, because general interests of all coincide with special interests of each, over time.
Government results from social contract, to secure life, liberty, and property. States are expressions of people's will. Property causes people to agree on government and give right of judging and enforcing law to authority. Authority must establish laws interpreting natural law, have impartial judges to judge and mete punishment, and have powers to enforce laws.
Judges should be independent of governing authority. The people should elect legislature by majority rule. Legislature and executive should be separate, with equally divided powers to make laws and enforce them. There should be checks and balances among government branches. War or compromise must resolve struggles between branches, because no higher authority can arbitrate.
The state has limited powers against people, especially against their property.
Government is moral trust. If government does not do good things, people can resist it.
There should be religious tolerance, with love of truth. People should avoid dogma.
He lived 1638 to 1715 and was Occasionalist.
Epistemology
At each occasion of experience, God places experience in people. Mind cannot know the body except through God.
God holds all perceptions and ideas. God puts innate ideas into minds so they can think. People cannot know all their mind or faculties.
Error is self-deception, so people are at fault for error.
Metaphysics
God causes all actions, including will, because they are necessary. No actual causes and effects exist, only physical motions under laws. God put initial motion in all bodies.
God wills at each instant.
Mind
Individual minds are in infinite reason, love, and God, because they modify universal reason or God. People can only oppose God in their wills, not minds.
He lived 1668 to 1738. Matter moves and lives. Mind is not separate from matter. Mind depends on body completely. All mental processes use material or mechanical processes.
He lived 1685 to 1753, was Catholic, and studied vision psychology.
Epistemology
Mind can only know sense impressions and images {immediate object}, perception contents. Mind only knows primary qualities and secondary qualities. People cannot know anything about physical world or about substance. Objects are only quality conjunctions, with no need for substance.
Mind only uses examples and analogies, not words or abstractions. Abstractions are illusions, because they just recombine words. Abstractions about object sensations are not real in thought or nature, because they must both include and exclude qualities, and no process can be so general and so specific simultaneously.
Perception cause is God's will, which maintains complex correlations between all sense qualities. All people thus perceive the same unified, continuous, and coherent world, and world really is as it appears.
People correlate visual experience and visual judgments, such as distance and size, by contingent and arbitrary associations, not by calculation. Objects in visual experience are only mental {divine visual language}, by which people infer information about environment objects. People do not know or use innate mathematical ideas or optics theorems.
Mechanical movements do not cause or explain anything, but scientific theories are useful to predict experience.
Metaphysics
Matter is not real. Only mind and sense qualities are real {subjective idealism}. To exist is to be perceived {esse est percipi}.
If consciousness is matter property, world needs no creator, and soul is mortal.
The real world is under will of God and is purposeful. God perceives, and thus guarantees, material existence.
Mind
Mind is not ideas but contains or perceives ideas. Perceiving or attending is mental action, and mind is mental actions. People are, and are only, minds or spirits, thinking things. Only intelligent active animate agents or minds can have will and cause ideas or events. People are always thinking and do not have unconscious periods {doctrine of private times} {private times doctrine}.
He lived 1711 to 1776 and was utilitarian, empiricist, and humanist.
Epistemology
Sensation or immediate experience is certain, providing basis for ideas and knowledge.
However, observations depend on uncertain assumptions.
Mental ideas are sense-impression copies. Brain does not infer sensations and ideas. Sensations and mental ideas are similar, but sense qualities have greater degree, force, and liveness. Belief in sensations and mental ideas depends on their degree, force, and liveness.
Besides original sensations and their copies, mental contents are ideas about sensations. Simple ideas are about independent sense impressions {psychological atomism}. Complex ideas have parts that are about sense impressions. All ideas depend on sense impressions. General ideas are actually about particular perceptions that have general connotation. Ideas are about sensation relations, which are resemblances, contrarieties, magnitudes, proportions, time and space relations, identities, and causations.
People can use logic and know probability of ideas and their relations. However, such reasoning does not necessarily relate to actual world. People can only know that perceptions or ideas relate, not that real objects relate. Demonstrative knowledge is about ideas and their relations. Knowledge is uncertain and relative. Beliefs are as justified as other beliefs. No uniform principles can apply. No object implies another's existence.
Perceptions are object representations. Perceptions do not prove external objects exist, because mind only has perceptions and not external objects themselves.
Statements can be facts that depend on nature or can relate ideas without needing facts {Hume's fork}.
Deduction or causation can prove statements. Causation arguments assume that laws are universal. Deductive arguments cannot show that laws are universal.
People assume causation when same event succession or conjunction {regular succession} repeats. Causation depends on constant mental association {necessary connection} {necessary relation}, which depends on contact. Causation allows inferences about the future, which is knowledge beyond observation. Belief allows us to act in practical life.
However, people do not experience causal relations but only perceive events and objects in succession. Because sensations, ideas, and events have no logical connections, people cannot know causes and causation. Association only apparently relates cause and effect. Inductive processes depend on experience, make only contingent predictions, and cannot give rational knowledge based on logic or reflection.
People can have no rational knowledge of God, causality, substance, mind, or self, because such ideas have no associated sense impressions. People cannot prove God's existence by reason.
Ethics
Moral actions can be good for people. People can perform moral actions in systems that generally are good.
Morals are about emotions, which can then produce actions. Basis of moral actions and judgments is ability to feel what others feel {sympathy, ethics}, as they experience pain or pleasure. Social life determines feelings. People approve good actions, because people feel the pleasure others gain.
Reason clarifies, orders, and evaluates feelings that people have and the ideas behind them. Reasoning, and feelings of sympathy for simple virtues, teach people sympathy for complex virtues. Besides sense qualities, people feel pleasure from justice, benevolence, fortitude, wisdom, and prudence. Though actions resulting from these virtues can be harmful or insignificant, sympathy causes people to approve.
No Ought from an Is {Hume's principle}.
Mind
Self has interactions, causes, and effects {bundle of sensations}, depending on memory. Selves are not objects or perceptions, because no sensation corresponds to "I". Mind is sum of sense impressions and ideas. Introspection only reveals perceptions, not self {elusiveness thesis}.
Politics
Compact theories of government are incorrect.
He lived 1720 to 1793 and described people who saw aliens {Charles Bonnet syndrome, Bonnet}. Consciousness unity and sensation-and-motion disconnection both imply that immaterial mind is separate from body. Nervous system initiates mind's activities but does not cause them.
He lived 1724 to 1804, was pietist, and synthesized rationalism and empiricism.
Aesthetics
Consciousness has feeling, including judging art {judgment, Kant} {aesthetics, Kant}. Aesthetics is about perceptions that reveal object formal properties {Form, Kant} and lead to feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime.
The beautiful or sublime is subjective feeling and is not necessarily useful or agreeable. The feeling is not about physical object or concept but about mental image or perception that reveals object formal properties, exciting understanding, imagination, and sensibility. The Beautiful and Sublime belong to consciousness-in-general and are beautiful or sublime for everyone.
The sublime causes painful subjective inadequacy feelings in humans, because its greatness overcomes sensual abilities. Then human higher abilities relate sublime to super-sensual mastery, overcome awe, and obtain final delight. The sublime harmonizes sensual and super-sensual. Theoretical reason masters the mathematically sublime. Practical reason masters the dynamically sublime or powerful.
Art tries to elicit feelings of the beautiful or the sublime. Feeling suggests nature's purpose, which is to harmonize experience Forms and contents. Good artists therefore follow nature's forms.
Epistemology
Consciousness has thinking or ideation {theoretical reason} {pure reason}, which leads to questions about knowledge. Knowledge can only be about experience. Reasoning strives to find ultimate, complete, and consistent knowledge by pure reason but can only know how to act in experience {practical reason}. Through reason, people have ideas {ideas of reason} about self, physical world, and God.
Immanent principles involve Mind, which perceives world and has experience sense data {phenomena, Kant}. Transcendent principles involve reason, which uses unconditioned ideas beyond experience, such as actual objects and ideal forms {thing-in-itself} {noumena, Kant} {Idea, Kant}, about which one can have only faith in a-priori universal and necessary truths.
People can reflect and judge, using mass terms and sortal terms {natural kind, Kant}, to find experience order and purpose. Because all people use same tools, they share universal judgments of beauty and laws.
Knowledge is about perceptions, objects, and mental concepts, which can be true or not true and have value levels. Knowledge statements require subjects and predicates. Predicate to subject relations are third concepts different from subject and predicate concepts.
Applying concepts to objects using rules {judgment rule} is one cognition aspect. Judgments {analytical judgment} {explicative judgment} such as tautologies have predicate same as subject, so statement must be true. Judgments {synthetic judgment} {ampliative judgment} can have predicates that differ from subjects. Synthetic judgments have two types. People learn synthetic judgments, such as facts about world and perceptions, from experience {a posteriori synthetic judgment}. Synthetic judgments, such as mathematics and reasoning principles, relate subject and predicate in universally true and logically necessary way, unrelated to experience {a priori synthetic judgment}.
The main question about knowledge is about thinking forms or tools, how ideas originate and what mental activities are {critical method} {transcendental method}. The reason uses such concepts, principles, and judgments, but they are not innate, are not from experience, and are not consciousness contents. The fundamental categories used to understand reality are not objective features but are conceptual mental structures {Kantian idealism, Kant} and make experience possible {transcendental idealism, Kant}. Human understanding needs a priori concepts about space, time, substance, and cause to have experience, know objects, and give objects properties {transcendental argument}. A-priori synthetic judgments are only in mathematics, pure natural science, and metaphysics and are mental concepts, not physical reality. The basis for their truth is how people think.
Basic reasoning activity is synthesis {transcendental logic}, which is unifying manifolds or plurality. Sensations synthesize to perceptions, perceptions to judgments, and judgments to Ideas. First, mind combines sensations caused by physical objects {things-in-themselves} with mental space and time Forms to make perceptions. Second, mind combines perceptions with understanding concepts, which can create ideas, to make experience judgments {spontaneity, Kant}. Third, mind combines judgments about experience to make Ideas or general principles. Thus, a priori judgments do not require formal or analytical logic.
Using synthesis, people can make general synthetic judgments based on their perceptions. Such judgments are about perceived-thing relations, such as "every change must have a cause."
People cannot know physical reality itself.
Mind uses general judgments to form further concepts from perceptions.
Space and time ideas are pure perception forms and are a-priori principles, not mental concepts. Perceived particular things must be in space and time. Space and time are infinite, are about only one thing, are not subjective, do not relate to particulars as wholes relate to parts, are not necessarily actually in the physical world, are invariable, and are not universals. Space and time unify the sense manifold. Time unifies the self-perception manifold.
Twelve judgment types reflect twelve relations between subject and predicate. Universal quantity uses "all". Particular quantity uses "some". Singular quantity uses "one". Affirmative quality uses "true". Negative quality uses "false". Infinite quality uses "all" or "none". Categorical relation uses "all" or "none". Hypothetical relation uses "if ... then ...". Disjunctive relation uses "and/or". Problematic modality uses "possible" or "contingent". Assertoric relation uses existence as actuality. Apodictic relation uses necessity. Twelve Categories correspond to twelve relations. Respectively, they are totality, plurality, unity, reality, negation, limitation, inherence vs. subsistence {accident, substance}, causality vs. dependence or effect, community or reciprocity, possibility vs. impossibility, existence vs. non-existence, and necessity vs. contingency.
Categories lead to reasoning principles. Quantity gives the principle: all phenomena are extensive magnitudes. Quality gives the principle: sensation objects are intensive magnitudes. Three categories define possible, actual, and necessary {modality, Kant}. Relation category and other categories give principles. Substance is permanent. Substance quanta cannot increase or decrease. All changes have causes and effects. All substances continually interact. In mathematical form, these principles are all inferences from motion laws, because motion accounts for all events and perception changes. Principles are only about perceptions and experiences, not about actual physical reality.
The principle of pure understanding, which is self, ego, or consciousness as whole, develops from all Categories.
People can think of things-in-themselves as quality totalities, setting up intuition or non-sensuous mind perception, and so can think of world, souls, God, and imaginary creatures. World is totality of sensations. Souls are totality of self-perceptions. God is totality of everything. Such unifying totalities are the Ideas.
Subjectively, mind has sensibility and understanding. Sensibility is passive or receptive. Things in themselves can generate mental contents or representations {intuition, Kant} in sensibility {perception, Kant}. The fundamental time and space categories are in sensibility. Time is the form of inner sense, which allows people to know mind's contents. Space is the form of outer sense {outer sense}, which allows people to perceive external objects. Understanding acts on sensibility to form conceptions from intuitions. Understanding includes fundamental categories and general conceptualization principles, which allow people to find natural laws. Imagination links sense data to understanding to recognize objects and apply laws. Imagination is necessary {transcendental, Kant} mediator between receptive sense and active understanding.
Contradictions and opposite conclusions {antimony} happen when using space, time, and categories to understand things that cannot be in experience. Antimony subjects are not experience objects but are transcendent reality. Pure reason has four such unresolved principle logical contradictions. A logical contradiction is that universe had beginning and has finite space, or it had no beginning and is infinite. Space and time are both infinite and finite. A logical contradiction is that substances have simpler substances, or only one substance exists. Substance is both simple and composite.
These two antimonies are about infinities.
A logical contradiction is that people have free will separate from physical laws, or that physical laws or God determine everything. Things can be both caused and uncaused. A logical contradiction is that necessary being exists or does not exist. God does and does not exist.
These two antimonies are about causation.
Thesis and anti-thesis are true. Contradictions happen because people can only know perceptions, cannot know actual world, and try to draw conclusions about world anyway. Infinite regression through same answer type, to which human experience cannot provide unconditional answers, causes antimonies.
Neither experience nor logical operations and concepts can prove existence of actual material things or their causal relations. Substance and causality are only mental associations.
Philosophy is about concepts, is analytic, searches for definitions, depends on experience, and depends on understanding concepts. Metaphysics is synthetic but a priori, as in statements about ultimate existence and causation.
Mathematics is about magnitudes, is synthetic, uses definitions, is independent of experience, and depends on clear and distinct perceptions using space and time.
Humor depends on feelings of superiority [1790].
Ethics
Consciousness has willing, which questions morality {practical reason, Kant}. Thought contents synthesize will or purpose objects using Forms, and wills perform acts. Ordinary will tries to gain happiness or satisfy desire by synthesizing ends with means to find action courses.
Rational will has universal and necessary purpose, which is duty. Rational will follows a priori moral laws {categorical imperative}. Rational wills can want that everyone do action. People should act based on principles that they will that they should become universal laws. Such moral judgments have no conditions and are universal laws. Wrong action or thing is against reason.
People do not perform ethical actions to obtain happiness or pleasure. Following duty is action for its own sake. Consequences are not important.
Phenomena are deterministic. Noumena are not deterministic. Rational will is autonomous and free. People are free in as much as they are things-in-themselves. People's will is free to act. All actions must come from will. People consider {autonomy, Kant} which actions to take in situations to attain goals. People can choose to act morally and justly.
Conscience is feeling responsibility for actions and implies that people can choose in unconditioned ways. Being moral is having temperament that follows duty. Reverence for law causes obedience. People gain the dignity of law itself.
Pleasure or approval feelings unite and synthesize theoretical and practical reason and tell people if object or idea in theoretical reason is means for desire or purpose of practical reason. Feelings can be pleasant or show utility. Feelings can arise from Forms themselves. One feeling is what people feel when they obey or break the categorical imperative.
The Idea of the highest good connects perceptions and unconditioned things by uniting happiness, which is object of natural or sensuous will, and virtue, which is object of rational will. The only happiness is virtue or justice. All ends have highest end, to attain after death, that combines virtue and happiness.
Divinity above experience can represent the moral ideal. The moral law within us leads to faith in free will, God, and immortality.
God, society, or mental feeling or goal {heteronomy} can command moral law. Religion makes the moral law divine command. Because people, in their guilt and awe, need help, God offers man redeeming love to obey the law.
People have reason, and others must respect this reason and so respect people as persons or agents, with ends in themselves. People are subjects and should not be tools, instruments, or objects.
Logic
Logic is science of understanding. Logic has twelve judgment types. Logic {transcendental analytic} has quantity, quality, relation, and morality.
Metaphysics
People seek highest good, so a source of all morality must exist and make this idea. However, ontological and cosmological arguments are invalid.
If universe and time are infinite, everything should have happened already and everything should have same temperature. If universe began at a time, why did it begin at that instant after infinite time?
Mind
Perhaps, people have mental faculty that unifies their experiences {transcendental ego, Kant} and separate mental faculty that makes them self-conscious {empirical ego} [Kant, 1787].
Politics
Law and rights are about people's actions, not intentions or temperaments. Law is only valid if enforcement is certain. Law should unite people's wills to ensure freedom, by blocking natural or sensuous will. People's dignity, derived from moral law, makes them ends in themselves not things.
Penal law should only be for necessary retribution. Perhaps, before governments, people were innocent of duty. History has brought people closer to duty but not happiness, because it has increased people's wants. History is movement toward more rational social order.
He lived 1762 to 1814 and developed a philosophy based on Kant's idealism.
Epistemology
Sense qualities come freely from outside. Consciousness is activities {tasks, Fichte} that create objects from unconscious sense qualities and unify knowledge about such objects. In this way, experience is a consciousness product. To perform its tasks, consciousness reasons using all activities in unified ways. Consciousness starts with basic task and ideas felt to be necessary and true. The first task for people is to create oneself and unify all ideas about oneself, to be self-consciousness. Whenever task tries to create and/or unify, it encounters resistance or contradiction. To overcome contradiction, task performs dialectical process, to reach higher synthesis. Consciousness knows its actions while it acts and so has both being and consciousness. The self-consciousness perceives subject, oneself, and object, one's activities. People can only know the "I" or self by distinguishing it from the not-I or object perceived by self. The "I" has evolved historically by the dialectic to know, first, objective activity, then communities governed by law, then exercise of will and science, then realization that all is spirit, and then philosophical understanding of God's will as part of God's community. Therefore, starting from the basic task, dialectical processes create task hierarchy. Dialectic processes keep all tasks working together smoothly to form unified processes. Dialectic is essence of reason. Perhaps, self-consciousness involves unified task hierarchy [Fichte, 1794].
Besides ideas that arise from dialectic, consciousness contains ideas characterized by feelings of necessity and certainty in their truth.
Sensation has no basis in preceding mental activity and so is free and unconscious. It appears to come from outside consciousness but is the way reason sets goal or object for itself.
Ethics
Consciousness creates sensation objects for action. People follow the command of duty. People have right to work to fulfill duty.
History evolves from state of instinctive reason and morality, to impulse and will, to reason {artistic reason} under common universal consciousness. Man's goal is restfully contemplating God. "I" comes from and directs toward God.
Philosophy is to organize reason or consciousness.
Metaphysics
All being comes from objective reason. There are no things-in-themselves. Reality cannot mix material world and consciousness, because they are completely separate.
Objective-reason unity, which is not subjective, causes all things to have unity, have order, and necessarily connect.
God is the free, world-creating activity or universal self. World is teleological, not causal.
Mind
All things happen within self, and there are no things-in-themselves {critical idealism}.
The "I" is activity of being aware of self {thesis, Fichte}, which is subjective being. Things outside the "I" have their own activities {antithesis, Fichte}, which is objective world. Both interact dialectically to limit each other and make relations between self and world {synthesis, Fichte}. Theoretical-reason synthesis stages achieve purer knowledge. Consciousness knows its actions while it acts and so has both being and consciousness. The self-consciousness perceives subject as oneself and object as one's activities. People can know the "I" or self only by distinguishing it from the not-I or object perceived by self.
The "I" has evolved historically by the dialectic to know, first, objective activity, then communities governed by law, then exercise of will and science, then realization that all is spirit, and then philosophical understanding of God's will as part of God's community.
He lived 1756 to 1837 and was French Ideologist. Attention notes sensation facts. Comparison links sensations. Reason organizes sensations and comparisons. He said property taxation is illegal.
He lived 1775 to 1854, was Romantic, and worked with Fichte.
Aesthetics
Aesthetic reason or artistic genius unites conscious and unconscious.
Art works are the highest phenomenon of reason, because they realize the world of reason.
Epistemology
Dialectic is a tool of metaphysics and reason. Formal logic is for perceptions only.
Ethics
Life parallels God's self-development, an idea from Baader and St. Martin. Directed toward itself, will makes Ideas, then reason, and then world, which is consciousness of conflict between purpose and impulse. Later, self-knowledge brings consciousness of reason.
Metaphysics
Universe is a perfect organism and artwork. Organisms can share body plans {bauplan, Schelling}. Reality has archetypes, which become more perfect {Naturphilosophie}.
God created ideal mental world and real matter world by creating finite irrational things {leap}, which must return to God over history. Realizing such Ideas is falling away from God, which is selfish and evil. Falling away has no cause or reason, so Ideas are free. Ideas strive to return to God. Reality is will, going from irrational to rational.
The Absolute must have falling away in it at all times and so must have irrationality in its essence. God has primordial ground of being and striving or unconscious will. God develops from primitive essence, to self-knowledge, and then to absolute reason. God participates in history, and history of revelations and religions shows God's development.
Nature and mind cannot be separate, because they unify in the absolute or God. Nature is self in the process of becoming self. Nature is an organism whose purpose is to produce sensitive beings that have consciousness, sensation, and reason and so make higher selves. Higher reality builds over history by synthesizing opposing forces into higher unity.
Mind
Absolute and unknowable reason unites self and nature.
He lived 1766 to 1828. People can have relative knowledge of things-in-themselves, relative to themselves. Objects exist, because they resist the force of will. Subjects or selves exist, because people are conscious of willing and thus know force within themselves.
He lived 1776 to 1841.
Epistemology
Ideas are active and compete to become consciousness. Ideas have intensity, which they can lose through tension. After losing intensity, idea becomes unconscious and becomes impulse. This is how feeling and will arise.
Psychology is mechanics of ideas. Associational psychology is not true, because it makes mind faculties real and basic.
Understanding cannot produce or create, so space, time, and categories all derive from experience. They cannot mold experience. Consciousness uses concepts from experience and has no transcendental logic. Consciousness is aware of matter, which is appearance created when Reals interact, as sense qualities. Consciousness is not aware of inner states of Reals.
Something that contradicts itself cannot be real. To know reality, people must take concepts known by experience and use relation method to find what has no contradiction.
Ethics
Morals are part of aesthetics. People's aesthetic Ideas give them ability to judge or estimate. All mental relations have feelings of pain or pleasure, which judge relations aesthetically and morally. Ethical Ideas used for judging are freedom, affection, right, benevolence, and equity.
Metaphysics
Universe has many things-in-themselves or independent elements {Real}, which are simple and unchangeable. Reals interact with or influence {disturb, Herbart} each other, causing their inner states, not necessarily conscious, which are for self-preservation. Reals are like physical units of a causally interacting machine, which has interaction laws. Matter is appearance created when Reals interact.
Mind
Souls are Reals, with Ideas as inner states. Ideas disturb each other, making tension and resulting in mental activities and states. Self is activity in which new perceptions and ideas meet previous ones and assimilate.
He lived 1770 to 1831 and was empiricist and materialist. He expanded dialectical method of Kant.
Epistemology
Categories or statements {thesis, philosophy} have within them internal contradictions, which are opposite categories or statements {antithesis, philosophy}. The only available resolution is to combine the statements at a higher thought level {dialectical method}, to reach new categories or statements {synthesis, philosophy}. Dialectic applies to all subjects. Synthesis can explain all phenomena. Theses and anti-theses are not fully in consciousness until synthesized to higher knowledge.
Dialectic can continually create new theses from existing ones, without limit. Knowledge subjects develop through dialectic.
Thinking methods or categories similarly have internal contradictions. Reason as object of itself negates reason as subject. Sensations are objects, consciousnesses are subjects, and their synthesis is self-knowledge. Self perceives individual subjective spirit and objective spirit, and synthesis resolves these two into one absolute spirit, which is perception in art, image in religion, and concept in philosophy and combines personal and social.
People already contain in their minds all knowledge but must remember, grasp, or learn it through dialectic to make it exist {learning paradox}. However, theses and categories are not real but exist only in mind as mental-process parts.
Material mind cannot perceive ideal rational concept of mind or spirit but can know spirit through people's objective spirit.
Ethics
People's objective spirit causes activity, will, and spiritual life. Abstract, general objective spirit in itself is Right. Acting morally is following the commands of Right. The moral order has people in states following Right.
Morality is from family and society and so is social in origin and maintenance.
Religion relates finite spirit to infinite and absolute spirit. People can gain better absolute-spirit knowledge through better finite-spirit representations.
Freedom applies to objective spirit as it tries to know absolute spirit better and develop self and society. Subjective spirit is not free.
History
History is self-realization of absolute spirit working through individuals and nations. The Absolute comes to understand itself through the dialectic of history. States develop by such dynamic processes, not by rules or social contracts and other static abstract-principles. States are particular and individual expressions of people's objective spirits.
History develops through dialectic toward higher consciousness and more freedom. In ancient empires, only emperor had freedom. In ancient Greece, more people, as city-state individual citizens, were free and began to think more. Reformation allowed more people to be more individual and use their minds more. In the Enlightenment, states and institutions became more rational and favored more freedom.
Metaphysics
Reality is only spiritual, with subjective spirit {soul, Hegel}, objective spirit {consciousness, Hegel}, and absolute spirit {geist, Hegel}. Absolute spirit {Absolute, Hegel} {Absolute Mind} {Absolute Idea} is unconditional and unitary. Absolute spirit {absolute idealism} is real, rational, and true, because it knows itself and has no contradiction, from Fichte. Absolute spirit permeates whole universe and has synthesized and unified all concepts {gedanken, Hegel} through its dialectic, which motivates the dialectic in everything. Absolute Mind {Begriff} contains all knowledge and has reflections in intuition in art, imagination in religion, and pure logic in philosophy.
Dialectic in everything means universe is like organisms that continually develop.
Particular and finite thing is separate from infinite whole and can be only partially real and true. Combining particulars makes more reality and truth.
Because finite things have contradictions in themselves if they apply to the whole or absolute, finite things develop by thesis, anti-thesis, and resolution through the dialectic contained in absolute spirit.
Mind
Objective spirit or consciousness is a finite reflection of absolute spirit. Mind is subject that can know something other than itself {alienation, Hegel}. This thesis-antithesis resolves at higher level using absolute spirit. Because spirit is self-determined, objective spirit acts through logical necessity and develops through dialectic stages like organisms grow.
Politics
History stages have dominant groups that arise from national spirit, and groups determine people's ideas and decisions.
Ideal societies are rational communities that provide maximum benefits, so all people can give it allegiance, not just one group.
History judges actions. Therefore, power and success make whatever happened be the right or best thing {might makes right}.
He lived 1788 to 1860 and was a pessimist. Plato, Kant, and Vedic thought influenced him. Philosophy is art, not science, based on people's will.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is perception without will.
As people become less individual, they can better know the ideal.
Epistemology
Knowledge depends on having objective concepts {Idea, Schopenhauer} {objective concept} about reasoning, space, time, and causes.
Perceptions are individual, are in space and time, and have causes. From perceptions, people abstract subjective images or representations {Vorstellung}, which are also memories and imagination objects, using reason. From representations, people can know geometry, arithmetic, space, and time. From causes, space, time, and reason, people can know the world. The Ideas unify all knowledge.
Humor depends on feelings of superiority [1819].
Ethics
The Will, and individual wills, are always unhappy, because they never have complete satisfaction.
Individual wills conflict as they try to live and gain their desires. Conflicts of wills lead to inability to satisfy desires and thus pain and suffering.
People can never overcome the will to live, but to obtain happiness people should try to deny or negate will. They should quiet desires, have contempt for life, and become selfless {self-abnegation}. People can quiet will by sympathizing with suffering and by contemplating art and science.
Pleasure is relief from suffering and dissatisfaction.
Ethics {ethics of pity} depends on sympathy, compassion for the inescapable suffering and pain felt by other people. People should feel others' pain and should not inflict suffering. By submerging self and sympathizing with others, people decrease conflict of wills. The ideal is to unify all wills, and so end suffering and obtain justice.
Will feels itself to be free, but it actually acts deterministically. Freedom is acting to deny or negate will to live.
Metaphysics
Will to live or exist is essence of reality. Will is subjective thing-in-itself that has no object except itself, and so it can only will that it exist and live. Will has no outside method, object, purpose, or conclusion and is therefore absolute unreason.
All individual wills unite in the Will {world-will}.
All existing things manifest Will {voluntarism}. Will causes things to move and so keeps individuals restless and unsatisfied.
The world formed by Will is necessary and has determination, with an infinite number of relations and ideas.
All things in world result from physical cause, logical reason, mathematical reason, or moral cause.
Mind
Undirected forces {will to live, Schopenhauer} are true natures of people {absolute virtualism}. The will to live is individual, subjective, and irrational but is part of world-will. Will is separate from body. Will feels itself to be free, but all actions are deterministic. Will encounters resistance to its acts from everything, because everything has will or manifests will.
He lived 1770 to 1831. Consciousness allows people to know being, and being allows people to know consciousness. Real and conscious activities interact. Philosophy is explanation of self, because self is conscious.
He lived 1813 to 1855, was Christian, and founded existentialism. He criticized Hegel's absolute consciousness, which left out subjectivity and personality in favor of rationalism.
Epistemology
Truth is in self. Subjectivity gives truth.
Religion knows truth first by revelation and personal feeling {Religiousness A} and then by history and the eternal {Religiousness B}.
Ethics
People should do good deeds for spiritual satisfaction alone, not to reach goal, gain reward, or avoid punishment {double-mindedness}.
To act ethically, people cannot use objective standards, because choices are personal. People must develop self or essence through ethics. Self makes choice and commits to idea or action.
People have sense of anxiety, dread, or anguish about having no control and facing life's vicissitudes {angst, Kierkegaard}. People can try to avoid spiritual satisfaction {despair, Kierkegaard}, by denying God, by not thinking about it, by trying to be someone else, or by suicide. Despair can lead to rejecting pleasurable life and discovering self. People need faith, the opposite of despair or doubt, to avoid despair and suffering.
Mind
People's use of will to make choices with meaning and passion gives them self-interest and structure. People develop themselves over life. People have essences, which try to come into existence and thus pass through three life stages: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. Societies or political groups do not define people.
He lived 1806 to 1873, was James Mill's son, and was utilitarian, empiricist, and associationist. He tried to meld the Enlightenment with romanticism.
Epistemology
Knowledge, including mathematics and logic, comes only from experience. People can know matter and objects only as sensation loci.
Reasoning is induction or generalization {inductivism}. Reasoning can be good, middling, or poor.
Science laws can result from adding similar components {homopathic law} to obtain similar results. Science laws can result from multiplying dissimilar components {heteropathic law} to obtain new properties.
Eliminating objects and events that have no effect can find true causes {Mill's methods}, by agreement, difference, joint-agreement-and-difference, residues, or concomitant-variations methods.
Language feature, word, or phrase has connotation and denotation. Connotation is meaning and gives denotation. Proper names do not have connotation, because they have no wider meaning and no defining attributes.
Associations can be real and actual or apparent and verbal ones.
Consciousness is only perception associations. It does not need intuition or subjective faculty.
Ethics
People seek only happiness. Other goals, such as virtue, are part of happiness or means to happiness.
The happiness of the greatest number is the best. Happiness requires liberty and free will. Wrong actions or things cause less happiness.
Pleasures have qualitative differences. People must account for pleasure quality, as well as quantity.
Human nature is free and individual.
Mind
Mind can have experiences, memories, and hopes or desires, experienced by self.
Other humans seem to have consciousness, but how can mind know that there are other minds {Other, Mill}.
Politics
Society should provide the basic conditions for happiness. Society can nurture human nature.
Government can coerce individuals only to prevent harm to others {harm principle}.
Society must protect people's possessions. One possession is justice.
He lived 1806 to 1856 and was of Hegelian left wing. Personal egos are reality and should use ideas and things for themselves. There should be no state, government, law, property, religion, family, ethics, or love. There should be no compulsion.
School included M. Lazarus and H. Steinthal.
He lived 1818 to 1903. Nearness in time and space, not causes or logic, causes idea associations.
He lived 1817 to 1881 and was Teleological Idealist.
He lived 1826 to 1917, was Positivist, and studied history.
He lived 1838 to 1917.
Epistemology
Psychology is about mental states, which can be mental/intentional or physical/sensational.
Phenomena are physical, such as color, cold, sound, smell, or mental, such as presentations from senses or imagination, emotion, judgment. Physical phenomena require object. Like language, mental phenomena can reference objects in thought {intentionality, Brentano} and can be conscious or unconscious. The mental is about something else.
However, some conscious states are not representational, and some representations are not conscious.
Awareness relates to objects and events external to people and their awareness, so awareness has intentionality. Subjective experiences refer to perceptions or mental ideas, independent of their external objects. Intention objects can also be selves {psychological immanentism}.
All and only mental phenomena have intentionality {irreducibility thesis}. Mental states are always intentional {Brentano's thesis} {aboutness}.
However, sensations seem not to be about something else.
Mental states are intentional states {propositional attitude, Brentano}. All intentional states are intentional, but not vice versa. Intentional states causally relate to their objects, including non-existing objects.
Consciousness acts are constitutive powers of self and are subjective experiences. Intuition can describe all subjective experience. Subjective experiences have classes {act psychology} {descriptive phenomenology} {phenomenognosis} that find causal relations between phenomena.
Intentionality grounds object concepts.
Emotions and judgments use presentation with acts of judging or emoting.
Mind
Mental is personal and self-referencing. Mental phenomena cannot be physical phenomena.
He lived 1825 to 1895, was evolutionary theorist, and promoted and defended Darwin's theory.
Epistemology
People cannot know the Absolute.
Ethics
It is immoral to believe if one cannot justify the belief from what one knows.
Mind
Animals are machines but are conscious {conscious automata}. Consciousness does not cause anything {epiphenomenalism, Huxley}.
He lived 1840 to 1912 and was of Marburg School of Immanent Philosophy. People cannot know things-in-themselves.
He lived 1820 to 1909 and was Idealist.
He lived 1828 to 1920 and was of Comtian School.
He lived 1828 to 1875 and was of Marburg School of Immanent Philosophy.
He lived 1842 to 1906. The Absolute contains both idea and will, and will's pain and suffering always persists with idea order and spirit.
He lived 1832 to 1912, started New Realism, and emphasized stream of consciousness. People know things as somethings. Physical events cause conscious events, but conscious events cause nothing. The future is the test of truth.
He lived 1844 to 1900. Schopenhauer influenced him.
Aesthetics
Art can have restraint {Apollonian} or be free {Dionysian}.
Epistemology
People cannot know truth. All things are in flux, including truth. Therefore, all things must have continual study from many perspectives, accounting for all cases and situations.
Ethics
Values should depend on world as it is, humans as they are, and all their possibilities. Morals are always changing as world and people change.
People should accept material world and human life as they are. People should express their instincts, be fully alive, have desire for power, and exercise power. People should feel free, powerful, creative, and independent {overman} {superman}, by intellectually controlling and exercising their will-to-power as much as possible. For supermen, good and evil are meaningless.
The best morality for the present time is morality for masters and free, independent persons. Only the strong ought to survive and/or rule. Anything that delays arrival of the supermen is wrong or goes against nature.
Conventional morals and society are just escapes for the weak. People deny that anything is important or any action has significance {nihilism, Nietzsche}. Nihilism, old values, old interpretations, and old thinking ways, such as theology and metaphysics, are slave or herd morality for the powerless and weary. For example, the old value of sympathy perpetuates the unfit. Old values make people sensitive to injury, inferiority, oppression, frustration, or humiliation, and they react to them with hatred, tricks, and dishonesty {resentment} {slave mentality}.
Old values should have re-examination {transvaluation} {revaluation} to find relations to creative and powerful life values.
Will and intellect oppose each other. People that can only will must suffer, as things thwart their will or they conflict with others. Intellect should control will and engage in creative, powerful, and life-affirming activities.
Truth and happiness are not important, only expression of will-to-power.
Metaphysics
Irrational-force interactions {will-to-power} have no objective purposes and no structure and create and maintain physical and biological worlds.
"God is dead" and does not exist.
Mind
People can only will. Therefore, they must suffer.
Politics
Society can develop people's awareness and activity.
He lived 1835 to 1909, was Positivist, and studied criminology.
He lived 1846 to 1924 and was utilitarian and Idealist.
Epistemology
Appearance has many objects in many relations. Relations can be independent of objects, be aspects of objects, or be parts of whole system.
People experience the whole through appearances. Experience continually revises knowledge systems, and statements are revisable {coherence theory of knowledge}.
Judgments assign predicates to reality.
People have direct knowledge only of perceptions and can build descriptions and conclusions about reality from them. Logic itself is such conclusion and is mental system.
Ethics
Morality must provide people with unity, understanding, and goal for self {self-realization}. Pleasure seeking does not supply goals. Kantian duty or rationality assigns role to self but not goal. Hegelian morality provides only duties in context of society and history.
People should try to realize their best self {ideal morality}, using everyone's pleasures, all duties, all societies, and analysis and reasoning about them.
Metaphysics
True reality is mental, eternal, self-experiencing, unified, and Absolute.
Mind
People are parts of the Absolute. The Absolute only appears to people in certain forms or appearances.
He lived 1842 to 1910 and was pragmatist, radical empiricist, and Swedenborgian.
Epistemology
Things that people experience are real. Conjunctions {association, James} between perceptions and their parts organize experience. Ideal forms or categories do not organize experience.
Hypothesis is true if consequences of believing it lead to personal well-being, success, and satisfaction {pragmatism, James}. The best test of theory is what happens when using it. True beliefs have good practical effects in thinking and acting. They help people, are profitable, correspond to actual events, or are expedient in most situations.
Useful hypothesis makes prediction about experience or behavior.
Statements do not have objective truth.
Sshort-term memory can last from seconds to minutes and be in current experience. Long-term memory can last for days and require going back to the past.
Overt body behavior, especially in viscera, causes human and animal emotion, in response to internal or external stimulation or perception {James-Lange theory of emotion}.
Fear of loud noises is innate, but conditioning and stimulus generalization cause most fears.
Sense and motor systems interact {ideomotor theory}, so actions have representations about their effects, and the representations control further actions. Actions have predicted consequences.
Ethics
Will and attention seem to require effort, which indicates self-exerted force.
Will is active and purposeful consciousness. Belief requires effort of will {will-to-believe}. One then acts according to one's beliefs.
Free will is active attention to choose or maintain belief and choose behavior.
The will-to-believe allows one to choose belief in situations in which one must choose belief, and so action, without knowing consequences. Reason does not work in such situation.
Believing is good, because people might believe the truth, whereas avoiding error is not practical and cannot lead to truth. People choose not believing when they fear trickery or mistakes, but it is better to have false hope than false fear.
People should not reject hypothesis if results are good. Therefore, people should believe in God.
Metaphysics
Pure experience is the only reality {radical empiricism}. Experiences contain knower {consciousness, James}, known {perception, James}, and their relations. Living things both participate in pure experience and can reflect on it later. Experience is neither mind nor matter {neutral monism, James}. Experience is pluralistic. Soul, self, Ideas, and matter do not exist.
God is being and existence itself. Nothing else can determine God. Thus, God cannot not be, and so is necessary and sufficient. Because necessary and sufficient, God is perfect and absolute. Because limitation is non-existence, God has no limits from within or without and so is infinite. Because God is infinite, God is one and only one. Because God is one and only, God is indivisible. God has no potentiality, because potential can lose or gain, thus contradicting necessity and absoluteness. God contains all actuality already and is immutable. Because God has no limits, God is boundless. If God has bound, God is in space and thus is composite. God is omniscient, because God knows all causes as itself. God is pervasive and omnipresent, because God is present in all time. God is omnipotent for all things that do not have logical contradictions. If God has physical substances or anything inside, they have cause other than God, so God is non-physical and spiritual. If God is material, God has parts, which something not-God must combine, which is contradiction. Therefore, God must be simple. God's nature or essence and existence or being must be the same. Potential and actual, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes unite in God. Because God has all attributes of persons, God is a person. Because God is object and subject of its activity, God is a living self-sufficient person. Because people have will and intelligence, God has them, because cause must have more than effect. The object of those things in God is God itself. God wills itself, knows itself, and must do these things. God is eternal. If God does not exist from the beginning, God needs a prior cause. If God is not present at end, God is not necessary. If God has succession, God is mutable.
God can create being from non-divine substance or out of nothing. God can will to create, because everything outside God can change. God creates to exercise his freedom and manifest his glory. God creates out of love, to make rational creations that can know and love God. God implants the Ideas in us, but people perceive them from finite viewpoint.
Evil is negation, and so God cannot be evil. God permits evil in free beings but does not will it.
Mysticism is passive, transient, ineffable, and noetic.
Mind
Brain as whole makes continuous, personal, active, and changing experience {stream of consciousness, James}, which is about near past and near future. The stream of consciousness can affect brain.
Person's individual experience can interact with other's experiences.
Mind can use different means in different situations to reach fixed goals.
An "I" {subjective self} thinks and knows. A "Me" {empirical self} {objective self} is the body {material self}, social acts {social self}, and spirit or soul {spiritual self}, which has reasoning, will, goals, conscience, and sensory experiences. Spiritual self attends, judges, and acts {active element}. The "I" is whole set of Me's, holds thoughts, and is a special thought type that remembers, selects, unifies {unity, self}, and continues {continuity, self} into next such thought, making stream of consciousness. "...thought itself is the thinker..."
Consciousness can cause attention {cause theory}, or brain can direct it {effect theory}.
He lived 1855 to 1916 and was Idealist. The Absolute Mind includes all minds. Will properties or essence explain motivation.
He lived 1859 to 1938, was a psychologist, read Frege, and became a philosopher. He developed phenomenology by extending Brentano's intentionality theory.
Epistemology
People know knowledge types only by psychological effects {psychologism}, which are subjective experiences. Psychology is about psychological effects and subjective experiences themselves and so about consciousness. People cannot know physical scientific facts or how subjective experience relates to them. Psychology needs postulates, but psychology cannot prove these fundamental ideas.
Logical structures exist independently of psychological activities, but people can only understand logical structures from psychological effects.
To study mental processes and what is in conscious mind, start with no assumptions about perception, objects, concepts, causes, or consequences. Suspend judgment {epoché, Husserl} about actual existence.
First, classify phenomena {phenomenology, Husserl} and then find their essences {eidos} and origins.
People have meaningful and logical object representations {intention, Husserl} in consciousness {phenomena, Husserl}, which reflect universals or essences {noema}. People can experience and remember unique and individual intentions in consciousness and consciousness itself {noesis}. Conscious acts are intentional and direct towards objects.
Phenomena are mental object representations {profile, Husserl}. Profiles are object-essence aspects. Essence is sum of all possible profiles, and people find it by intuition {eidetic intuition} using intentions about profiles {transcendental subjectivity} {transcendental ego, Husserl}. Finding object essence makes that essence, and so consciousness is constitutive. Eidetic intuition both finds object essence and develops its existence {eidetic reduction}.
Phenomena have ontology, because they are in object essence. Intentions have ontology, because they are about object essence. Knowing object essence relates phenomena to intentions {phenomenological reduction}. Provisional connections {bracketing} {einklam-merung} are between objects and intentions, which both refer to noema. After analyzing intentions, find all possible meaningful intentional relations {transcendental reduction}. Intentions cannot refer directly to objects, because objects are not contingent, but intentions and subjects are contingent.
Phenomenology is better way to establish physical world facts. In Western world, science appears to be the only fact source {objectivism, Husserl}. However, facts are intentions from conscious activity, and subjective experience is all people can know about world. Empiricism should account for subject, observer, and methodology. Including life, history, and society subjective experiences requires an epistemological phenomena theory, such as phenomenology.
Psychologically, numbers develop from counting set elements. Logically, numbers are symbols and wholes, which people do not count but manipulate.
Awareness has unrepresented features and has space and time {horizon of awareness} {awareness horizon}. The horizon is necessary to perception, meaning, and understanding.
Mind
Mind knows only phenomena appearances, not reality.
Egos or subjects are not consciousness or mental-experience physical objects but transcend both categories {transcendentalism, Husserl}.
People's egos can know each other {the Other, Husserl}.
The living world {Lebenswelt} {life-world} is people's subjective natural state, before science and history, which has essences upon which to build knowledge.
Conscious experience has viewpoint and object {intentionality, Husserl}.
Conscious experiences have many meanings and appearances, some sensory and some non-sensory {superposition, Husserl}.
Imaginary objects have arbitrary properties, but perceived objects have definite and often more properties {transcendence, Husserl}. Perceived objects have stable part relations {relational constancy}; have no affect from interruptions or other perception changes, will or other mental states; allow perception by different senses {perceptual invariance}; and allow improvement in perception {corrigibility}.
Perceived objects associate with objects in the past and future {temporality}, including themselves, and so have history {retention} and expectations {protention}. Consciousness moments {primal impression} include past and future. People know viewpoint or object changes by object comparisons at different times. Perceived objects have duration, and events have monotonic order. Time is global and unitary. Events nest recursively.
People have lived-in bodies {leib, Husserl} and bodies as intentional objects {körper, Husserl}. Sensations relate to proprioceptive and kinesthetic information from physical body, which allows action. Sense-organ and body movements create egocentric space, which makes intentions and experience. The sense of self is implicit, not known by higher-order thought or itself.
Pain and color sensations {hyle} (material) are not intentional but are sense contents and lead to intentions and consciousness.
He lived 1859 to 1938, was New Realist, and developed evolutionary system.
He lived 1859 to 1941.
Epistemology
Consciousness can only know the present. However, people intuit continuous time, as irreversible, never-repeating, and always-altering change {duration, Bergson}. People must feel psychological truth by instinct.
Memory interacts alive, current, and active mind and inert, past, and passive matter. Memory recollects past states during present activity.
Perceptions are limitations to and uses for active life force.
Life and movement are beyond science, so philosophy is intuitions about life force, time, and matter.
Laughter happens when people see humans acting mechanically.
Ethics
Life and will are free and creative, make unpredictable products, have no purpose or end, and are just action. Creation is good in itself. Action is for its own sake.
Metaphysics
Change is the basis of reality. The life force {élan vital, Bergson} causes purposeful evolution through change and development against matter's passive resistance. The life force is dynamic, while matter is inert. Life and matter necessarily oppose. Life tries to organize and unify matter into new forms while matter tends toward separateness.
Time is essence of life. Duration is dynamic and continuous and not a series of states.
Mind
Through acting, life has produced instinct and intellect. Intellect is passive. Instinct is active. Intellect can deal with things as stable states, in separate objects or in series, explaining why matter appears as objects. Instinct deals with things in time, by harmonizing and blending present and past states.
He lived 1843 to 1896 and was realist. All science ideas should be verifiable by sensory experience {empirio-criticism, Avenarius}.
He lived 1861 to 1916. Phenomena are effects from mathematical-theory complexes, not from single theories. Data sets can have theories that vary greatly in assumptions {underdetermination} {Duhem-Quine thesis}.
He lived 1872 to 1970 and was neo-realist. In logic, he developed theories of types, classes, and descriptions, to distinguish between logical and grammatical proposition subjects. He invented method of stating problems in logical symbols {philosophical logic}, to transform ordinary language into propositions. He axiomatized counting numbers and logic {logicism, Russell}.
Epistemology
Philosophy is about meaning and therefore language and logic. Philosophy also uses science. "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know."
Mathematics does not assert anything about physical world, only about logic and language.
Mind can know mental facts based on language or logic {knowledge by description, Russell}. These facts can be true or false. Mind has special relation to certain mental objects such as perceptions, introspections, and certain memory types {knowledge by acquaintance, Russell}. These are not about truth. Knowledge by description depends on objects known by knowledge by acquaintance, which provides definitions and meanings by representation.
Propositional functions form a hierarchy {proposition types}, based on variable and function categories. Variable type is one level below propositional-function type {theory of types, ramified} {ramified theory of types}. Propositional functions cannot apply to selves {theory of types, Russell}. Function types can be equivalent to first-order functions {axiom of reducibility, Russell}.
Existence, identity, and predication differ. Proper nouns identify individual things. Predicates identify object classes. Existence and description are separate and independent. Asserting existence {theory of descriptions} {descriptions theory} requires class descriptions of subject and predicate. Existences are not individual things, subjects, or predicates. Asserting quantification requires subjects or descriptions, not predicates. Quantifiers do not apply for all functions or types. Phrases like "the x" {definite description} indicate unique existence. Phrases like "an x" {indefinite description} indicate non-unique existence.
Meaningful-proposition subjects can refer to objects that do not exist. Descriptions do not refer to anything, so knowledge does not need acquaintance.
Numbers are classes of classes, and so mathematics can be a logical system.
Sentence symbols {incomplete symbol} can have meaning only in context.
All conditions define class {comprehension axiom}. This axiom is not consistent, because class can be about all things not in the class {Russell paradox, Russell}. Instead of "class", use the word "function" in these statements.
People have innate postulates, allowing inferences.
If statements change truth over time, change has happened. Something began or changed shape, size, position, or orientation.
Beliefs, wants, and desires relate person to proposition {propositional attitude, Russell}.
Appearances that radiate from objects go to minds and become sense-data, which are external to mind but phenomenal. Sense-data cause mental images, which are how appearances exist in nervous systems. Mental images can also arise from within mind. Sensed appearances relate to other appearances, so brain can distinguish them from unsensed appearances, which have no such relations.
Intention objects are not mental objects but physical objects.
People feel assent or dissent to belief content.
Ethics
Desire starts behavior, and satisfaction ends behavior.
Metaphysics
Reality is elementary predicates or sensations, which are either instantaneous or outside time {logical atomism, Russell}. Logical analysis can discover these logical atoms, which are independent and are neither physical nor mental {neutral monism, Russell}. Complex things, physical and mental, come from logical atoms by logical methods. Logical atoms radiate from physical event to cause appearances.
However, negative statements, independence, and exclusion cause problems for logical atomism, as does the possibility of logical analysis for complex statements like beliefs.
Mind
Mind can acquaint with itself as subject {ego, Russell}. Mind is not the set of all received appearances.
School included Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner.
He lived 1876 to 1957 and started New Realism. Consciousness content is the same as consciousness object. Mind and brain are same. Anything conceived or perceived as outside mind is in mind. However, this cannot prove that nothing is outside mind {egocentric predicament}.
He lived 1889 to 1951 and was analytic philosopher.
Epistemology
Truth is about facts, not objects.
Propositions about metaphysics, ethics, religion, aesthetics, logic, propositions, and essences cannot state truth. They have no meaning, because they are about things with variable meanings. Philosophy goals are to describe and to increase understanding.
One thing is tautologically identical to itself, but two different things cannot be identical, and so identity cannot be relation {paradox of identity, Wittgenstein} {identity paradox, Wittgenstein}. Identity actually conjoins two propositions.
Models of reality need as many elements and relations as reality. Proposition sets can have as many elements and relations as reality and can model reality {picture theory of meaning, Wittgenstein}.
Actual language expresses mind's thoughts and intentions. Language description can clarify language usage. Language is not about experience. Grammar specifies how to use words {grammatical proposition}, not how world is. Language cannot explain thought structures or rules or prove them true or self-evident. No argument or appeal to other authority can prove the basic forms or ideas used in human activity or show they are self-evident. In all human activities, such as thinking, solving problems, or using language, people can distinguish correct from incorrect performance based solely on activity, not on verbal criteria or principles.
Mathematics is a rule system for using transformations and relations to produce new values or statements. Fundamental logic and mathematics forms and ideas are about nature of thought. Logical propositions are tautological rules. Logical forms cannot have name or description and are inherent in reality. Language alone can reveal them.
He described language game, family resemblance, and private language [Wittgenstein, 1953].
Language can be for shared social situations. People can agree about word meaning used in social situations, because they apply same words to same social situations and they realize they do so. The culture maintains social situations and so preserves word meaning. Meaning must be constant to allow people to communicate with others and themselves over time. Using language of social situations, people can communicate about what happens in minds, because same social situations shape mental images of perception words.
Sentences about emotions or sense qualities refer to internal things. Sentences about perceptual or physical phenomena name public reference object. Sentences about pain and anger are only about mental phenomena and have no physical object but still have public criteria through shared social situations and have constant meaning.
Like words, sentences have contingencies or applications that make them true and meaningful {truth-condition, Wittgenstein}. Using correct sentence structure determines truth and meaning, by determining truth-conditions. Truth and meaning do not depend on underlying thoughts. Mind can only assent to, dissent from, or abstain from thinking about sentences and applications.
Factual statements are the most-common statements, and conditions that make factual statements true are the best-understood statements. People judge other statement types in reference to factual statements, using assimilation or contrast. Factual statements represent the physical world but can also represent alternative possible worlds. Factual statement represents image. Factual statements should have same abstract form as the fact reported. Factual statements can express everything that people can say and so limit what people can imagine or conceive. Factual statement has sense. The sense of factual statements is what makes them true. Scrambled factual messages have no sense and are meaningless. Factual statements are truth assertions, because sense is about truth. Other statement types do not have sense but still can have meaning, by revealing physical-world or human-life features.
Things people do or use can rest on doing and thinking methods and so are not knowledge or truth but are all there is. Mind does not have or follow definitions, templates, principles, or rules. Mind interprets what to do and applies behaviors and language in particular situations. Definitions, templates, principles, rules, and understanding follow from ability to apply word to situation. Templates are not accessible to others, so people cannot know meaning. Templates typically do not precisely conform to situations, so meaning is not clear or true. Templates can change without person or others being aware of change. Templates can be wrong.
Interpretation is verbal and so itself can have interpretation. "If you can say, here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest."
He lived 1892 to 1985.
He lived 1895 to 1975 and discussed dialogism and heteroglossia [Bakhtin, 1986] [Bakhtin, 1983].
He lived 1889 to 1976, was atheist, founded existentialism, and was Sartre's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's teacher. Later, Heidegger became more pessimistic.
Being and thinking are becoming lost {nihilism, Heidegger}, as science, logic, and technology progress. People need thinking and language, as in art and poetry {the turn}.
Epistemology
Philosophy must be careful to use correct terms and to explain why other terms are incorrect.
Being itself causes errors in understanding, because many things are possible but only several actual.
Communication concerns living being transmitting information about problem at moment.
If something is true, people can understand it. False things do not have meaning.
Ethics
Present situations or problems require decision. Situation has social or problem context, people have goals or purposes, and tools and moods affect situation. One can act mechanically or freely. People must learn to act in these situations.
People must come to accept the inevitability of death. This knowledge is motivation to action, and so death is cause from the future that can affect people in the present.
Mind
People's lives are not like things people use {Zuhandenheit} and are not like things entirely separate from people {Vorhandenheit}. People's lives are fundamental forms of being, in which they have social relations to live in communities and personal goals to meet needs. Living people, as being itself {dasein}, are non-physical existences {existenz} or life loci.
People have identity gained from family and culture {authenticity}. People can understand this identity.
Before life begins, people are nothing and after death will again be nothing, so nothingness focuses human ideas and concepts.
Angst causes reflection. Then restless soul questions and so understands existence and thus accepts the pain and hopelessness of short life in limited universe. The soul takes resolute decision to assert its existence and essence and so determines its destiny itself. This is the meaning of being {sein, Heidegger}. Being depends on existence of people who understand its being.
To gain understanding of being and self, which are hidden, deliberately obscure, or too familiar, requires a method {hermeneutics, Heidegger}.
Politics
Beings develop in societies. Social conventions and ideas from the past determine one's being. To find all possibilities of being and to understand development, people must study history.
He lived 1902 to 1989, was logical positivist, studied mind-body problem, advocated neutral monism, and was member of Vienna Circle.
He lived 1905 to 1980 and was existentialist.
Epistemology
Things {the absurd} can appear to be subject to reason, but in fact people cannot reason about them. The meaning of existence is such a subject. Reason alone also cannot guide one's choice of fundamental project.
Repression is not possible, because conscious must be aware of what to repress at each instant.
Self-knowledge is impossible, because people are not objects but agents. People can create belief, even if they know it is not true.
Ethics
The main emotion is anguish over life and existence. Moral choices are about how to resolve this anguish.
Neither god nor nature provides moral authority {abandonment}. Moral authority comes only from people's choices.
There is no fate. People shape destiny and are responsible for choices.
One must choose to act. This is the human condition {la condition humaine}. Only people's actions have meaning. Choosing makes one free and creates one existence. Morality lies in making decision to act. Choosing to make no decision is self-deception or bad faith {mauvaise foi}.
Self-essence reveals itself by asserting existence. Existence precedes essence.
People often treat other people as objects, rather than subjects.
People have one or more overall purposes {fundamental project}, which they freely chose.
The imagination is free.
Mind
Understanding consciousness involves three existence or being categories. 1. Consciousness is conscious of objects other than itself {the in-itself}. In-itself exists only in consciousness but is not part of consciousness. It is an object of intention. It is non-physical and does not follow causal laws. In-itself is passive. 2. Consciousness can be conscious of itself as a different thing than in-itself {the for-itself}. The for-itself is separate from the in-itself and is not intentional. This self-consciousness {prereflective self-consciousness} is consciousness that there are intentions and the in-itself. For-itself is active. 3. People's bodies, characters, actions, and history exhibit a consciousness form that other people or same person can perceive as physical-world object {the for-others}. For-others relates its conscious body to other conscious bodies and relates its consciousness to its body. For-other and other for-other relations are perceptive, subjective, and affective and do not involve thought, knowledge, or cognition.
No consciousness type is personal or related to ego.
Mind has something inside {in-itself}, something for both {for-itself}, and something outside {for-others}. Because it is not in-itself, self-consciousness is nothingness, intention without object. As nothingness, self-consciousness causes questioning, imagining, being skeptical, denying, feeling detachment or delusion, and feeling need or lack. Therefore, self-consciousness has freedom. People are conscious of nothingness and freedom but often fear or do not accept them. Such people desire consciousness to be in-itself, rather than for-itself, and do not accept their real being. For-others often compete. Such relations oppose free action and so typically cause or involve conflict. Love, for example, can be a wish to possess another's freedom. Human relationships typically involve control of others and restrictions on freedom, so most human relationships eventually end. Human interactions involve so many factors that people cannot know them, and knowing them makes interactions impossible [Sartre, 1943].
Politics
Preferences in ethics determine political values.
At all human-life phases, from conception to death, something has power over individual {biopolitics}. Decisions taken for other people cannot have rational bases and are always questionable.
Society builds institutions that restrict freedom and increase alienation.
In coming into existence, driven by self or self-states, people's minds can go through transformations in which mental states appear abnormal. However, if transformations continue to completion, result can be clear and balanced mental state. Social contexts can help mentally ill people live independently.
He lived 1907 to 1961, was existentialist, and opposed dualism.
Epistemology
Awareness of object has representation and has space, time, and other unrepresented features {horizon, awareness}. The horizon is necessary to perception, meaning, and understanding.
Mind
Ego or self is about body experience. Body experience is neither subject nor object. Self's essence or reality develops through actions. World is self's experiences.
He lived 1902 to 1994 and studied inductive logic.
Epistemology
Proving statements false {falsification, Popper} can gain knowledge. Hypotheses should be statements that are testable and falsifiable. Stronger tests can test strong hypothesis {corroboration}. This process can refine hypotheses {falsificationism} to approach truth {verisimilitude}.
Observation or experiment cannot directly prove or falsify hypotheses, because subjective assumptions or previous knowledge, which can be wrong, always interpret evidence. Statistical induction is not reliable truth indicator.
Hypotheses have strong support if they predict true but surprising results.
Science uses falsifiable hypotheses. Pseudo-science uses falsified theories, such as Marxism, or theories that make no testable predictions, such as psychoanalysis.
People cannot predict plans well.
Mind
Matter and mind are separate substances, and interact in synapses {interactionism, Popper}. Mind has units {psychon}.
Politics
Open societies criticize plans and rulers and can change them constructively. Closed societies are passive and accept status. History evolves according to rules and is deterministic {historicism, Popper}. Epochs have spirits or overall feelings {Zeitgeist}.
He lived 1900 to 1976.
Epistemology
Philosophy should make language clear and find why some statements have no meaning or do not work in contexts. Statements have categories {statement types}. Knowledge can be about skill {knowing how} or about facts and events {knowing that} [1949]. Statements of one category often use contexts that require another category {category mistake, Ryle} {type error}.
Words belong to categories {logical type} by usage {logical behavior}. Mental ideas mean what happens in behavior {operational behaviorism} or what disposes people to behave in way {logical behaviorism, Ryle}. Words can be about mental dispositions and feelings. Words can describe values. Words {achievement word} can be about mental processes or activities that have results, such as solving, detecting, and seeing.
Words about mental processes can have different types. For example, people perform some mental processes and have skills, while some processes seem to just happen. Mental processes can have causes or antecedents, while others seem spontaneous.
Pairs can require each other for meaning {polar concept}, like up or down and correctness or error. Because there can be error, people can be correct.
However, this does not state when or where error or correctness was. Pairs, like finite and infinite, can have one member that has no reference.
Mental-event descriptions describe agent possible actions and statements, not actual mental events.
Thinking is acting in organized ways.
Mind
The idea that thinking things reside inside bodies or minds {ghost in the machine, Ryle} is ridiculous. Mind-brain dualism does not exist, because statements about minds are not statements about matter. Mental states are dispositions {reactive disposition} to behave in specific ways {dispositional analysis}. Mental states are not substances but substance processes.
If will causes voluntary actions, and will is voluntary, will has infinite regress.
He lived 1919 to ? and associate with Quine.
Epistemology
All particulars are individuals. Individuals can be particular spatial objects, with identity. Individuals can be non-particulars, like properties, numbers, and statements. Statements are non-particular and have context. Sentences and descriptions refer to particular objects, such as statements in which "The" and "That" can interchange. Concepts can depend on or refer to other concepts.
Mind
Experience is a mental-state series {pearl view, Strawson}. Self is new each time. Introspection shows that consciousness alternates with unconsciousness. There is no personality or agent. Neural processes have mental as well as non-mental properties. Experiences depend on persons or selves {no-ownership theory, Strawson}.
He lived 1900 to 2002 and studied under Heidegger.
Epistemology
Understanding differs from explanation and depends on culture. People should be aware of culture and how it affects their understanding of world and themselves. Understanding is in the present.
Realizing factors involved in understanding allows understanding to be as correct as possible {authentic}.
In studying and understanding, it is important to know writing style, intended audience, problem, and social and historical context {hermeneutics, Gadamer}.
Mind
The life-world is social.
He lived 1922 to 1996.
Epistemology
Scientists unconsciously use assumption, theory, and concept paradigms for developed sciences. Before development, science {preparadigmatic stage} has no paradigm. When competing paradigms become incompatible {incommensurability}, the paradigm alters. Two paradigms can exist at same time, because current observations cannot decide between them. Then a science revolution happens.
History has two aspects, one factual and the other myth {double truth, Kuhn}, which situation winner determines. History and personality affect truths and objects {dirty hands}. Earlier-time scientist independence can amalgamate with current-time big science {syncretism}.
He lived 1912 to 1989 and was functionalist.
He lived 1930 to 2004 and studied language relative to philosophy. He analyzed and criticized texts based on ideas about language relativity {deconstruction, Derrida}. His criticism contrasted with that of Roland Barthes.
Epistemology
Spoken and written symbols are physical and arbitrary. Spoken and written symbols are always in context. Because meanings differ in context, meaning can be unobtainable {undecidability, meaning}. As speech or writing progresses, sign meaning changes slightly {différence}, as context changes. Thus, signs cannot know consciousness or truth. Speech expresses mental thoughts {logocentric}, and writing is secondary.
Philosophy depends on opposite-concept pairs, such as soul-body, which are not useful or real but are only about language use.
Mind
The Other must contrast with the Self. This idea was against the idea of Emmanuel Levinas that the Other is absolute.
He lived 1926 to ?, was first logical positivist, and was Carnap's student. Quine, Wittgenstein, and Nelson Goodman influenced him.
Epistemology
People should not judge beliefs individually, but only as whole system {holism, Putnam}. Senses and facts cannot be the basis of knowledge. Knowledge requires brains that communicate.
Brain {brain in a vat} can know, by electrochemical input alone, everything people know, so it is impossible to prove existence of external world.
People react to natural occurrences to establish conscious linguistic responses {causal theory of reference, Putnam}. Mental states, representing ideas, cause linguistic responses. Linguistic responses report mental state using signs. Response pattern depends on similarity or relation represented by mental state, which people do not necessarily consciously know. Because mental states vary widely, natural occurrence can have incompatible explanations.
Skepticism refutes itself, because its thoughts have different meaning than ordinary thoughts.
Relativity requires that past, present, and future have no real distinction among them.
People think and speak based on how experts use words {externalism, Putnam}.
Mind
Mental states are computations {functionalism, Putnam}, and mind is relations between beliefs, desires, memories, and all mental states. This was his early thinking, which he criticized later. Minds know objects using mental tools {internal realism}.
He lived 1926 to ? and was Australian materialist and functionalist.
Mind
Mental processes are brain states and interact causally with body {central-state materialism, Armstrong}.
He lived 1929 to ?, was of Frankfurt School, and was Adorno's pupil.
Epistemology
People can study texts by considering social, historical, and textual contexts. People can reach true consensus about text. Free public debate can achieve such consensus.
Ideologies depend on power structures and slow social change. Ideologies have weak foundations {ideological critique}.
Mind
The life-world is social.
He lived 1932 to ?.
Epistemology
People's minds have intentions, which make meaning and language. Speech acts are rule-governed behavior, with roles and laws. There is strong AI and weak AI. After receiving grammatical string of Chinese characters as input, people who do not know Chinese language can use algorithm or lookup table to send grammatical and meaningful string of Chinese characters as output {Chinese Room example}. System of man and lookup table can pass Turing test but does not have real understanding of Chinese. Symbols and grammar must relate to representation to have meaning {symbol grounding problem}.
However, people must be able to perform such complex algorithms, using many underlying brain skills, including learning and memory. People must recognize Chinese characters in strings, put such characters in series, and follow many-ruled algorithm. To use algorithm, people must know language. Recognizing patterns is an algorithm part and means one knows symbols and representation. Perhaps, whole system understands because it must be complex and integrate many subprocesses, so understanding emerges. Perhaps, it needs causal relations to outside world. Perhaps, it needs brain-simulation program.
Mind
Neurological activity causes all mental phenomena {biological naturalism}. Mental phenomena and conscious states emerge from neurons and their processes. Minds have subjective essence. Sense qualities are elements of a field {total conscious field} that unifies conscious experience.
He lived 1942 to ?.
Epistemology
People can explain system if they assume that system is rational and has beliefs and goals {intentional stance}. They can look at physical, chemical, and biological processes {physical stance}. They can look at system structure, design, or algorithm {design stance}. Factual statements can substitute equivalent phrases for each other. Intentional statements are not true under substitution, because belief, knowledge, expectation, want, recognition, understanding, imagining are about specific ideas, not semantic meanings.
Brains {Darwin Machine} can recognize patterns, activate available behavior patterns, and select patterns through competition. Patterns are in neuron populations and can change.
Patterns that require extensive processing receive attention and so become conscious. Experiences report brain-activity results or output. In given situations, researchers can ask people to report their experiences, observe their behavior, or analyze their brains. Researcher can build story about their experiences {heterophenomenology, Dennett}.
Mind
Brain is network with many pathways that make many reactions to input {Multiple Drafts}, one of which is for consciousness. Human brains create histories, which revolve around same brain {center of narrative gravity}. Brains and memes have co-evolved, so brain parallel architecture {Joycean machine} simulates serial processing used by memes. This simulation is self.
Dreams are saved-narratives rerun during sleep {cassette theory}.
People naturally feel that they can imagine philosophical zombies {zombic hunch}, because they think experiences are separate from matter.
He lived 1917 to ? and developed a meaning theory.
Epistemology
For first-order languages, sentence truth is provable from semantic sentence-part relations. All languages can transform into first-order language, for sentence-truth clarity. This allows speakers to have truth-theory. First-order language meaning depends on truth-conditions.
Language interpretation or translation should use universally true and neutral beliefs and references, to minimize errors and falsehoods.
Intention, such as belief, is a mental state in which contrast forms. Speakers speak intentionally.
Causality is only physical, with no mental component, and follows physical law.
People can describe and imagine objects. People can understand and report events. Objects and events are independent.
Mind
Mental processes are physical processes, because they have relation laws, which can only be about physical events. However, mental states are not physical states and physical states cannot describe them {anomalous monism, Davidson}.
He lived 1937 to ?. Consciousness is subjective experience. Organisms are conscious if and only if there are mental phenomena {something it is like} to be that organism. Subjective experience has one viewpoint, unlike objective physical theory.
He lived 1931 to 2007. Wilfred Sellars and Quine influenced him. Truths, and objective or transcendental judgments, do not exist. Only beliefs exist, and they can be close to truth. Such truth depends on social context {neo-pragmatism, Rorty}. Intentions and mental states do not correspond to physical brain states {eliminative materialism, Rorty}. Folk psychology is not the way brain works.
He lived 1942 to ?.
Epistemology
People use terms such as desires, intentions, and reasons {folk psychology}, but scientific terms must replace these terms {eliminativism}.
Mind
Consciousness uses short-term memory, does not need sensory input, changes attention, interprets input, disappears in deep sleep, reappears in dreaming, and unifies senses. Conscious states involve changing attention, representing inputs, using concepts, combining attention and perception in short-term memory, and processing over time {dynamical profile approach}. Consciousness can be conscious of all representations, not just self-representations or high-level representations. Brain uses recurrent neural networks for attention and memory.
He lived 1933 to ?. Brain-mind mental and physical states function together, pair one to one-or-many, cause brain and body behavior, and affect mind {union theory}.
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He lived 1932 to ?.
Epistemology
Beliefs are information about relations. People know relations by differences and similarities among related scenarios {relevant alternative}.
Mental states represent beliefs about external events.
Learning acts are the basis of representations. Learning links external events and internal natural indicators {natural sign, Dretske}. Natural signs are mental phenomena, personal experiences, and actions, not abstract or arbitrary symbols. In learning, representational system gathers information from environmental events to make new algorithms. Learning is not just sensitizing, habituating, or setting algorithm parameters.
Mental-state pattern or structure {belief, Dretske} influences neural events and provides reasons to perform behaviors {structuring cause} and so causes action {triggering event} that leads directly to behavior {structural-cause theory}.
He lived 1942 to ?. Self does not exist. Personal identity is just grouped personal characteristics {bundle theory, Parfit}. Theories {ego theory} can posit souls or selves. Personal choices can affect particular people {person-affecting principle}, possibly making those people worse off. Ethical choices are about particular people affected by particular action, as well as general considerations. Self-interest does not exist.
He invented semantics based on truth conditions. Explanation is justifiable if it increases beliefs or makes simpler, more powerful, more fruitful, or more complete and consistent explanations, inferences, or hypotheses for the whole or a larger data set {explanationism}.
She lived 1943 to ? and is eliminative materialist.
Consciousness is representational. Mental representations that are poised, are abstract, are non-conceptual, and have intentional content are conscious {PANIC theory}. Poise means that it can affect beliefs and thoughts. Abstract means that it is a code or symbol, not just a physical thing. Non-conceptual means that it is specific and continuous, not a concept or category. Intentional content means that it represents external or internal object or event.
He lived 1942 to ?.
Mind
What happens if individuals in China physically perform same algorithm used by conscious people {Chinese nation example} {China brain example}. Does chess machine that uses lookup table to know all best moves in all positions have intelligence? Does robot with all human behaviors have intelligence? Can qualia be missing or interchanged?
Sense qualities and experiences are a consciousness type {phenomenal consciousness, Block} (p-consciousness). Mental representations, used for rational thoughts and actions, are a consciousness type {access consciousness, Block} (a-consciousness). Access consciousness is under conscious control and includes self-consciousness, creativity, discrimination, generalization, and behavior flexibility.
Consciousness does not lie between perception and behavior {classical sandwich} but actively binds perception, behavior, body, and environment {dynamical singularity}.
Opening refrigerators turns light on and it always comes on, so you think that it is always on, but it really goes off when door closes {refrigerator light illusion}.
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Date Modified: 2022.0225