NATS 1730 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Tabula Rasa, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant
15 Feb 2017
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For newton, wherever he saw regularity in the universe that he could not account for with his physical laws was where the hand of god was apparent, tinkering with the system. When asked how god fit into laplace"s understanding of the world, he announced that he had no further need of that hypothesis. Refers to the 18th and at least part of the 19th century. The term was coined by the german philosopher immanuel kant. Reason would reveal the laws of nature. One would come to know god through the study of nature. His essay on human understanding saw the mind as a blank slate (tabula rasa) which could be transformed into anything. He attempted to apply a mathematical analysis in the style of euclid to the understanding of the mind. The style was modeled directly on newton"s principia.
