PHILOS 25B Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Epicureanism, Corpuscularianism, Tabula Rasa
Document Summary
Berkeley"s predecessors: recall that descartes provided a philosophical foundation for the new science. Countered the aristotelian view that references the essence or form of a thing. The new science explained things by appeal to underlying structures and to explain its properties. universal laws. All physical things are just configurations of a single substance, body. Descartes argues against aristotelian plurality of substances. So we only appeal to extension to explain bodies: spinoza and leibniz agreed that physical phenomena are explained by extension/mechanical laws. They just differed in their views on the ontological status of matter: locke essentially agreed with mechanism/corpuscularianism to explain everything in the physical world. Big difference rejection of cartesian epistemology, specifically innate ideas. For descartes, what we know most clearly and distinctly are those things that are innate, not the ideas we get from our senses. He says that all ideas originate in experience (which includes sensation of the outside world and reflection upon our minds)
