electiveHQ

How do modern treatments of substance and causality differ from what came before? Do we require certain knowledge, or is probable knowledge enough? Do we really need to go outside nature to explain nature? Are there such things as innate ideas, or is the mind at its beginning a 'blank slate' awaiting sense impressions from outside? Does my identity lie in the unconscious, or in conscious experiences I can call my own, or both? In this course we will explore these questions, and others, by looking at the contrasting ideas and arguments put forward in the great philosophical traditions of Rationalism and Empiricism. Following a brief consideration of Descartes' later work, the philosophers to be examined in most detail will be Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley and Leibniz.