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3 - Phenomenalism and idealism I: Descartes and Malebranche

from II - Idealism and early modern philosophy

Edited by
Jeremy Dunham
Jeremy Dunham
Affiliation:
University of the West of England, Bristol
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Summary

Descartes' move towards an egocentric philosophy of the cogito is one of the most important, radical and often discussed moments in the history of philosophy. Whitehead wrote in 1929 that:

[Descartes] laid down the principle, that those substances which are the subjects enjoying conscious experiences, provide the pri- mary data for philosophy, namely, themselves as in the enjoyment of such experience. This is the famous subjectivist bias which entered into modern philosophy through Descartes. In this doc- trine Descartes undoubtedly made the greatest philosophical dis- covery since the age of Plato and Aristotle.

(PR 159)

In a seminal paper, Burnyeat fleshed out this claim and, through a careful analysis of texts that Berkeley used as proof of predecessors from Greek philosophy, argued that prior to Descartes there were no examples of philosophical idealism whatsoever. In addition, Burnyeat put forward the even stronger thesis that it was not even possible to conceive of idealism prior to Descartes, as idealism requires the subjective epistemological shift that Descartes acquired through hyperbolic scepticism: a shift that used tools not available to even the ancient Greek sceptics.

In a recent article, Darren Hibbs (2009: 646) claims to find four definitions of idealism in Burnyeat's work. He lists them:

D1: The doctrine that everything is in some substantial sense mental or spiritual.

D2: The doctrine that the world is essentially structured by the categories of our thought.

D3: The doctrine that esse is percipi.[…]

Type
Chapter
Information
Idealism
The History of a Philosophy
 , pp. 34 - 58
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2011

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