Lecture 6: Rationalism Flashcards
What was the key emphasis of British empiricism in explaining the intellect?
Sensory experience and laws of association, relatively passive mind
What did rationalists postulate about the mind’s role in transforming sensory information?
An active mind that makes sensory information more meaningful and discovers principles beyond sensory input.
According to Spinoza, what was the basic reality, and what term did he use to describe the relationship between mind and body?
Basic reality: God; Relationship: Psychophysical double aspectism or double aspectism.
What did Malebranche believe about the interaction between the mind and the body?
They did not interact; instead, God coordinated them, known as occasionalism.
According to Leibniz, what is the difference between conscious and unconscious experiences based on?
The number of monads involved. Like Spinoza, Leibniz believed that all matter possesses consciousness but that physical bodies vary in their ability to think clearly. Leibniz’s contention that the monads of the mind were perfectly correlated with those of the body was called preestablished harmony, and was his answer to the mind–body problem
What term did Leibniz use to describe the perfect correlation between the monads of the mind and body?
Preestablished harmony.
How did Reid respond to Hume’s skepticism, and what did he call his contention about reality?
Response: Strongly opposed; Contention: Direct realism or naive realism.
According to Kant, what are the innate categories of thought responsible for modifying sensory information?
Kant’s categories of thought included concepts of unity, totality, time, space, cause and effect, reality, quality, existence-nonexistence, possibility/impossibility, etc. These concepts are than used to convert the sensory information we receive into information that is meaningful or useful to anything other information we already know or will experience later. In this way, Kant believed that the categories of thought caused mental experience because the categories of thought are always interacting with the sensory information we receive and altering one’s phenomenological experience. This is in-escapeable because one can not escape the active mind processing the sensory information according to Kant’s categories of thought.
What did Kant propose about moral principles, and what is the categorical imperative?
Kant’s improvement on the golden rule, the Categorical Imperative: Act as you would want all other people to act towards all other people. Act according to the maxim that you would wish all other rational people to follow, as if it were a universal law.
Why did Kant believe psychology could not be a science?
Subjective experience could not be measured with mathematical precision.
What did Hegel consider to be the only true knowledge, and what process did he believe the human intellect advanced through?
True knowledge: Unity (the Absolute); Process: Dialectic process involving thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
What’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in Hegel’s terms?
The thesis is an intellectual proposition. The antithesis is simply the negation of the thesis, a reaction to the proposition. The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths and forming a new proposition
How did Herbart view ideas, contrasting with the Newtonian perspective?
Ideas were likened to Leibnizian monads, having their energy and striving for conscious expression
What did Herbart call the group of compatible ideas of which we are conscious at any given moment?
Apperceptive mass
According to Herbart, how can an idea cross the threshold between the unconscious and the conscious mind?
If it is compatible with the ideas making up the apperceptive mass.
