|
Rene'
Descartes (1596-1650), the father of modern rationalism,
abandoned traditional paths to knowledge and developed a new
method of seeking truth. Descartes doubted everything to eliminate
preconceptions, and to test all candidates for true knowledge
-- but he discovered he could not doubt his own existence
as a conscious being. Through rigorous self-examination, he
offered an account of the nature and reality of mind, body,
God, and their interconnections. He aimed to affirm human individuality,
freedom, and spirituality in a way that was consistent with
his revolutionary, unified, mathematical approach to science.
Descartes argued that philosophies based on sense experience are unreliable;
he said that the human soul and God can and must be known before
we know anything about the physical world. He noted that our
capacity for error results from the gift of free will -- but
he argued that by using his method for seeking knowledge we
can infallibly know the timeless nature of things. Descartes
said that humans are not merely physical beings; each of us
is a composite, in which an unthinking, spatially extended,
physical body is combined with a free, conscious, non-spatial
mind or soul (which is the true self). The body and soul
intimately interact, yet each can exist separately
-- so it's metaphysically possible that the soul may survive
the death of the body.
Francis
Bacon (1561-1626) pioneered the other major early-modern
philosophical method known as empiricism; unlike Descartes,
Bacon based all genuine knowledge on sense experience.
He said the growth of knowledge is inhibited by faulty assumptions,
habits of mind and methods of investigation, and
he developed experimental procedures to enable otherwise limited
human minds to interpret nature correctly.
|
|
On
two audiotapes - about three hours in length.
Narrator: Lynn Redgrave
Author: Professor Jeffrey Tlumak
Editor: Professor John Lachs and
Wendy McElroy
Publisher: Knowledge Products, Inc.
This
title is part of the Audio Classics Series by
Knowledge Products. Knowledge Products publishes a variety of
audio presentations on the great ideas and events of history.
|
