Selected Lecture Notes for Historical Interlude
Based on Ten Theories of Human Nature (2009)
I have not had time to adjust these for Twelve Theories, but the questions and responses still apply, even if the relevant pages in Twelve Theories have larger numbers.
Last modified: April 1, 2013
Historical Interlude
9. In what ways did Luther challenge the Catholic church (of which he had been a part)? He disapproved of the Church's sale of indulgences. He emphasized justification before God by individual faith and by God's freely given grace, and the lack of need for the Church to play the role of middleman. (136)
The printing press was invented shortly before Luther's Reformation. How did Luther make use of it? (What did he translate into German?) He translated the Bible into German. (136)
Was he the only one to translate this book into languages that were commonly spoken in Europe? No, but he was one of the first to survive after doing so. (136)
10. What replaces the Pope as the primary source of authority for Protestants such as John Calvin? The Bible. (136)
What was the primary source of authority for the Radical Protestants such as Anabaptists and Quakers? (136) The inner light or God's revelation in the individual mind or heart.
How did the Euro-American liberal view of toleration emerge? (136-37)
In the 16th and 17th century, various "Christian" groups used the power of the state, whenever they had it on their side, to suppress, expel, and even massacre, other groups that they regarded as heretics. After such painful experience, which clearly had the effect of increasing personal insecurity for large numbers of people, European peoples began to accept that different religions could be tolerated in the same country. The United States, whose citizen body derived from English colonists often belonging to Christian groups that had been persecuted in England, endorsed this tolerance by writing the separation of church and state into the (Bill of Rights to the) Constitution.
11. What combination was triumphantly demonstrated in the scientific work of Galileo and Newton?
The combination of the experimental method with systematic mathematical theory.
What happened to the authority once enjoyed by Aristotle, the Bible, and the Church with regard to knowledge of the physical world? By 1700 they were no longer accepted.
What problem remains to this day? (137) How far can scientific method be applied to human beings?
12. What views did Thomas Hobbes reject?
Dualism and medieval (Thomas Aquinas') Aristotelianism.
What metaphysical position did he espouse? An uncompromising metaphysical materialism. (137-38)
What was his view of human motivation?
Human beings are inherently self-interested, concerned with their own survival and reproduction. ("Selfish" is misleading, since selfishness is assumed to be a vice, but it is Hobbes' view that prior to the establishment of a society with laws, there is no right or wrong, just rational and irrational.)
We are inevitably in conflict with each other for food, for land, and other scarce resources.
What does he think would happen if there is no common power to keep order?
People tend to resort to brute force. There is no mine or thine distinct, only that to be every man's that he can take, and for so long as he can keep it. As a result, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
What is needed to save humanity from the evils of the "state of nature"? An authority with a monopoly of the use of force.
It is in the interest of each person to give up his freedom to attack others for the sake of security (not being attacked by others). But such a mutual nonaggression pact would be unstable unless the result community immediately transferred the authority to enforce the pact to a power strong enough to enforce the rule of law.
(Hobbes was a "social contract" theorist and imagined that people moved into an organized society by "contracting" with one another to avoid mutual aggression.)
What criticism does Stevenson make of Hobbes' theory? (138)
The terms "state of nature" and "human nature" are ambiguous. Hobbes and other social contract theorists seemed to mean by them the nature of human beings before organized human society. But the idea that human being were isolated from society seems to be a myth; the evidence from anthropology and archeology is that human beings have probably always been social creatures.
[Notes on Descartes questions temporarily removed]
13. Explain Descartes' dualist view of human nature? (139)
Body and soul (or mind) are two distinct but interacting substances.
How does he understand body? The body occupies space and is subject to the laws of nature studied by natural science. (139)
Mind or soul? The soul or mind is what thinks, feels, perceives, and decides (thus exercising free will). The soul is incorporeal, i.e., it is not made of matter, it does not occupy space. It cannot be studied by the methods of natural science. The soul can survive the death of the body, and it is the basis of the personal identity of a person. (139)
Why does he make a sharp distinction between humans and nonhuman animals?
For Descartes the most striking form of thought was the sort of self-awareness that we have of our own consciousness. The second most important was the logical thinking that is important in mathematics. Animals could do neither. Descartes seems to have jumped to the conclusions that they had no other soul-related properties. (139)
14. What is his main argument for dualism? (139)
Whatever one can doubt, one cannot doubt one's own existence as a conscious being—trying to doubt it, one recognizes the she is engaged in a conscious act, which proves that the doubt is invalid. But one can doubt that he has a body. He can conceive that he is a disembodied mind and a powerful evil spirit is implanting in him vivid experiences of having a body and perceiving a non-existent world.
15. What is his argument for the uniqueness of human beings in Discourse part V?
He argued that the capacity humans have for language is unique, and that proves that humans alone are rational. Many human beings have a relatively small vocabulary. But even so, they are able to combine them into a very large number of new sentences that we can understand even if we have never heard them before, because we know rules for combining worlds into intelligible sentences. (139)
16. How does he reconcile his Catholicism with his endorsement of the modern scientific method? Having divided reality into the material, studied by science, and the spiritual, consisting of finite minds (us) and the infinite mind (God), he was able to remain a traditional theist and a believer in human free will. (139)
17. What in a nutshell is Spinoza's view on human nature?
Spinoza held that mind and matter are not two distinct and separable substances, as Descartes had, but that they are just two aspects of one complex underlying reality. A descendent of Spinoza's view is the 20th century materialist view known as "mind-brain identity": the same events can be given two descriptions, on the one hand, happenings in the brain that can be studied by neuroscientists; on the other hand, thoughts or feelings of which we can become conscious by reflection. (140)