The Relationship of Being and Perception in Enlightenment Philosophy

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document in english

humanities/philosophy

term papers

published 03/10/2007

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Summary

The philosophical efforts of the Enlightenment thinkers were based on the relationship between metaphysics and epistemology. Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley progress in their understandings of being by refining the means by which they are able to make justified claims to knowledge. In a conversation framed around Berkeley’s “to be is to be perceived,” one could phrase the Cartesian rational dualism as ‘to be is to apperceive,’ and the Leibnizian rational idealism as ‘to be is to perceive.’ These three formulations typify each philosopher’s combination of metaphysics and epistemology while demonstrating how each wrote in response to the connected historical discourse in which they participated. The rationalist epistemology employed by Descartes and Leibniz gives way to the empiricism of Berkeley in his attempt to ground abstract epistemological claims in actual experience.

The philosophical efforts of the Enlightenment thinkers were based on the relationship between metaphysics and epistemology.
Berkeley's metaphysical idealism denies the existence of material substances.
Descartes initially establishes the essence of material things from their potential existence in our clear and distinct mathematical ideas
While both philosophers use the interaction of body and idea to explicate their greater projects, the meaning of ‘idea' itself differs in the Cartesian and Berkeleyan epistemologies
Both Descartes and Berkeley set out upon their philosophical adventures with the intention of proving the existence of God to a skeptical audience
Berkeley's criticism of rationalism's abstract tendency is directed at Leibniz' rational idealism
Humans mark that point along the monadological continuum in which perception includes self-perception; at the limit of distinctness in perceiving, God's self-consciousness involves perception of the whole
If monads are ever-subjective, how does body exist even as an object to be perceived?
The philosophies of the Enlightenment period attempted to distinguish the metaphysical truths of the universe by devising various epistemological methods