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TTC - Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes and the Rationalists
Released 12/2024
By James D. Reid, PhD Professor, Metropolitan State University of Denver
MP4 | Video: h264, 1280x720 | Audio: AAC, 44.1 KHz, 2 Ch
Genre: eLearning | Language: English | Duration: 12 Lessons ( 6h 16m ) | Size: 5.23 GB
From the 17th to the 18th centuries, bold thinkers cast off the authority of ancient traditions and embraced reason as the primary tool for understanding the world. No longer would orthodox beliefs get in their way. Instead, they would use reason alone to seek knowledge. These rationalists, among the early modern philosophers, included René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-visionaries whose answers to profound questions remain relevant today
What can we know for certain? Employing the tools of reason, the rationalists sought to establish a secure foundation for knowledge in response to the intellectual, scientific, and religious upheavals of their time.
Are we truly free? The problem of free will troubled these thinkers, as it does many philosophers and scientists today. Are our actions determined by natural or divine laws, or can we act according to our own discretion?
Is there a God or a higher power? In an era when God's existence was simply assumed, the rationalists aimed to establish the existence of God or a fundamental substance by using logical arguments.
The rationalist movement also included other innovative thinkers, such as Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Lady Anne Conway, and Nicolas Malebranche, each contributing unique perspectives on mind-body interaction, the nature of substance, and the role of God in human understanding.
Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes and the Rationalists covers all of these groundbreaking figures in 12 intellectually rich, half-hour lectures, presented by award-winning teacher James D. Reid, Professor of Philosophy at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Professor Reid shows how Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and the other early modern philosophers serve as a bridge between the Scholasticism of the late Middle Ages and thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment-such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Voltaire, who were directly responding to the writings of the rationalists. This broad arc of ideas makes Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes and the Rationalists invaluable for understanding the evolution of thought in Western philosophy.
Witness the Birth of the Modern Mind
It is no accident that early modern philosophy developed in tandem with the Scientific Revolution, spearheaded by Kepler and Galileo, among others. Together, the two movements laid the foundation for a fully modern world, guided by reason, systematic inquiry, empirical evidence, and a growing secular view of the universe that emphasizes human autonomy. As a result, taking this course is like witnessing the birth of the modern mind. For example
Descartes: Famously secluding himself to question all his beliefs and rebuild knowledge from scratch, Descartes concluded that one of the few things he could not doubt was his existence as a thinking being.
Spinoza: Rejecting the notion of a personal God, Spinoza concluded that God and Nature are one, governed by the same unchanging laws-a mechanistic view that promoted a scientific outlook.
Leibniz: Believing in a harmonious universe, Leibniz proposed that reality consists of simple substances, or monads, each reflecting the cosmos-an outlook that emphasized the search for underlying principles.
Descartes also made fundamental contributions to mathematics with his development of analytic geometry, while Leibniz, alongside Isaac Newton, co-developed calculus. Both branches of mathematics are of supreme utility in the physical sciences, and both are products of the rationalist outlook.
A Comprehensive Understanding of Reality
However, the rationalists did not all share the same views. Most of them challenged Descartes's strict dualism of mind and body as distinct substances, a conclusion he reached through his exercise of radical self-doubt. And while Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz each incorporated God into their systems, the other philosophers highlighted in this course saw a more active and immediate role for God
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia: A close friend and philosophical interlocutor of Descartes, Elisabeth explored the emotional and psychological dimensions of human life, with special attention to the divine's role in human well-being.
Lady Anne Conway: An English aristocrat with a mystical bent, Conway proposed that all created beings are emanations of a single, divine substance, implying a dynamic, living universe shaped by divine will.
Nicolas Malebranche: A Catholic priest, Malebranche expanded on Cartesian dualism by advocating occasionalism, the idea that God is the true mediator of all interactions between mind and body.
Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes and the Rationalists also makes connections to post-Enlightenment thinkers. For instance, German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, both active in the first half of the 20th century, were heavily influenced by Leibniz. And such existentialist theorists as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, spanning the 19th to 20th centuries, wrote in critical dialogue with rationalist philosophers like Descartes.
Professor Reid notes that the goal of philosophy is "to clarify, understand, and explain the whole of what can be said to be. Unlike the special or specialized sciences, philosophy is concerned with how all things might be said to hang together." This comprehensive understanding of reality has been the project of philosophers throughout history; however, it was the rationalists, inspired by the successes of the Scientific Revolution and sobered by the religious wars sparked by the Protestant Reformation, who first attempted a unified, systematic framework, grounded in reason, that aimed to explain the interconnectedness of all aspects of existence-physical, mental, and divine.
We have been building on their insights ever since.
What Will You Learn?
Learn the arguments for and against free will
Evaluate rationalist arguments for the existence of God
Probe the distinction between mind and body
Discover the ideas that define modernity versus the Middle Ages
Find out how Rationalism helped spark the Scientific Revolution
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