Part I: Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1697)

The man

  • timid
  • desired order and stability; discomfort with chaos
  • walked a lot, always with a pen
  • concrete thinking
  • spiritual, but not religious

The Ideas

  • empirical materialist
  • absolute power of monarch
    • government enforces social tendencies
  • all knowledge derived from sense input – imagination as decaying sense
  • determinist
  • every idea is expressed through action
  • man is individualistic by nature, life was ...

nasty, brutish and short

  • government emerges from mutual implicit agreement to common submission
  • absolute power because shared power leads to conflict, war, and chaos

democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators

  • control of religion, speech, press, books, etc. is necessary for order

the absolutist polity is a child of war, and democracy is a luxury of peace

every art should accept the moral obligation to be intelligible or silent

Part II: John Harrington's Utopio

  • his book Oceana describes a utopian democracy as he wished Cromwell to bring to England
  • political power follows economic distribution which boils down to land in Harrington's view
    • Harrington ignores other forms of wealth
  • limits on land per person are necessary to maintain healhty distribution of power
  • citizenship active in government, all serving terms
  • universal education
  • freedom of religion

Part III: The Deists

Who

  • Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, William Whiston

Ideas

  • stood for "universal" beliefs in God and immortality
  • organized religion is a human creation used for gain
  • faith without reason is morally wrong
  • reason as a fundamental virtue which should be used to make decisions
  • determinism

Part IV: Defenders of the Faith

Who

  • Charles Leslie, Sam Clarke, Bentley
  • Cambridge Platonists
    • Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Joseph Glanville

The Defence

  • fought reason with reason; which is indicative of the times
  • biblical evidence like eye witnesses considered too crazy to invent
  • proofs of God
  • proofs of Christians morality
  • folly of atheism
  • sensory knowledge's inability to satisfy emotional demands; loneliness of the soul
  • challenge to explain awareness; why should materialist body generate consciousness?
  • accusation that science built on false premise of cause

how should a thought be united to ... a lump of clay?

to hang weights on the wings of the wind seems far more intelligible

  • fallibility of sense and reason

the larger souls, that have traveled the divers climates of opinion are more cautious in their resolves, and more sparing to determine

Part V: John Locke (1632 - 1704)

Person

  • sober, industrious, patient – Puritan character with underlying warmth; sometimes hidden
  • cautious
  • over all a lot like John Rockefeller
  • never married; accused love of robbing him of reason

Ideas

  • two treatises on Government which are the cornerstone of modern democratic theory
  • Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a primary text of modern psychology
  • developed theory of representative government
  • preached political liberty
  • established natural equality of man; equal rights under God
  • community is the rightful source of power
  • government primary purpose is preservation of property which is a sacred right
  • power of the executive branch needs some balancing power
  • freedome of religion; separation of church and state
  • all knowledge derived from experience, including conscence, belief in God, and ideas
  • primary (solid, count, shape, movement) and secondary (color, sound, odor) qualities
  • we know qualities; but not the actual underlying truth of matter
  • all reality is perception
  • his ideas leave the door open to materialism

Part VI: Shaftesbury (1671 - 1713)

  • added social instinct as a origin of society, as opposed to the "contract" of Hobbes
  • the larger the group inspiring community feelings in a person, the better the person
  • beauty is what we percieve as good
  • truth is a kind of beauty; a harmony of parts

Part VII: George Berkley (1685 - 1753)

  • aimed to oppose materialism because he saw it as source of atheism
  • nothing exists except by being percieved; mind is the ultimate reality; matter is not real
  • space itself is a mental construct based on experience; a blind man given sight has no depth perception)
  • to be is to be percieved