PHIL 216 - Realism, Idealism, and Skepticism

FC ARHU

4 credits
The scientific revolution of the early modern period went hand-in-hand with radical changes in how scientists and philosophers thought about the nature of reality. This course focuses on Descartes’s attempt to discover foundations for a novel metaphysical theory informed by developments in science, and how subsequent philosophers responded to Descartes’s theory. At the heart of Descartes’s metaphysics is a powerful argument for the claim that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of things in the world. Armed with this distinction, Descartes goes on to argue that our modern sciences compel us to revise our everyday thinking about bodies. The bodies around us appear to have various qualities like color, flavor, and heat. However, our best scientific theories suggest that these qualities as we experience them are actually sensations in our minds-they are not “out there” independent of us. The history of philosophy in the centuries to follow is dominated by attempts to raise doubts about Descartes’s dualism of mind and body. Locke agrees with Descartes’s realism about bodies-there is a mind-independent world of bodies. However, Locke is agnostic about dualism: he cannot rule out the possibility that his mind is also a body. Meanwhile, Hume argues that we have no reason to believe in the existence of bodies understood as entities “out there” independent of us. He is a skeptic about the external world. Berkeley and Kant go even further and defend versions of idealism, the view that the world we experience does not exist independent of our minds.

Prerequisites: one course in PHIL.