Notes: Spinoza, Locke and Hume

11th Grade Philosophy Class 

Notes:

Spinoza:

• A philosopher must help people to see life in a new perspective. One of the pillars of Spinoza's philosophy was indeed to see things from the perspective of eternity. page 245
• The teachings of Jesus therefore represented a liberation from the orthodoxy of Judaism. page 245
• Jesus preached a 'religion of reason' which valued love higher than all humanity. page 245 
• I don't mean only the infinity of space. I mean the eternity of time as well. page 246
• He identified nature with God. He said God is all, and all is in God. page 246
• Spinoza wanted his ethics to show human life is subject to the universal laws of nature. page 246-247
• He believed that there is only one substance. Everything that exists can be reduced to. page 247
• "But when Spinoza uses the word 'nature', he doesn't only mean extended nature. By substance, God, or nature, he means everything that exists, including all things spiritual." page 247 
• Thus Spinoza does not have the dualistic view of reality that Descartes had. We say he was a monist. page 247

Locke:

• "And a rationalist believes in reason as the primary source of knowledge, and he may also believe that man has certain innate ideas that exist in the mind prior to all experience. page 257 
• Rationalist thinking of this kind was typical for philosophy of the seventeenth century. page 258
• "There is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses." page 258
• "We have no innate ideas or conceptions about the world we are brought into before we have seen it. page 258 
• We see the world around us, we smell, taste, feel, and hear. And nobody does this more intensely than infants. page 259
• So he distinguished between 'sensation' and 'reflection'. page 259
• "Locke emphasized that the only things we can perceive are simple sensations. page 260 
• He believed that the idea of God was born of human reason. That was a rationalistic feature. page 262 

Hume: 

• David Hume lived from 1711-1776. He stands as the most important of the empiricists. 
• His main work. A Treatise if Human Nature, was published when Hume was twenty-eight years old.
• Hume proposed the return to our spontaneous experience of the world.
• In the time of Hume there was a widespread beliefs in angels. 
• According to Hume, an 'angel' is a complex idea. It consists of two different experiences which are not in fact related. 
• Man have two different perceptions, namely impressions and ideas. impressions: the immediate sensation of external reality. Ideas recollection of such impressions. page 265
• A person who has never seen gold will never be able to visualize streets of gold. 
• Hume's point is that we sometimes form complex ideas for which there is no corresponding object in the physical world. page 266
• Comparing Hume to Buddha page 269
• agnostic: is someone who holds that the existence of God or god can neither be proved nor disproved. page 270
• He only accepted what he had perceived through senses. 

8th Grade: William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare: 

While Shakespeare caused much controversy, he also earned lavish praise and has profoundly impacted the world over in areas of literature, culture, art, theatre, and film and is considered one of the best English language writers ever. From the Preface of the First Folio (1623) "To the memory of my beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us"--Ben Jonson;

"Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give."

Click on the link to watch a short video about William Shakespeare.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW86UuKqrPQ

Influence: 

Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential ofcharacterisation, plot, language, and genre.Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."^[146]

In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,^[151] and his use of language helped shape modern English.^[152] Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.^[153] Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.^[154]