This Is Modern Philosophy

KURT SMITH is a Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has participated in three competitive National Endowment for the Humanities summer programs focused on Early Modern Philosophy and has been a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University. Professor Smith is the author of several monographs, book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries.

• Acknowledgements viiIntroduction 1I.1 Knowledge as Scientia 2I.2 Ideas, Propositions, and Beliefs 5I.3 The idea of a Modern Philosophy Course 11I.4 Rationalism and Empiricism 12I.5 Some Other “isms” of the Period 14I.6 The Problem of the External World 161 René Descartes 211.1 Descartes’s First Principle 211.2 Preliminaries on Ideas and the Ontology 391.3 Clarity and Distinctness: A Model Based on Simple Natures 511.4 The Idea of the Infinite Being: A Proof for God’s existence 571.5 Why God, Creator of Descartes’s Mind, Cannot be Understood as Being a Deceiver 641.6 The Problem of the External World Continued: The Case for a Material World 68Reference 742 Thomas Hobbes 752.1 Hobbes’s Materialism 752.2 Hobbes’s View of Mind 772.3 Concept-Pairs 832.4 A Body Cannot be the Origin of Its Own Motion 882.5 A Proof for the Existence of an External World 90Reference 913 George Berkeley 923.1 Berkeley’s Rejection of a Material World 923.2 Abstraction versus Exclusion 943.3 Objects are Collections of Ideas 1013.4 The Problem of the External World Answered: The Omni-perceiver 1343.5 Possible Common Ground 1434 David Hume 1474.1 Hume on Impressions and Ideas 1484.2 The Idea of Cause and Effect 1524.3 Object and Existence 1564.4 Unity and Identity 1594.5 Constancy, Coherence, Continued Existence, and Distinct Existence 1615 Immanuel Kant 1675.1 Kant’s Critical Period 1675.2 Knowledge: Preliminaries 1695.3 Transcendental Philosophy 1715.4 Two Distinctions and the Category of Synthetic a priori Propositions 1755.5 The External World 192References 2026 Lady Mary Shepherd 2036.1 Cause and Effect, and a Proof of the External World 2036.2 Hume and The Problem of the External World 2056.3 Consciousness and Sensation 2066.4 A Commonsense Reading 227References 230Epilogue 232Index 239