Philosophy tends to be regarded as a long, history of mistakes. This statements is vindicated when one reflects upon all the competing, metaphysical pictures of reality construed by some of the great philosophers. In light of these readings, the following will succinctly summarize competing, metaphysical pictures of reality originally purported by Descartes, John Lock, Leibniz, Heidegger and John Paul Sartre.
Descartes constructed a metaphysical picture of reality that made belief in God compatible with the new sciences. Descartes begins by casting doubt about whether we can know anything about the external world. In particular, if dreams and reality are merely electrochemical impulses in the brain, then there is no way to discern reality from a dream. The only thing I can know for certain is that I am a thinking being asking myself questions. This point was famously put into Latin as “cogito ergo sum,” which translates to, “I think therefore I am.”
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"Metaphysical Pictures of Reality".
Descartes then argues that our minds begins as blank slates. Our picture of reality is construed by experiences imprinted into the mind by the flow of time. Whatever exists in the mind must have originally been inputted by the external world. Desecrates argues that since we have an idea of God as a perfect being, and that our ideas of reality our imprinted by the external world, then it follows that the concept of a perfect being must have been imprinted by an actual perfect being who exists in the external world. Since God is good, he would not want deceive our senses all of the time. Therefore, the method of observation as practiced by the new sciences is dependent upon a God who wants us to know about the external world.
Descartes’ philosophy attempted to account for the existence of the soul. However, John Locke purports an objections to the soul theory of personal identity. According to the soul theory, what constitutes personal identity is not psychological continuity but that a person has a specific type of soul. However, suppose God obliterated a soul in a body and replaced with a new soul with the same psychological continuity as the former. If that is the case, the person that wakes up Wednesday is not the same person as on Tuesday; although they would have no way of knowing it. For John Locke, this was too big of a pill to swallow. Therefore, the soul theory of personal identity is implausible.
To continue upon the theme of identity, Fredrick Leibniz developed a theory of identity known as Leibniz’s law. Specifically, two things are identical if they share the same properties. Yet for Leibniz, space was a mathematical construct used to relate bodies. In the absence of bodies, space does not exist. Since no two bodies can occupy the same position in space, according to Leibniz, it is impossible for two objects to be identical, including identical twins.
For Martin Heidegger, the greatest of all metaphysical mysteries was not whether the soul or God existed, but why there is something rather than nothing. In attempting to answer this question, Heidegger defined nothingness as a kind of false vacuum that annihilated anything within its purview—including itself. As a corollary of nothingness, reality must burst into existence.
At a more practical level, John Paul Sartre was not concerned about grand metaphysical theories of existence. For Sartre, the most important question for philosophy was, “should we commit suicide?” to which Sartre replied, “no.” In particular, Sartre is noted for being associated with the existential movement. He argued that life contains no inherent meaning. Nevertheless, this does preclude the possibility that we can make our own meaning. This is what Sartre meant when he said, “existence precedes substance.”
This highlights the main points emphasized in the reading. Some of the philosophies purported are complimentary, whereas others are highly contested. Yet this should be unsurprising when trying to answer the deepest questions of existence. Perhaps this is one of the many reasons why philosophy is described by The Devil’s Dictionary as a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
