> On Nov 22, 2015, at 7:25 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > I'm sure we all learned in one place or another that Locke, Berkeley, and Hume > belonged to a group called “The Empiricists” while Descartes, Spinoza, and > Leibniz > belonged to a group called “The Rationalists”, where “empiricism” and > “rationalism” > were described or exemplified as positions or tendencies the former and the > latter, > respectively, bore in common. That's all very pat, and pat enough to content > the > mind for a time, but if one gets the idea that thinkers split in their > practices > as cleanly and deeply as gradgrinds teach undergrads to categorize their > thought > then that would be a mistake.
This seems right. When discussing a movement we usually focus on some key aspects of the movement even though it’s rare that the actual exemplars within the movement held to all these positions. It’s even more pronounced when they movements become objects for later philosophers to differentiate themselves from. Even philosophers rarely believe quite what their name represents. Descartes is probably among the most obvious of this. But it’s frequently true of any great philosopher who, later generations come to think, made a grave error. Even when philosophers perhaps are better served by their representations there are often different ways of reading their texts. Hegel being a great example of this. That said, I think there are useful things to be learned from a simple presentation of Rationalism against Empiricism and both against more nuanced later positions. And for all of so many in the 20th century seeing Descartes as ushering in centuries of philosophical error, his never quite became the pejorative strawman that the logical positivists found themselves becoming by the late 20th century.
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