> On Nov 24, 2015, at 11:28 AM, John Collier <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don’t think that all rationalists were foundationalists. Descartes perhaps, > but I don’t think Leibniz or Spinoza were. Empiricists up to Reid were > foundationalists, and Mill was not. I think it is an independent issue. <> I think Spinoza, going by memory, is unique in that he’s a foundationalist yet doesn’t think we have to know that we know. That is the more phenomenological approach of Descartes tied to awareness isn’t in Spinoza. So for Spinoza justification just isn’t as significant as it is for Descartes. This leads to certain oddities like splitting belief from knowledge.
This is worth bringing up relative to Peirce as there are a few echoes. So Spinoza says, …only by works can we judge anyone to be a believer or an unbeliever. If his works are good, he is a believer, however much he may differ in religious dogma from other believers; whereas if his works are evil, he is an unbeliever, however much he may agree with them verbally. (Theological-Political Treatise 165) Peirce makes a similar move taking belief to be a matter of habits of behavior rather than an awareness of some mental state open to oneself. With Leibniz my memory is more fuzzy (odd as I read far more Leibniz than Spinoza when younger). Leibniz and Spinoza are much more similar than many suppose. Leibniz has that issue of clarity and distinctness. So for clear knowledge one need only provide signs that differentiate a thing from an other thing and is able to give a definition. Complex items can only be known by knowing fully the parts and providing these signs for each part and how they relate to the whole. So direct perception is foundationalist and we have to build up from this. He seems a fairly strong Platonist epistemologically. The place I don’t remember with Leibniz is whether he thinks to count as knowledge all things must be tied back to these innate foundationalist ideas. Certainly most of what he talks about is foundationalist but I just can’t recall if he (similar to platonists) rejects sense knowledge inferences. He critiques them for sure. I did some checking and I couldn’t find that. When checking I did find a lot of arguments that to be a Rationalist is to hold that there are basic beliefs known by rationalist intuition and that by that criteria Spinoza and Leibniz are Rationalists. However I took Rationalism (perhaps incorrectly) to be a somewhat stronger hypothesis not that there are these basic foundational beliefs but all knowledge rests on them. Of course perhaps foundationalism is an accidental feature and not what we’re after when we discuss Rationalism. (Which always seems oriented more around a certain argumentative style) > Since there is a clear distinguishing feature, belief in the synthetic > apriori in today’s terms, I prefer to use that to distinguish rationalists, > not some rather vague ideal that probably nobody held. I am pretty sure that > it distinguishes consistently those who are called rationalists, though there > are some who would call, e.g., Russell, a rationalist, and Peirce, because of > the role of logic in their views, but this seems wrong to me. Peirce was a > fallibilist sort of positivist, and Russell was an empirically oriented > Platonist. The line between movements blurs. So Leibniz is basically a platonist even if he differs from the classic early modernist platonists in some ways. Empiricism pushed too far is an idealism and so there’s often a fuzzy line between empirical idealist and platonist, just as there is a bit of a fuzzy line between certain idealisms arising from Spinoza and Hegel and platonism. But I tend to agree with you overall.
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