History of Philosophy (Modern and Contemporary)
Modern and contemporary questions reward chronological and doctrinal precision: which philosopher responded to whom, and what exactly was the move. Expect to reconstruct arguments rather than summarise reputations.
Early modern
- Descartes: method of doubt, cogito, clear and distinct ideas, real distinction of mind and body, ontological argument revived.
- Rationalists: Spinoza's one substance and conatus; Leibniz's monads, sufficient reason and pre-established harmony.
- Empiricists: Locke on tabula rasa, primary and secondary qualities, and memory-based personal identity; Berkeley's idealism; Hume on impressions and ideas, causation as constant conjunction, the bundle self, and the is-ought gap.
- Kant: Copernican turn, synthetic a priori, categories, phenomena and noumena, antinomies, categorical imperative, reflective judgement.
Nineteenth and twentieth centuries
- Hegel's dialectic and Geist; Marx's alienation and ideology; Kierkegaard's stages; Nietzsche's genealogy and will to power.
- Analytic turn: Frege on sense and reference; Russell on definite descriptions and logical atomism; early Wittgenstein's picture theory, later Wittgenstein's language games; logical positivism and its verificationism.
- Quine: Two Dogmas attacks the analytic-synthetic distinction and reduces epistemology to naturalised enquiry.
- Kripke: rigid designation and the necessary a posteriori. Phenomenology: Husserl's epoché, Heidegger's being-in-the-world, Sartre's bad faith.
Worked example
Hume asks what impression grounds the idea of necessary connexion. Watching one billiard ball strike another yields contiguity, succession and constant conjunction - never a perceptible power. The idea therefore arises from custom: after repeated experience the mind feels determined to expect the effect. Conclusion: causal necessity is a feature of our psychology, not of the world as perceived. Step through impression, missing impression, substitute origin, and the resulting mitigated scepticism.
Traps that cost marks
- Presenting Kant as a rationalist or an empiricist rather than as responding to both.
- Making Hume a dogmatic sceptic; he endorses mitigated scepticism and natural belief.
- Attributing the later Wittgenstein's language games to the Tractatus.
- Treating Quine as denying that anything is analytic in practice rather than attacking the distinction's explanatory work.