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John Locke Vs Leibniz

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The philosophical issue of the mind and body problem reduces down to mainly two opposing views debated by John Locke and Gottfried Leibniz. Locke’s view leans towards occasionalism, physical events do not strictly cause mental events. He believes God himself inserts the correlating thoughts into one’s mind. Leibniz has a more metaphysical point of view, the mind and body share a rational connection that sparks thoughts. After conducting research, I favor the view of Leibniz; the mind and body have a rational connection between physical experiences and events that lead to correlating thoughts in the brain.
John Locke is a seventeenth century philosopher with a strong religious background, he particularly worried about the modern scientific view …show more content…

All our ideas are the results of the action of bodies on our minds. The soul experiences changes on account of its being acted on by bodies outside. Locke does not think that our perception of the external world is clearer than our notion of the reality or existence of the soul, or that we are surer of the nature of bodies than that of souls. He would rather say that our idea of the soul and its action is clearer and more distinct than that we have regarding material bodies. Our knowledge of bodies outside is not certain knowledge; the secondary qualities which we perceive do not represent the reality of things. The secondary qualities are produced not by the things as such, but by the primary qualities which inhere in things and which really belong to things. The primary qualities really represent things.
Similar to the beliefs of Locke, writer John Foster strongly favors Cartesian dualism and argues that the mind is more than just the brain. There are two very different realms, one mental and the other physical. Both are fundamental and one cannot be reduced to the other - there are minds and there is a physical world. He defends the dualist ideas of the mind which attributes the immaterial contents of the mind to an immaterial self (Foster …show more content…

concepts that are exemplified in sense-experience.-we must accept something metaphysical that is perceptible only to the mind and not through the senses. In addition to material mass we must add some higher kind of principle that might be called formal” (Leibniz 7). Leibniz is here invoking the distinction between form and matter. His strong mathematical background largely influences his reasoning behind his disbelief of Cartesian dualism. Leibniz’s foundations are based upon all truths of metaphysics, such as logic, arithmetic, geometry, etc. He states that anyone who denies these truths would be implying a contradiction in their argument. (Leibniz

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