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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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He further to response to Princess Elisabeth question by introducing to her what is called (Cartesian Dualism) he uses these to explain to her that the mind, soul and the body are not the same and can never be same, which came to conclude that your mind cannot be your body and your body cannot be your mind. He also explains

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Locke’s thoughts on

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The body can exist independently from the soul as a material, extended thing but it is not a thinking thing. The body can only cause sensory perceptions by acting on the soul but otherwise exists as a simple non-thinking thing, fully separate from the soul. Descartes says to Elisabeth, “to conceive of the union between two things is to conceive of them as one single thing,” (Letter 4), suggesting that the body and soul are simultaneously one union of things, enabling the soul and body to affect each other, and fully distinct material and immaterial

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Both material and mental substances have their individual attributes and modes. In his Third Meditation,

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Conclusion: The mind is substantively different from the body and indeed matter in general. Because in this conception the mind is substantively distinct from the body it becomes plausible for us to doubt the intuitive connection between mind and body. Indeed there are many aspects of the external world that do not appear to have minds and yet appear none the less real in spite of this for example mountains, sticks or lamps, given this we can begin to rationalize that perhaps minds can exist without bodies, and we only lack the capacity to perceive them.

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“Locke, on the other hand, thinks that god has two different things to do. First, fix all the physics and laws of physics. But second, decide how to ‘annex’ mental events to physical events, fixing up psycho-physical relations.” Like Leibniz, Locke believed that god would have had to first create the physical world, but he added another step to the creation of the universe. Locke believed that god would then have to create the connection between the mental and physical.

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According to this quote, Locke explains that people are born with empty minds, but individual learning and experiences will help to shape life. Experience comes from two different sources: outer experience and inner experience. Outer experience comes from the senses and provide sensory details like color, shapes, heat, and sweetness. Since these qualities exist in material objects, every human perception is the same and produce the same impact in each human. Inner experience comes through self reflexion and provides ideas such as beliefs, ideas, and thoughts.

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John Locke presents a view that

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To begin with, Dualism is the philosophical doctrine, first introduced by Rene Descartes, that the Mind and Body are two distinct separate entities. Rene Descartes believed that the Mind and Body were separate entities that were not only independent from one another, but that both were composed of dissimilar elements. Descartes explains that the body, and all its physiological attributes, are composed of “Physical” matter, and as such, dwells in the material realm and abides the laws of Physics or the laws of nature. Conversely, the Mind and all its attributes, thoughts, emotions and qualia, are composed of “Spiritual” matter, and as such, dwells in the immaterial realm and does not abide to the laws of physics or nature.

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Additionally, the writings he had written had challenged philosophies of thinkers of the time. Furthermore, Locke was the first person to identify himself through his consciousness and then began to believe there were endless possibilities of the human mind. In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” he advanced a theory of the self as a blank page, with knowledge and identity arising only from accumulative experience. Written in four separate books, each pertaining to a section of his explanation, its purpose was to, “to enquire into the original, certainty and extant of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion and assent.” Nevertheless, John Locke influenced the world more than just the philosophy of human understanding, he also greatly influenced the way we think of government and religious toleration.

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He argues that the body and soul are two elements that have the same underlying substance. He maintains that a person’s soul is the same as his nature of body; however, he argues that the mind differed from other parts of the body as it lacked a physical feature. In this case, he maintains that the intellect lacks a physical form, and this allows it to receive every form. It allows a person to think about anything, including the material object. In this case, he argues that if the intellect were in a material form, it could be sensitive to only some physical objects.

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I will explore this question by looking at how this question has developed into two key schools of thought: Dualism and Monism. Dualism states that the mind is not physical and exists separately while Monism states that the mind and body are not separate. There are arguments for both theories and these dichotomous ideas have brought to light the mind-body problem, which I will analyse below. There are sub-forms of both schools of thought and one of the key sub-schools of thought under Dualism which I will discuss is Interactionism; that the mind and body are separate but both influence each other The Mind-Body Debate Rene Decartes believed that the mind

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Introductory Paragraph (description of theory) John Locke (29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) is a English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers and known as the "Father of Classical Liberalism”. Locke got a scholarship to Oxford University where he spent 30 years at Oxford, studying, tutoring, and writing. He wrote influential political science and philosophy. Locke 's famous theory had to do with the Social Contract theory. The Social Contract covers the origin of government and how much authority a state should have over an individual.

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But may believe even Descartes isn’t exactly clear on the inner working of the relationship (Robinson, Howard). Spinoza’s substance monism cleverly dissolves this issue by labeling mind (thought) and body (extension) as attributes to a common and singular substance. Other substance pluralist philosophies are also denied when we truly capture the infinite extent of

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Henceforth, one can use Vasubandhu’s ideas as means of seeing the possibility of objects existing in the mind or use Locke’s empiricism to deconstruct the properties of objects to gain knowledge about the process of cognition. In Locke’s view, the properties of objects interact with the mind by producing ideas into it. Additionally, consciousness makes use of this information by synthesizing all the corresponding ideas to an object and creates an informed decision of recognition. The secondary qualities help make sense of the primary qualities in regard to its color and temperature, which makes sense because without these secondary qualities, the characteristics one sees

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