2.

) Explain how Descartes tried to prove the existence of God and why was the argument unconvincing
for most Philosophers?

Descartes’ proof of the existence of God occurs in the Third Meditation. He uses methods of Doubt and
Analysis he has systematically examined all his beliefs and set aside those which he could call into doubt
until he reached one belief which he could not doubt. He begins by doubting the existence of God and claims
that he has the most unusual idea of God; like a fantasy or a figment of his imagination. This idea, he says,
cannot be without a cause of its objective reality i.e. its existence in his mind. Descartes uses ontological
arguments to conclude that God exists. Ontological arguments are arguments from nothing but analytic and
necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists.

Descartes builds his entire argument upon his proof in the previous meditation that in order for him to think,
he himself must exist. From this single observation, Descartes notices that the idea of his existence is very
clear and distinct in his mind; based upon this clarity and the fact that he has just determined his own
existence, he deduces a rule—that the things that he sees as very clear and very distinct are all true. Descartes
then examines his idea of God as an absolute necessary being who’s non- existence was a contradiction in
terms. He tries to figure out how the idea of a God came in his mind. He rules out himself and anyone like
himself which leads him to believe that he is not alone. Descartes holds that only an all perfect, formally
existing god outside his mind , could be an adequate cause of the idea of an ‘all perfect’ in his mind because
nothing so perfect could come from anything but a really existing ‘all perfect’. Descartes completely
dismisses the possibility of socialization as a source of this idea. He claims the idea of God to be a special
privileged idea, a necessary being, one that cannot not be. Descartes, as a mathematician, often compares the
ontological argument to a geometric demonstration, and God's existence is purported to be as obvious and
self-evident as the most basic mathematical truth.

Descartes’ arguments and proof of the existence of God were unpersuasive for most philosophers since in his
ontological arguments; he completely dismisses the possibility that socialization and religious education
could have played a role in the idea of God in his mind. He is really assuming the existence of God as a
necessary being instead of proving that, in fact, God exists. His proof of God quest ends up being a part of
the Cartesian anxieties as it is obsessed with a model of rationality marked by a quest for certainty by
negating the power of intellect. Philosophers preferred to use ordinary rationality to solve problems and
today the existence of God is much more a discussion to be held within the subject of philosophy, not in
metaphysics.
3.) Explain what Kant meant by his “Copernican Revolution” and why a metaphysics of morals
changed previous renditions of metaphysics like Descartes or Locke’s?

Kant's “Copernican revolution” in philosophy refers to his hypothesis or assumption that each idea we have
has its cognitive dimensions from sense data (experience) and mental forms (structures of the mind itself).
This is like the hypothesis of the astronomer Copernicus, according to who, the way celestial phenomena
appear to us on earth, is affected by both the motions of celestial bodies and the motion of the earth, which is
not a stationary body around which everything else revolves. Both the hypothesis requires contributions from
the observer to be factored into explanations of phenomena, although neither reduces phenomena to the
contributions of observers alone. According to his priori theory, ‘a priori’ or intuition is built into our
cognitive powers of sense, understanding and reason, and space and time are universally present as structures
or modifiers of sensed data. He attempts to discover, through analysis of judgment, the categories that are
inherent in sense and understanding data, and what the mind uses or imposes as modifiers or conditioners of
that data. According to him, no empirical data without the minds priori structures exists as an object of
knowledge.

Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals is an attempt to identify and explain a priori forms of ‘reason’. According to
him, God, soul, freedom and immortality are the a priori forms of reason. These a priori forms of reason have
no material or sense data reference and can’t be pictured or measured like substance and cause. They are
empty of sense data content and are therefore not cognitive ideas, they correspond to what we can hope for
or believe in rather than what we can know. Kant calls them ideas of reason that are useful for ethical
behavior; they form what he calls metaphysics of morals”. These ideas are important in human life because
there is no sense data that they modify; they transcend sense data and there function in our lives is to help us
orient or direct ourselves to achieve our moral goals of life. Living by god’s will and acting to achieve
immortality of soul regulate our moral choices.

God, souls and immortality are ideas associated with the religious dimension of our moral life while freedom
is associated with the foundation of our moral life. Kant believes that religious beliefs help and motivate us
to actualize our moral development, but are not necessary for morality, only freedom is. He claims only
freedom grounds the responsible self. If one does not believe in freedom, one undercuts all morality because
no moral act can exist unless freely chosen. Being religious is an option that some people may choose if it
were good for their moral or ethical life, but it is not necessary. This is what Kant means by metaphysics of
moral which is in itself grounded in freedom.

Kant’s metaphysics of moral changed previous renditions of metaphysics like Descartes and Locke’s, as up
until him, philosophers have claimed that soul, god, immortality and freedom could be objects of knowledge
and not objects of hope and faith. He used science and sense data in his analysis of metaphysical ideas and
opened the possibility of philosophical reflection of metaphysics associated with our desires to be more
complete.
5.) Why did Hegel hold that a metaphysical appreciation of ‘spirit’ and spirituality was more
important than Newtonian Mechanics for science? Why was it an overcoming of alienation, and why
was it considered as a carrier of a romantic religious movement?

Hegel’s favored a more spiritual form of philosophy and claimed that other philosophers like Descartes,
Locke, Hume, and Kant capitulated too much to science and tried to make philosophy in general and
metaphysics in particular like science. Hegel’s philosophy can be seen as a reaction to Descartes, and he
claims that the purpose of philosophy is to overcome oppositions and divisions found in all human thought.
He calls for reconciliation between ‘the machine’, a metaphor for Newtonian mechanics during
Enlightenment (like Descartes), and ‘nature’, a metaphor for the ‘‘spirit’’ or ‘‘geist’’ advocated by the
Romantics (like Hegel). The only way to reconcile the machine and the ‘geist’ is to find a higher unifying
form of an infinite ‘geist’. According to him, both nature and machine are a part of a higher ‘geist’ and both
human ‘geist’ and ‘geist’ in nature are finite. Infinite ‘geist’ unites both nature and human nature in an
infinite ‘geist’. Hegel did not want to use science as a Newtonian mechanistic way of understanding nature
and humans since these were not machines. He wanted to retrieve the historical idea that the ‘spirit’, mind or
‘geist’, was alive in the physical natural world and in human beings. He saw this as the way to raise the level
of philosophical discussion from its immersion in mechanism.

In Hegel’s metaphysics of ‘‘geist’’ lies his theory of alienation of the ‘‘geist’’. This alienation can take two
forms: one, a human geist denies itself or another human geist, and two; the human geist denies the geist in
nature. According to Hegel, alienation always involves “false consciousness”, or a serious misunderstanding
of who we are as human beings. He treats alienation as a universal, ontological, characteristic of the self-
conscious spirit. To overcome alienation, the spirit has to complete its development and come to be at home
in the world. Reality, according to him, is marked by the opposition between infinite and finite geist and the
central quest for his philosophy and that of Romanticism, is to unite the two, to show the infinite in the finite.
A finite human could experience the infinite through the highest form of metaphysical experience which was
contained in the religious experience of an infinite spirit. This metaphysical appreciation of spirit and
religion was important in overcoming self- alienation of the geist and is generally associated with Romantic
Idealism of the Absolute Geist. This thought process was the carrier of a romantic religious movement since
religion was thought to be the vehicle of self realization of the geist.
6.) William James thought “common sense” had a vital role to play in philosophy because it could be a
substitute for Kant, Hume, and Descartes. Why did he think this way? What details about “common
sense” gave him such confidence?

William James authored the book “Pragmatism”, a series of lectures on the popular philosophical movement
called Pragmatism that stated his own version of its philosophy. Lecture V in the series deals with
Pragmatism and Common Sense. James reinterprets common sense by expanding the notion of practical
good judgment and uncovering its role as the first successful, consolidated, experiential check on interpretive
schemes. He also reconstructs the evolution of common sense as “a stage of equilibrium in the human mind’s
development” that gives us the most fundamental ways of thinking about things which are actually the
discoveries of our ancestors and have been preserved in experience throughout time.

The ordinary meaning of common sense would be good judgment, but in philosophy it means a man’s use of
certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. These are the categories that James claims are the oldest
in the philosophical vocabulary and that they have lasted because they could withstand the critique of
centuries. Unlike Hume, Kant, and Descartes, James found that the old common- sense way of understanding
and rationalizing things was by a set of concepts or categories which were: Thing; The same or different;
Kinds; Minds; Bodies; One Time; One Space; Subjects and attributes; Causal influences; The fancied; and,
The real. These were the same ideas that Hume, Kant and Descartes had a problem with. These metaphysical
ideas, he claimed, were ordinary and evident because they are universally found in every human language.

With the ideas of common sense, James advanced an idea of philosophy as so perennial and natural that it
could never be surpassed or replaced; it is the universal kid of philosophical thought that everyone uses no
matter how much or how little education in philosophy they have. But he also points out that in spite of the
above stated ideas, relating to common sense, being so venerable and universal, they may all just be a
collection of successful hypotheses by which our ancestors adapted to their environment. It just makes
practical good sense to accept them for that reason alone, not because of some elaborate theory of the human
mind, as suggested by Kant, or some psychologically developed theory of belief based on similar sense
impressions, like suggested by Hume.

END