Quiz 2 Flashcards
What is substance?
That which is in and conceived through itself
What is attribute?
That which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of a substance. Substances don’t have essence, it’s what the intellect perceives as being the essence
What is the difference between Descartes “essence” and Spinoza’s “attribute”
Descartes: any substance has essence
Spinoza: the intellect perceives a given substance as having this or that essence (AKA attribute)
What does “parallelism” mean? (In Spinoza’s account of relation between body and mind)
There is a strict harmony between mind (ideas and thoughts) and body (extension). What occurs in the realm of mind is paralleled by what occurs in the realm of the body (and vice versa)
What is the second definition for “neutral monism”? (Slide 13 notes)
There is one kind of substance (which is neither fundamentally mind nor fundamentally body) but we can conceive them in terms of mind or in terms of body
What is the first definition of “neutral monism”?
That there is only one kind of substance, not two
What is the consequence of Spinoza’s “non interactionism”? (Regarding explaining mental and physical events)
Mental events should be explained by appealing to mental causes, without having to appeal to intervening bodily causes (AKA we can do two different sciences for one substance)
What is abstraction? What is an example?
The process of conceiving a property independent of other properties that together constitute an object.
Ex: when we look at an apple and conceive its property of redness as if it were an independent thing
What is generalization? What is an example?
The process of, in a single idea, combining a number of abstractions according to a common feature.
Ex: we can abstract redness from all red things we see, then generalize these abstractions by combining them together as the idea of redness in general
When can we rightly form abstract ideas, and when can we not? (According to Berkley)
When we can: when the idea corresponds to something that could exist
When we can’t: the idea corresponds to something that couldn’t exist
What are primary qualities?
Exist in the nature of external things, independent of the mind (motion, extension etc.)
What are secondary qualities?
Exists in the nature of the mind alone, though caused by external things (colours, sounds etc.)
What are the sources of the objects of human knowledge?
The senses and introspection
What is a “thing” according to Berkley?
A certain combination of ideas which we can find accompanying one another
(Berkley) there must be minds because:
There must be something which perceives ideas
