The rise of modern philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 3 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 56

DESCARTES TO BERKELEY When Descartes tried to doubt everything, the one thing he did not call into question was the meaning of the words he was using in his solitary meditation Had he done so, he would have had to realize that even the words we use in soliloquy derive their meaning from the social community which is the home of our language, and that therefore it was not, in fact, possible to build up his philosophy from solitary private ideas Again, Descartes thought that it was not possible to call into question propositions that he was taught by natural light—the clear and distinct perceptions that form the basic building blocks of his system But in fact, as we shall see in detail in later chapters, too often when he tells us that something is taught by the natural light in our souls, he produces a doctrine that he had imbibed from the Jesuits at La Fle`che There is no doubt of the enormous inXuence Descartes has exercised from his own day to ours But his relation to modern philosophy is not that of father to son, nor of architect to palace, nor of planner to city Rather, in the history of philosophy his position is like that of the waist of an hourglass As the sand in the upper chamber of such a glass reaches its lower chamber only through the slender passage between the two, so too ideas that had their origin in the Middle Ages have reached the modern world through a narrow Wlter: the compressing genius of Descartes Hobbes Of those who had been invited to comment on Descartes’ Meditations in 1641, the most distinguished was Thomas Hobbes, the foremost English philosopher of the age At that time Hobbes was Wfty-three years old, having been born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada He had been educated at Oxford and had served as a tutor to the Cavendish family and as an amanuensis to Francis Bacon In 1629 he had published an English translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War During a visit to Paris in the 1630s he had met Descartes’ Franciscan friend Marin Mersenne, whom he described as ‘an outstanding exponent of all branches of philosophy’ In 1640 he had written a treatise in English, Elements of Law, Natural and Political, which contained in essence the principles of his philosophy of human nature and human society He Xed in the same year to Paris, anticipating the Civil War which was heralded by the activities of the 41