The topic for the second week was Descartes, and I am happy to report that my pricey prep school education did not go to waste in this area. I am pretty sure we covered everything from this lecture in my senior year Modern European History class (AP, natch! I got a 4.) Sadly this means that I probably did not actually need to stay up until all hours doing the suggested reading the night before the class. 75 pages is a lot of Descartes to process in the wee hours, only to find that I already had the gist of it all somewhere in the recesses of my brain.
The reading of Descartes meditations was accompanied by a Bertrand Russell crash course on European history from the Renaissance to the Reformation and on to Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Once again, thank you Rivers and Mr. Burzillo for teaching me everything about all of that ten years ago! Still it was nice to have a bit of a refresher.
The scary thing is that as obnoxious as some of my high school classmates could be back in the day, they had nothing on some of the folks in my MEP class. Sheesh, people, let's not have theological discussions in PHILOSOPHY class. Good for the Prof for asserting that the "point" of Christianity is to get to heaven. However, I really didn't need to hear angry counter-arguments from people who then added that they were agnostic or atheist. Seriously? That being said, Descartes's "proof" of G-d is an interesting theory, but I'm not quite buying his argument, which is along the lines of "nothing comes from nothing" (reminding me of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones song "Royal Oil"). That is, an imperfect finite being cannot give rise to the idea of an infinite, perfect being; therefore, the idea of G-d is innate, and that idea must have been created by G-d.
On the other hand, we probably have Descartes to thank for The Matrix, since the whole "cogito ergo sum" business comes from him trying to prove that people are not just beings existing in a jar somewhere. A person knows he truly exists when he is thinking because he is thinking; thinking and existing cannot be exclusive of each other.
There was also a fun bit of etymology regarding Descartes's name that I rather enjoyed. He was left for dead by his parents and then rescued by a nursemaid. He also developed his own brand of philosophy from scratch. Both of these facts make it quite fitting that the name Rene comes from the latin renatus (reborn), since Descartes himself was reborn and the discipline of philosophy was reborn by him.
Next up: Spinoza
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