SYSTEM THEORY PRESENTATION REPORT

Figures of the Continental Rationalism & the Renaissance

British Empiricist and Relations with Psychological Knowledge

Puan Shafikka Izzaty

Encik Asmuni Ab Ghani

18th October 2019

GROUP 6

Wan Nurina Binti Wan Hafizul (A176851)

Khishantini A/P Keasavan (A173320)
Marsya Humaira Binti Marhazman (A177276)
Nurin Jazlina Binti Joehan (A176618)
Nurainawatif Binti Jamal (A175768)

Psychology System & Theory

SKPX1013

The National University of Malaysia

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TABLE OF CONTENT

Content Page

1.0 Introduction 2

2.0 Rene Descartes

2.1 Method of Doubt
3
2.2 Cogito Ergo Sum
2.3 Mind-Body Dualism

3.0 Baruch Spinoza

3.1 God or Nature
5
3.2 Human Freedom
3.3 Virtue and Happiness

4.0 John Locke

4.1 Tabula Rasa
6
4.2 Reflections and Sensations

5.0 David Hume

5.1 Feelings versus Reasoning
9
5.2 Skepticism

6.0 Conclusion 10

7.0 References 12

1.0 INTRODUCTION

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The expression “continental rationalism” refers to a set of views shared by several active
philosophers working in continental Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, in particular,
Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, especially as they can be regarded in contrast with
representatives of “British empiricism,” most notably, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The
rationalistic idea shared did not dominate the Enlightenment period but it laid as the critical basis
for the debates that developed over the 18th century. The Continental rationalists thought that
knowledge has its foundation in the study and orderly implementation of ideas and principles
proper to the mind itself. Whereas in Britain, British empiricist held that knowledge has its origin
in sensory experience, dominated.

Rationalism, or a belief that we come to knowledge through the use of logic, and thus
independently of sensory experience. As the Enlightenment centered on reason as the primary
source of authority and legitimacy, many philosophers of the period drew from earlier
philosophical contributions, most notably those of René Descartes (1596-1650), a French
philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Descartes was the first of the modern rationalists. He
thought that only knowledge of eternal truths (including the truths of mathematics and the
foundations of the sciences) could be attained by reason alone, while the knowledge of physics
required the experience of the world, aided by the scientific method. He argued that reason alone
determined knowledge and that this could be done independently of the senses. For instance, his
famous dictum, cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am,” is a conclusion reached a priori (in
an example, before any kind of experience on the matter). The simple meaning is that doubting
one’s existence, in and of itself, proves that an “I” exists to think. Descartes laid the foundation
for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried
Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley,
and Hume.

Empiricism, emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory

perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas, and argues
that the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori (meaning based on experience). It relies
on induction or inductive reasoning (making generalizations based on individual instances) to
build a more complex body of knowledge from these direct observations. Modern science, and

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the scientific method, is considered to be methodologically empirical, relying as it does on an
inductive methodology for scientific inquiry. The first explicit formulation of Empiricism was by
the British philosopher John Locke in the late 17th Century. Locke argued in his "An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding" of 1690 that the mind is a tabula rasa (or “clean slate”) on
which experiences leave their marks, and therefore denied that humans have innate ideas or that
anything is knowable without reference to experience. However, he also held that some
knowledge (such as the knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and
reasoning alone.

On that note, the rationalists also did not fully disregard experience as is sometimes
mistakenly alleged; they were thoroughly immersed in the rapid developments of the new
science, and in some cases led those developments. They held, however, that experience alone,
while useful in practical matters, provides an inadequate foundation for genuine knowledge.
Both Spinoza and Leibniz asserted that, in principle, all knowledge, including scientific
knowledge, could be gained through the use of reason alone, though they both observed that this
was not possible in practice for human beings except in specific areas, such as mathematics.
Additionally, Leibniz admitted in his book Monadology, that “we are all mere Empirics in three-
fourths of our actions.” Also keeping in mind, that both Descartes and Leibniz contributed
greatly to science as well. Thus, this report will cover the views and ideas of some of these
important figures that influence significantly both philosophy and psychology education today.

2.0 RENE DESCARTES

Rene Descartes is a French philosopher, mathematician and scientist that was born on the 31st
March 1596 at La Haye, France. He is a continental rationalist that went against the scholastic
Aristotelian even though his early education which consisted of Cicero, classical poets, Latin and
Greek grammar followed by three years of philosophy education which was purely Aristotelian.
The reason was that he thought that the Scholastics’ method had the tendency to doubt the
reliability of human sensation as the main source of knowledge and he wanted to have a more
mechanistic model as the final causal of scientific explanation. He became well known as the

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Father of Modern Philosophy due formulation of ideas based on the mind-body dualism and the
phrase “Cogito Ergo Sum” became part of his identity during the Era of Enlightenment till today.
Descartes’ metaphysics is mainly a rationalist based on matter, God and innate ideas however he
strongly felt that physiology and physics solely based on sensory experiences is classified as
mechanistic and empiricist. In the year 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden wanted Descartes to
tutor her on passion and philosophy therefore he moved to Sweden reluctantly. As the Queen
was very busy she could only find time for her tutor as early as five in the morning. The harsh
and cold weather took a toll on Descartes which soon led a normal chill into pneumonia causing
his death at the age of 53 on 11th of February at Stockholm where he was in coma and died
without saying anything at all.

2.1 METHOD OF DOUBT

Descartes spent his years of his life travelling from the northern to southern Europe and
claimed that he read the ‘the book of world’ soon. He felt that the main aim for him was to make
mind better equipped in order to make the thinking task easier for everyone. Therefore, he came
up with a method known as ‘Methods of the Doubt’ which was purely based on mathematics and
applicable to almost most of the profound problems. Descartes officially formulated the method
through his book ‘The Discourse of the Mind (1637)” and also explained further in the following
book known as ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1701). The method explained four
important rules which was firstly is that nothing that is self-evident should be accepted as true,
secondly is that bigger problems should be divided into smaller understandable sections, thirdly
is that the simple part should be prioritised first before proceeding to the complex part and fourth
is that all the reasoning should be rechecked.

2.2 COGITO ERGO SUM

Descartes was well known for his philosophical statement known as ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’
which he came about during the climax of his philosophical life. The question that made
Descartes dive deep towards the quest, was “How can anyone including oneself know anything
exist rather than just being in a dream or just fantasy?” Therefore, Descartes slowly realised that

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human senses are deeply unreliable and the only thing he could trust was that he was actually
thinking. He was certain of his existence as it was proved by a tautological trick which is “I think,
therefore I am”. He justified the statement by saying that he cannot think that he exists unless he already
exist.

2.3 MIND-BODY DUALISM

Descartes classified mind and body as two different substances where mind is mental
substance and body is physical substance however the mind was immortal. He also classified
body which a substance that have extension as ‘Res extensa’ and mind as a substance that think
as ‘Res cogitans’ and since they are distinct the same tools cannot be used to study the both
separate realms. Descartes also concluded that mind and body influence each other. He also
stated that bodies works under the principle of a machine as each of them work based on their
own laws and the mind influences the body by acting as a ‘pulling lever’ and when the question
where the levers were placed in our body arise Descartes stated that the pineal gland plays an
important role as it is not duplicated on both sides of the brain. The pineal gland was regarded as
a mediator between the human mind and body. Furthermore, unlike like humans Descartes stated
that animals have no mind and inner consciousness. By explaining both animal and human
behaviour in terms of mechanistic and reflexes he legitimized the study of animals as a means to
understand the functioning of human bodies.

3.0 BARUCH SPINOZA

Baruch Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam as a Jew. He is one of the early thinkers of the
Enlightenment era. He is best known for his Ethics which is a monumental work that presents an
ethical version unfolding out of a monistic metaphysics in which God and Nature are identified.
According to Spinoza, humans find happiness only through a rational understanding of
deterministic system. For many, Spinoza is the harbinger of enlightened modernity who calls us
to live by the guidance of reason. For others, he is the enemy of the traditions that sustain us and
the denier of what is noble within us. Spinoza died peacefully in his rented room in The Hague in
1677.

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3.1 GOD OR NATURE
God is the basic principle that create the unity of body and mind. Spinoza concludes that
nature is God because without nature, nothing exists. He insists that nature is the creator of
everything. To Spinoza, nature is deterministic. To understand the nature and its content can only
be perceived by seeking and understanding the efficient necessity. This is because of the
necessity inherent in Nature, there is no teleology in the universe. God or Nature does not act for
any ends, and things do not exist for any set purposes. Spinoza also denies that the human being
is a union of two substances which are the human mind and the human body are two different
expressions. The mind and body are the same thing. Both mind and body cannot be separated.
Thus, Spinoza denies the existence of Descartes theory of dualism, mind-body problem.

3.2 HUMAN FREEDOM

Spinoza stated that freedom of humans is an illusion. To Spinoza, human beings are not
endowed with freedom. This is because our actions and volitions are as necessarily determined
as any other natural events. If we think we are free, we are ignorant and unaware that we are all
determined by causes. Spinoza tries to find the cause of human behavior. He finds out that it has
a few similarities with B.F Skinner view. According to B.F Skinner, organisms behavior as an
effect of contingency, antecedent-consequent was formed through enforcement. Human behavior
was not determined by God’s will, but the law of nature. All beings are naturally endowed with
passions. Passions is a desire of a human to have fun, and avoid from being in pain or sad.
Reasoning needs to empower the emotion if humans want to strive relative freedom to act.

3.3 VIRTUE AND HAPPINESS

Spinoza introduced the guidance of reason to keep the society harmony. According to
Spinoza,who all share the same nature and act on the same principles will naturally and
effortlessly form a harmonious society. Spinoza admits that emotion plays the main role in
rational activity in controlling passions. “Hence, insofar as men live according to the guidance
of reason, they must always agree among themselves” (IVp34–35). It means as long as human
beings are guided by their passions, the state is necessary to bring it about that they “live
harmoniously and be of assistance to one another”. Though nature is out of human control, their

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passions can still be guided through the reasoning. Spinoza also states that the state should
encourage the freedom of thinking among the people, to point out their ideas and views because
every individuals need to be given freedom to determine their own thinking. Intellectual ability
makes humans a unique living to be compared to the other livings.

4.0 JOHN LOCKE

John Locke was an English philosopher particularly a British empiricist who was born on August
29th, 1632 in Wrington, Somerset England and later died on October 28th, 1704 in High Laver,
Essex due to health complications. He was recognized as the founder of British empiricism as his
ideas later dominated the European Enlightenment. His philosophical thinking parallels with the
ideas of the founders of modern science, especially Robert Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, and other
members of the Royal Society. Locke was famous for his work, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1689), in which he developed his theory of ideas and his account of the origins
of human knowledge through experience.

4.1 TABULA RASA

In 1690, he popularised the concept of the ‘tabula rasa’ also known as a blank slate.
Locke argued that the mind does not have innate ideas, and so sensory knowledge is the only
knowledge one can have. Innate ideas are knowledge that does not come from experience. Locke
further claimed that if a person had innate ideas then all beings that possess a mind should be
aware of them. Yet people don't appear to understand mathematics until they are taught and some
people are never able to learn. Locke argued that if a human mind can exist without being
conscious of an idea, then it can’t be innate. Even if one could find some rational knowledge that
everyone is aware of possessing, then Locke claimed this would still not show that one has come
to know these ideas innately and not through shared experiences.

4.2 REFLECTIONS AND SENSATIONS

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 Locke also argued that we have two types of experiences: sensations and reflections. We
gain some knowledge from reflection, some from sensation, and some even come from both. In
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke described reflection as “that notice which
the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them”. Reflection allows us to be
conscious of our mental processes, and so tells us about how our minds operate. Examples of
reflection include “thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing”, and “willing”. These
encounters all invoke qualia (meaning conscious experience) that do not correspond to external
objects, and so Locke referred to reflection as an “internal sense”. Sensations arise from external
stimuli and tell us about the external world. Locke described two types of sensations, those
corresponding to primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are similar to the properties
Descartes equated with rational introspection, such as size, shape, and quantity. Secondary
qualities correspond to qualia, like color, sound, and emotion. Locke highlighted the problem of
secondary qualities with his example of the inverted spectrum. Like Descartes, Locke claimed
that it is impossible to know if different people experience the same qualia. meaning that this
assumes that different people could experience different colors despite exhibiting the same
behavior and brain activity. Locke claimed that it is impossible to know if different people
experience the same colors when they look at the same object. Locke accepted that people do not
observe the external world directly but failed to see qualia as proof that the mind is composed of
a non-physical substance, or that the external world does not exist. Instead, Locke advocated
causal realism, the view that people can at least derive the existence of external objects from the
qualia they implement. Specifically, Locke believed that an object’s primary qualities are
representative of its true nature and that they are responsible for inducing the secondary qualities
we experience in their presence. one cannot know if these objects really resemble the qualia one
implements. Similar to Thomas Hobbes, Locke did not think people were capable of
understanding how external objects give rise to qualia. He stated that,

“Experience convinces us, that we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence and an
internal infallible perception that we are. In every act of sensation, reasoning, or thinking, we
are conscious to ourselves of our own being, and in this matter, we don’t fall short of the highest
degree of certainty.”

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Locke did not accept Descartes’ dualism however he suggested it is equally possible that the
mind and body could be made of the same substance, leading to the idea that physical matter
could be capable of thought.

5.0 DAVID HUME

David Hume is a Scottish philosopher. He was born on April 26, 1711. Hume was a
British Empiricist during the age of enlightenment and also an advisor to the British ambassador
in Paris. Hume also known by the French as “Le Bon David. David Hume wrote his philosophies
in his few published books; A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), The Enquiries
Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), and
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). He died in Edinburgh on August 1776.

5.1 FEELINGS VERSUS REASON

According to Hume, we need to get right in life by using feelings and reasons rather than
rationality. He insisted that we should not train our mind to be as rational as possible to be
devoted to evidence and logical reasoning and committed to preventing our feelings from getting
in the way. He stated that reason is the slave of passions. We are more motivated by our feelings
than logic. Few of our leading convictions had driven by rational investigations of the facts.
Reason helps but the decisive factors are bound up with our emotional lives, with our passions.
To Hume, human is just another kind of animal. We find an idea a nice or threatening and on that
basis alone declare it is true or false. Reason only come later to support the original attitude. He
did not believe our feelings are acceptable and equal. He firmly believes in the education of the
passions and people have to be more benevolent, more patience, more at ease with themselves
and not to afraid of others. They need education system that addresses feelings rather than
reason.

5.2 SKEPTICISM
Hume is known as a skeptic. Skepticism is a denial of the possibility that humans can have
certain knowledge about much of what everyone takes for granted. He was committed to doubt a

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lot of common sense ideas of the day. He also doubted the “personal identity” concept and
insisted there was no such thing as “core self”. Hume wanted people to hold on most in our
commonsense beliefs because they are what keeps us make our way in the world. No one should
be rational at everything. He proposed that anything we do is ever truly rational. But the most
beliefs are justified simply because they are useful to help us to get what we want to do. In
religion, Hume did not think it was rational to believe in God. There were no compelling logical
arguments in favor of the existence of the deity. He is between agnostic and atheism. Thus,
Vindictive god, which is punishing people in an afterlife for not believing him is considered a
cruel superstition to Hume. According to Hume, we should not treat those who disagree with us
over religion as rational people who have made an error of reasoning. Therefore, those who are
trying to be rational in arguments over religion was arrogance.

Hume’s philosophy in ethics, he argued that morality is not about having moral ideas.
According to him, being able to follow complex arguments or deduced trend from data does not
make one sensitive to the suffering of others. If you want people to behave well, you need to
rethink the education and influence the development of feelings. We have to encourage
benevolent, pity and shame through the seduction of the passionate sides of our nature without
delivering logical lectures. In conclusion, David Hume rejected rationalism. Instead of being
rational, he proposed the idea of feelings and common sense and people need education system
that addresses feelings rather than reason.

6.0 CONCLUSION

Rationalism has influenced modern psychology tremendously, and early rationalists like
Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Herbart, and Hegel are just a few who have contributed their ideas to
psychology. Rationalists believed the mind was, therefore it arranged the information gathered
from the senses and detected intricate ideas and concepts that otherwise does not encompass
sensory experience. Other important concepts of this approach include self-actualization,
emotion, passion, alienation, and threshold. Several early rationalists contributed their ideas to

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modern psychology. First, Baruch Spinoza introduced the concept of pleasure and pain of the
emotion as the basis for forty-eight other emotions that are produced. Spinoza also drew a line
between emotion and passion. He stated that emotion was associated with a concrete thought,
whereas passion was not related to concrete thought. Spinoza insisted that one can improve
oneself by clarifying one's ideas through an analysis of them and by rationally controlling one's
passions comes very close to Freudian psychoanalysis. In fact, replacing the term passion with
unconscious determinants of behavior shows how similar Spinoza's position to Freud's.
Alexander Selesnick (a 1966 psychiatrist) actually refer to Spinoza as the greatest pre-Freudian
psychologist. Immanuel Kant greatly influenced modern psychology with his view of perception,
language, and other innate factors. Leibniz also introduced experiences of the unconscious mind
as being below the threshold. Lastly, Johann Herbart and Georg Hegel were rationalists who
contributed their ideas to modern psychology. Herbart influenced the development of
experimental psychology and Hegel introduced psychophysiology along with ideas on alienation.

On the flip side, British empiricists have also contributed and influence as much, on the
study of psychology up until this very day. Empiricism, the philosophy of knowledge by
observation, has been extremely important to the history of science. As those various empiricist
thinkers over the centuries like John Locke, David Hume and Berkeley have proposed that all
knowledge should be tested empirically rather than just through thought-experiment or rational
calculations. Psychology as a science, many researchers in psychology use empirical methods to
study the mind and behavior. These are methods that gather data using the senses. This involves
designing tasks for participants that will produce observable, measurable data that can be
replicated and verified. As an example, inferring what is occurring in the mind by recording
observations such as how many words are recalled or the kind of mistakes that are made under
different conditions. Another example is the measurement of personality traits using rating scales
which gives scores that, in theory, indicate the presence of or strength of particular qualities. All
in all, both ideas of rationalism from the continental rationalists and the ideas of empiricism from
the British empiricists made great impacts on modern psychology. Philosophy and psychology
come hand in hand with one another since philosophy gives psychology a general vision of being
human and has contributed to some remarkable topics in psychology.

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