In the 1750s and 1760s seventeen vo

In the 1750s and 1760s seventeen volumes of the Encyclopédie, edited by Jean-Baptiste le Rond D’Alembert (1717–83) and Denis Diderot (1713–84), were published. D’Alembert was a gifted mathematician who aimed to bring to all the sciences the clarity of arithmetic and geometry. “The creation motive of the Christian religion gave way to faith in the creative power of scientific thought which seeks its ground of certainty only within itself.”[303] The two shared a faith in the inevitability of scientific progress and believed that the Christian religion was a great obstacle to human betterment; they held a materialist view of human nature. In terms of Herman Dooyeweerd’s nature/freedom dialectic, they emphasized the nature pole. They gathered a group of like-minded contributors including Montesquieu and Voltaire. All were anticlerical, but not all were atheists. Voltaire, for example, believed that some notion of the deity was important for the moral law to carry weight, but this was not the Creator God of theism.
David Hume Born a Scotsman, David Hume (1711–76) published A Treatise of Human Nature at the young age of twenty-seven; it received little attention initially but later achieved great fame, and Hume came to exercise greater influence than any philosopher since Descartes. The subtitle explains the aim of Hume’s Treatise: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects—that is, to do for psychology what Newton did for physics. Hume rightly recognized the fundamental importance of anthropology for philosophy and determined to march directly to this heartland of science itself. Hume was an empiricist, and in book 1 he classifies the contents of the mind into perceptions of two types: impressions and ideas. Impressions, which include sensations and emotions, are more vivid and forceful than ideas. Ideas are perceptions related to thinking and reasoning. All of our knowledge that extends beyond the immediate input of the senses depends on the concepts of cause and effect, which therefore deserve close attention. In this respect Hume comes to a radical conclusion: our belief in a necessary connection between cause and effect results not from reasoning but custom. “Accordingly we shall find upon examination, that every demonstration, which has been produced for the necessity of a
cause, is fallacious and sophistical.”[304] Hume extends the same skepticism to time and space and similarly to anthropology: “All the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.”[305] Book 2 deals with passions or emotions, a special type of impression. Hume distinguishes between original and secondary impressions: original impressions are sense impressions and physical pains and pleasures; secondary impressions are passions such as pride and humility. For Hume, the conflict between passion and reason is a myth, since all voluntary behavior is motivated by passion; reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. Book 3 deals with ethics, and Hume argues that not reason but only the passions can lead us to action; reason can neither cause nor judge our passions. Ought can never be derived from an is; the chief source of moral distinctions is the feeling of sympathy with others. Hume’s empiricism is a strong assertion of the limits of human reason, but this does not mean that he acquiesced to radical skepticism. By the end of his Treatise it is clear that our social and individual well-being depends on holding certain nonrational beliefs. In this way Hume seeks to prevent philosophy from becoming alienated from common beliefs and practices. As he notes, “Man is a reasonable being; and as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment: But so narrow are the bounds of human understanding, that little satisfaction can be hoped for in this particular, either from the extent or security of his acquisitions. . . . Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”[306] This does not, however, involve an openness to religion. In 1755 Hume published The Natural History of Religion, and his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published posthumously in 1779. Both are attacks on natural theology, and in particular radical critiques of Locke’s natural theology. For Hume, exceeding the boundaries of our secular, common life equates to a hubris that is inappropriate for our human faculties. Two major arguments are used to support his anti-theism. First, he regards it as unwise to assent to any metaphysical beliefs that cannot be rationally justified by empirical evidence or are not the result of a universal, involuntary mechanism such as those that produce natural beliefs. Second, we should avoid those metaphysical beliefs that create psychic unease and social turmoil.[307] As James R. Peters rightly notes, Hume . . . rejects religious faith, including and especially Christian faith, as both psychologically destructive and rationally insupportable. I have argued that Hume’s negative diagnosis of Christian faith is defective. Hume fails to understand the inner life of a faith that is animated by love rather than anxiety and ignorance. Furthermore, Hume’s powerful criticisms of the Lockean reconciliation of faith and reason simply do not extend far enough to challenge the radically dissimilar outlook on faith and reason characteristic of the Augustinian tradition.[308] With Hume’s skepticism we witness the cracks in the Enlightenment edifice starting to appear. He may have stopped short of radical skepticism, but his rigorous pursuit of rational criticism led precisely in this direction. Ironically, the quest for a sure foundation in human autonomy and reason seemed to lead to doubting everything.
Thomas Reid From the end of the eighteenth century on through the nineteenth, Thomas Reid (1710–96) was probably the most popular philosopher in the United States and United Kingdom, and he enjoyed considerable popularity in France. Nicholas Wolterstorff says that “I myself judge him to have been
one of the two great philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century, the other being of course Immanuel Kant.”[309] However, Reid has almost disappeared in modern philosophy courses in Western universities, although there is a renewed interest in him nowadays. A Scotsman, Reid was a contemporary of Hume and was Hume’s earliest and fiercest critic. In 1764 he published his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, the same year he was appointed professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University as Adam Smith’s successor. In 1785 he published Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, and in 1788, the same year that Kant published his Critique of Practical Reason, Reid published his Essays on the Active Powers of Man. He studied theology for three years in the course of his education and was a licensed Presbyterian preacher. Unlike Hume, who thought that philosophy’s failure to progress resulted from the failure of philosophy to use the experimental method of the new science,[310] and unlike Kant, who thought the problem was philosophy’s quest for “pure reason,” Reid argues that philosophy’s lack of progress should largely be attributed to its failure to take the principles of common sense seriously. Common sense refers to those propositions that properly functioning adult human beings implicitly believe or take for granted in their ordinary activities and practices.[311] For Reid, modern philosophy has flouted common sense because it has embraced “the Cartesian system.” The Cartesian system leads inevitably to skepticism: “From the single principle of the existence of our own thoughts, very little, if any thing, can be deduced by just reasoning, especially if we suppose that all our other faculties may be fallacious.”[312] We should therefore jettison the Cartesian system and embrace a form of foundationalism[313] that is moderate and wide. Moderate, because an idea can be worth belief without being indubitable. Wide, because many of our beliefs are warranted without being inferred from other beliefs. It is a first principle of common sense that the particular deliverances of the faculties of consciousness, perception, memory, the moral sense, and so on are immediately warranted. We should also divest ourselves of the “way of ideas”; this mechanical view does not explain how we apprehend reality, and we should rather stay with our prereflective conviction that we apprehend entities of various kinds. For Reid, we should start in the thick of human experience by attending to ordinary language use, the principles assumed in human conduct and actions, and the operations of our own minds, or what Reid calls “introspection.” “Philosophizing has to start somewhere, and Reid saw no reason that we should leave our commonsensical modes of discourse and convictions at the door when entering into the philosophical workplace.”[314] Reid grants priority to introspective consciousness—namely, perception, memory, testimony, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning. For Reid, these sources are not reducible to one another, and they are of equal authority. A moot question is why we should trust common sense. In this respect it is important to remember that Reid was a Christian philosopher who saw the world and humans as God’s good creation. He placed great emphasis on human free will, but unlike Kant, who positioned free will in the noumenal realm as opposed to the natural realm of necessity, Reid appropriately distinguished between laws of nature and the voluntary actions of humans. In opposition to Kant’s doctrine of necessity, Reid stressed contingency. God has created the world in a certain way, but he did not have to. Reid wrote and taught about a staggering range of topics. “Reid’s thought appea

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Di 1750s dan 1760s tujuh belas volume Encyclopédie, disunting oleh Jean-Baptiste le Rond Denis Diderot (1713 – 84), dan D'Alembert (1717-83) diterbitkan. D'Alembert adalah seorang matematikawan berbakat yang bertujuan untuk membawa semua ilmu kejelasan aritmatika dan geometri. "Penciptaan motif agama Kristen memberikan cara untuk iman dalam kekuatan kreatif ilmiah berpikir yang berusaha tanahnya kepastian hanya dalam dirinya sendiri." [303] dua berbagi iman di keniscayaan kemajuan ilmu pengetahuan dan percaya bahwa agama Kristen rintangan besar untuk kemajuan manusia; mereka memegang pandangan materialis sifat manusia. Dalam hal Herman Dooyeweerd alam kebebasan Hegel, mereka menekankan sifat tiang. Mereka berkumpul kelompok sepaham kontributor termasuk Montesquieu dan Voltaire. Semua antigereja, tapi tidak semua ateis. Voltaire, misalnya, percaya bahwa beberapa gagasan dewa penting bagi hukum moral untuk membawa berat, tapi ini bukanlah Allah Pencipta teisme.David Hume Born a Scotsman, David Hume (1711–76) published A Treatise of Human Nature at the young age of twenty-seven; it received little attention initially but later achieved great fame, and Hume came to exercise greater influence than any philosopher since Descartes. The subtitle explains the aim of Hume’s Treatise: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects—that is, to do for psychology what Newton did for physics. Hume rightly recognized the fundamental importance of anthropology for philosophy and determined to march directly to this heartland of science itself. Hume was an empiricist, and in book 1 he classifies the contents of the mind into perceptions of two types: impressions and ideas. Impressions, which include sensations and emotions, are more vivid and forceful than ideas. Ideas are perceptions related to thinking and reasoning. All of our knowledge that extends beyond the immediate input of the senses depends on the concepts of cause and effect, which therefore deserve close attention. In this respect Hume comes to a radical conclusion: our belief in a necessary connection between cause and effect results not from reasoning but custom. “Accordingly we shall find upon examination, that every demonstration, which has been produced for the necessity of a cause, is fallacious and sophistical.”[304] Hume extends the same skepticism to time and space and similarly to anthropology: “All the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.”[305] Book 2 deals with passions or emotions, a special type of impression. Hume distinguishes between original and secondary impressions: original impressions are sense impressions and physical pains and pleasures; secondary impressions are passions such as pride and humility. For Hume, the conflict between passion and reason is a myth, since all voluntary behavior is motivated by passion; reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. Book 3 deals with ethics, and Hume argues that not reason but only the passions can lead us to action; reason can neither cause nor judge our passions. Ought can never be derived from an is; the chief source of moral distinctions is the feeling of sympathy with others. Hume’s empiricism is a strong assertion of the limits of human reason, but this does not mean that he acquiesced to radical skepticism. By the end of his Treatise it is clear that our social and individual well-being depends on holding certain nonrational beliefs. In this way Hume seeks to prevent philosophy from becoming alienated from common beliefs and practices. As he notes, “Man is a reasonable being; and as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment: But so narrow are the bounds of human understanding, that little satisfaction can be hoped for in this particular, either from the extent or security of his acquisitions. . . . Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”[306] This does not, however, involve an openness to religion. In 1755 Hume published The Natural History of Religion, and his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published posthumously in 1779. Both are attacks on natural theology, and in particular radical critiques of Locke’s natural theology. For Hume, exceeding the boundaries of our secular, common life equates to a hubris that is inappropriate for our human faculties. Two major arguments are used to support his anti-theism. First, he regards it as unwise to assent to any metaphysical beliefs that cannot be rationally justified by empirical evidence or are not the result of a universal, involuntary mechanism such as those that produce natural beliefs. Second, we should avoid those metaphysical beliefs that create psychic unease and social turmoil.[307] As James R. Peters rightly notes, Hume . . . rejects religious faith, including and especially Christian faith, as both psychologically destructive and rationally insupportable. I have argued that Hume’s negative diagnosis of Christian faith is defective. Hume fails to understand the inner life of a faith that is animated by love rather than anxiety and ignorance. Furthermore, Hume’s powerful criticisms of the Lockean reconciliation of faith and reason simply do not extend far enough to challenge the radically dissimilar outlook on faith and reason characteristic of the Augustinian tradition.[308] With Hume’s skepticism we witness the cracks in the Enlightenment edifice starting to appear. He may have stopped short of radical skepticism, but his rigorous pursuit of rational criticism led precisely in this direction. Ironically, the quest for a sure foundation in human autonomy and reason seemed to lead to doubting everything.Thomas Reid From the end of the eighteenth century on through the nineteenth, Thomas Reid (1710–96) was probably the most popular philosopher in the United States and United Kingdom, and he enjoyed considerable popularity in France. Nicholas Wolterstorff says that “I myself judge him to have been one of the two great philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century, the other being of course Immanuel Kant.”[309] However, Reid has almost disappeared in modern philosophy courses in Western universities, although there is a renewed interest in him nowadays. A Scotsman, Reid was a contemporary of Hume and was Hume’s earliest and fiercest critic. In 1764 he published his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, the same year he was appointed professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University as Adam Smith’s successor. In 1785 he published Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, and in 1788, the same year that Kant published his Critique of Practical Reason, Reid published his Essays on the Active Powers of Man. He studied theology for three years in the course of his education and was a licensed Presbyterian preacher. Unlike Hume, who thought that philosophy’s failure to progress resulted from the failure of philosophy to use the experimental method of the new science,[310] and unlike Kant, who thought the problem was philosophy’s quest for “pure reason,” Reid argues that philosophy’s lack of progress should largely be attributed to its failure to take the principles of common sense seriously. Common sense refers to those propositions that properly functioning adult human beings implicitly believe or take for granted in their ordinary activities and practices.[311] For Reid, modern philosophy has flouted common sense because it has embraced “the Cartesian system.” The Cartesian system leads inevitably to skepticism: “From the single principle of the existence of our own thoughts, very little, if any thing, can be deduced by just reasoning, especially if we suppose that all our other faculties may be fallacious.”[312] We should therefore jettison the Cartesian system and embrace a form of foundationalism[313] that is moderate and wide. Moderate, because an idea can be worth belief without being indubitable. Wide, because many of our beliefs are warranted without being inferred from other beliefs. It is a first principle of common sense that the particular deliverances of the faculties of consciousness, perception, memory, the moral sense, and so on are immediately warranted. We should also divest ourselves of the “way of ideas”; this mechanical view does not explain how we apprehend reality, and we should rather stay with our prereflective conviction that we apprehend entities of various kinds. For Reid, we should start in the thick of human experience by attending to ordinary language use, the principles assumed in human conduct and actions, and the operations of our own minds, or what Reid calls “introspection.” “Philosophizing has to start somewhere, and Reid saw no reason that we should leave our commonsensical modes of discourse and convictions at the door when entering into the philosophical workplace.”[314] Reid grants priority to introspective consciousness—namely, perception, memory, testimony, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning. For Reid, these sources are not reducible to one another, and they are of equal authority. A moot question is why we should trust common sense. In this respect it is important to remember that Reid was a Christian philosopher who saw the world and humans as God’s good creation. He placed great emphasis on human free will, but unlike Kant, who positioned free will in the noumenal realm as opposed to the natural realm of necessity, Reid appropriately distinguished between laws of nature and the voluntary actions of humans. In opposition to Kant’s doctrine of necessity, Reid stressed contingency. God has created the world in a certain way, but he did not have to. Reid wrote and taught about a staggering range of topics. “Reid’s thought appea