Georg Bernhard Bilfinger: The three types of cognition – historical, philosophical and mathematical – articulated (1722)

Although my blog has been dedicated to the task of expounding the story of classic German philosophy in general, the field has been thus far ruled by Christian Wolff, with the exception of few pietists, who will become fierce enemies of Wolff. It is time to introduce a new minor figure, this time from the Wolffian side of the game: Georg Bernhard Bilfinger with his dissertation De triplicium rerum cognitione, historica, philosophica et mathematica, articulos.

I called Bilfinger a minor figure, and judging by his influence, he truly is such. The main point of importance in Bilfinger's career is that he introduced Germans to Chinese philosophy and especially to Confucianism – even in the dissertation he mentions these themes in passing.

We have already have the opportunity to familiarise ourselves with the dissertations of the time when we looked at Wolff's first publication, which combined elementary mathematics with rather strong philosophical conclusions without any clear connecting link. Bilfinger's dissertation is rather less ambitious and is mostly a discussion of the ideas of Wolff and his teacher Tschirnhaus.

The main purpose of Bilfinger's thesis is to classify and define different types of cognition or science. Bilfinger starts by determining various meanings of the term philosophy by comparing it with mathematics (well, actually he just follows his two predecessors, as he does in the whole book). When you learn mathematics, you might learn various definitions of mathematical objects. Similarly, philosophy if often restricted to mere verbal bickering, where the fight is all about the meaning of words. This is the lowest type of philosophy: although it is important to make one's meaning clear, it is not worth to start arguing for the meaning of a word.

Secondly, we could be taught who was the person who discovered some important theorems. This corresponds with merely historical study of philosophers, philosophical schools and their opinions. Beyond the verbal explanation of mathematical and philosophical terms and the historical description of mathematics and philosophers, there's still the real mathematics, and corresponding to it, real philosophy. What do these consist then?

To answer this question, Bilfinger presents another division, this time between different moments of cognition. Cognition should begin with a historical phase, where history has the traditional sense: we observe and experiment. The results of this historical phase are then to be used by philosophy as a material for discovering the first principles of cognition. These principles are then to be used finally in mathematics for deriving new truths.

The three types of cognition, historical, philosophical and mathematical, form then a sequence based on experience, but ending with a system of knowledge founded on indubitable experiences: note the balance between empiricism and rationalism that Wolff had already endorsed. If the sequence would form a cycle, we would be very close to the later hypothetico-deductive account of science, where theories are tested against observations.Yet, Bilfinger imagines that the creation of theories involves more than mere guess work, and indeed, is what real philosophy is all about.

It seems amazing, but this is the whole content of Bilfinger's dissertation: two divisions borrowed from other philosophers. Next time, we shall return to Wolff and to another set of reasonable thoughts.

Joachim Lange: Mental medicine - Curing your mind through Descartes

Last time I gave a preliminary account of what philosophy and its negation, philomoria, were for J. J. Lange and how the two were supposed to be related. This time I shall say something about the concrete methodology of philosophy as Lange conceived it.

As we should remember from the previous text, for Lange philosophy was essentially striving towards wisdom, which was defined as a connection with God. This connection or harmony is actually what humans are intended to live in. Yet, in the current state of things humans are naturally disharmonious. The natural human being is disturbed by sense impressions, and while education can help a person to correct her original state, it might lead her to even worse things – like Aristotelianism.

It is this state of disharmony that Lange strives to cure in Medicina mentis. Although Lange mentions many methods of cure, such as conversation with other persons and prayer, philosophically most interesting is the use of lumen naturale, natural light or human cognitivie capacities.

As one might remember, Descartes was in addition to Socrates the only philosopher that Lange viewed in a completely positive light. For instance, Lange views Cartesian method of doubt as a sober form of skepticism, because it strives to find a reliable and indubitable ground, while an unhealthy skepticism, like the ancient Pyrrhonism, leads merely to turbulence of mind and eventually to libertine denial of all values.

Interestingly, Lange sees the core of unhealthy skepticism not in doubt, but in refusal to accept some facts. Thus, Lange regards both infamous atheists of the time, Spinoza and Hobbes, as partial skeptics, because they did not accept the validity of the Christian notion of God. This peculiarity is connected with Lange's definition of skepticism as the opposite of what he calls formal truth.

What then is a formal truth for Lange? First of all, a material truth is simply a validity of some fact: this is so and so. Formal truth, on the other hand, is a material truth that is in harmony with a mind. Thus, a material truth might not be a formal truth for some person, if that person fails to assent this truth. Then again, a material truth might not be a formal truth, if it is only a part of the whole picture or fails to describe anything essential to the mind involved. In other words, formal truth is an assent by mind of an essential material truth.

The bad form of skepticism, then, is the opposite of formal truth, because it involves a failure to assent to an essential material truth. Thus, atheism as a rejection of God's existence is by Lange's definitions this sort of skepticism. On the other hand, Descartes is not a skeptic in this sense, because ultimately Descartes doesn't reject e.g. God's existence.

In light of Lange's appreciation of the great French philosopher, it is no wonder that Lange's ideas of using the natural light of human reason derive largely from Descartes. Indeed, Lange even calls the use of natural light meditation, borrowing the name obviously from Cartesian Meditations. The meditation, Lange says, should begin from an indubitable starting point. Like Descartes, Lange affirms that this starting point is not demonstrated syllogistically. In fact, Lange goes a step further and says that it is indemonstrable in all senses, that is, an incontrovertible fact.

Lange's rejection of the demonstrability of the first truth is connected with another modification of Cartesian meditations. While Descartes begins from an indubitable proposition, ”I think, therefore I am”, Lange begins from a non-propositional self-consciousness, which he further defines as perception of mind by itself.

Similarly, Lange does not demonstrate other truths concerning mind from the fact of its existence, but says that these truths are just contained within the original self-consciousness. Indeed, he explicitly criticises Descartes for limiting the foundational notion of mind to cognition. Still, what Lange actually tells of mind has a Cartesian air: mind is a non-material substance, but intrinsically connected to a material body, through which it receives impressions of material things and which it can control.

Langian meditations continue in a Cartesian manner, although not through demonstrations: thinking about oneself leads one to think of God, through whom one can even find some certainty in thinking sense objects. Yet, the most important point for Lange is to point out that through self-consciousness one can discern also the limits of natural light and the need for a supernatural light of divine revelation: reason itself shows the need for antirationalism.

Lange's Cartesian inspired antirationalism has an interesting relation to Jacobi's later antirationalism. The purpose of both writers is the same: to move the attention from the mundane science to God as the true meaning of human life, and both also begin from some immediate, indemonstrable starting point: Lange from self-consciousness and Jacobi from Glauben or faith. Yet, for Jacobi it is not Descartes, but Hume, who offers the starting point.

Considering that Descartes was a stout believer, but Hume leaned more towards agnosticism or even atheism, Jacobi's position might seem awkward. But the tides of philosophy had changed from the days of Lange. For Lange, the immediate starting point was human self-consciousness, which immediately led to God as the ground of that consciousness. Self-consciousness was thus a justification for the existence of God, while God was the only thing giving value and stability to the sense world.

At the time of Jacobi, on the other hand, self-consciousness as the first principle was almost exclusively used by philosophers of Kantian inspiration. Now, one thing that philosophers like Fichte appeared to do was to downgrade the role of God in the trinity of self-consciouness, God and material things. Indeed, they seemingly tried to account for the existence of the material things in terms of mere self-consciousness.

Jacobi thought this strategy was ultimately nihilistic, because it destroyed the true source of values. Furthermore, it made it more difficult for Jacobi to use Lange's strategy of justifying the existence of God through self-consciousness: who needs God to account for the existence of material objects, if they can be accounted by the self-consciousness itself?

In this light Jacobi's endorsement of Hume becomes more understandable. Hume had argued that we couldn't really demonstrate the substantiality of the objects of experience through our mere self-consciousness, but that we had to just believe in their stable existence. This stability inhered then somewhere beyond self-consciousness, and Jacobi could then just assume that it inhered in God as the source of all values.

So much for Lange, for the time being. Next time, we shall see what happened 17^th of March, 1716, around 7 PM, at Halle.

Christian Wolff: Reasonable thoughts on the capacities of the human understanding and their correct use in knowing truth - Rationalism vs. empiricism

A common trope in philosophy text books is the supposed battle between rationalists and empiricists, in which the first wanted to base all knowledge on reason and the latter on experience and which was finally solved by Kant who discovered that knowledge was based on both reason and experience. It takes no great historian to discover that this simple tale of two battling schools with three great names on both sides is largely fictitious, not least because e.g. Leibniz did not form a common school with Descartes and Spinoza, but opposed the two in some issues even more than he opposed Locke, the only empiricist of note to have written at the time.

I am not sure who actually invented the fable of the two schools of philosophy, but the first signs of it is the already familiar Kantian tale of Locke as the intuitionist and Leibniz as the intellectualist and Kant himself as the necessary symbiosis of the two. But even after Kant this paradigm was not a given when interpreting the history of philosophy. For instance, Hegel distinguished empiricism from metaphysical school, which apparently included, in addition to the traditional rationalists, ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Even the separating principle of the two schools is not the same as in the separation of rationalists and empiricists. Metaphysical school, says Hegel, based science on common experiences and analysis of these experiences, while empiricists tried to base it on individual perceptions and then noted that no science of necessities and universalities could be based on them – this description fits not Locke, the paradigm empiricist, but characterises at most a caricature of Humean philosophy. Furthermore, Kantian philosophy is for Hegel not a symbiotic combination of the two schools, but more like a modification of empiricism in the sense that both disagree with metaphysical school about the possibility of certain kinds of knowledge.

In place of a strict division of two schools, various premodern philosophers form then more of a continuum of different standpoints from, say, Spinozan axiomatics as the ultimate in rationalism to Humean bundle of impressions without any necessary connection as the ultimate in empiricism. What I would now like to do is to see where in this continuum Wolff's philosophy fits in. One would expect that Wolff as the supposed follower of Leibniz would be closer to the rationalist end of the line. Yet, Wolff is distinctly aware that many sciences can be based only on experiences. Indeed, in addition to the method of syllogistic reasoning, Wolff tries to describe, however crudely, a method of experimentation, by which basic propositions could be discovered.

Wolff defines experience as something that can be known through perception. Note that he does not identify experience with perceptions. Instead, experience is in a sense more stable than a perception: while a perception might vary from one person to another, experiences are only such perceptions that we know to be capable of being at least in principle communicable to other persons. Thus, experiences are essentially intersubjective.

Despite this stability, experiences deal still only with individual things and might even be deceptional, because human perceptions are not always reliable. Yet, Wolff admits that true universal propositions could be based on experiences. The method for this universalisation is careful experimentation: one varies the situation and so tries to determine the conditions in which the experienced phenomena appears.

Wolff's methodoloy of experiences appears surprisingly empiricist. Still, he is not a pure-bred Lockean, although he does mention latter's work favourably at the beginning of his logic. Wolff does accept also the possibility of substantial knowledge being based on self-evident or analytic axioms, as we already saw in his treatment of mathematics. In other words, analytical propositions are not empty or tautologies according to Wolff. Wolff's justification of the substantiality of such propositions is characteristically pragmatic and even pragmatist. An axiom or a definition can be informative, because it might help us to determine postulates, that is, self-evident ways to affect things. Thus, because we know what a circle is, we know also how to produce one, if suitable materials are given. Even logic is not for Wolff a mere formal system but a helpful tool as a methodology of science.