The Revolutionaries
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The revolution wrought in the 17th century was not all the work of Descartes. In particular, Descartes' view of ideas does not quite give them the 'representational' role that came to be central.
There were in fact two prongs to the revolutionary assault. One was to re-categorise what had previously been regarded as a variety of different kinds of one thing; and the other was to establish a representational model of generic activity - thinking - under which the variety had been subsumed.
These two thrusts were in fact sequential.
| Robert Boyle |
Descartes mounted the first, but did not himself agree (eg with Hobbes) that thinking was an operation upon representations.
(See Descartes, 3rd set of objections and reply, 4th Objection and reply, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes ed. Cottingham et al. Cambridge, CUP, 1984, pp. 125, 126.)
It was John Locke who established the representational point very firmly, by articulating his notion of 'idea' with forthright bluntness ('an idea is whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks'), by working the concept into a comprehensive 'philosophy', and by getting his work so widely read.
With Locke, the notion of the 'idea' became the new fundamental concept.
Where the hylomorphic view had seen perception (eg) in terms of a person sharing the form of the object seen, according to the new perspective the object is represented before the mind by an idea. Ideas are 'mental' entities, the only items with which the mind can deal directly, but they stand for the non-mental things about which the thinker has occasion to think.
This then is the invention of the mind; and it constitutes one of the foundation stones upon which the Modern framework of conceptions is built.
It was, as Rorty explains,
' a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations [...] mathematical truths, moral rules, the idea of God, moods of depression, and all the rest of what we now call 'mental' were objects of quasi-observation.'
Richard Rorty, Mirror of Nature, Blackwell, Oxford, 1980, p.50.
Revised 30:03:04
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