External links
- Robert, Aurelien. "William Crathorn". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
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William Crathorn | |
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| Born | Yorkshire, England |
| Era | Medieval philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophers |
| School | Scholasticism |
Main interests | Epistemology, philosophy of language, ontology |
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William Crathorn (fl. c. 1330) was an English Dominican philosopher, from Oxford. He was a philosopher who immediately followed in the intellectual tradition of William of Ockham and worked to strengthen his philosophical works. Crathorn created unique theories in the philosophy of language and psychology, as well as in epistemology by focusing on the claims of skeptics. Other areas of Crathorn's philosophy, which have not been extensively studied, show promise is revealing more about his life and his work.
Almost nothing is certain about Crathorn's life outside of his position as lecturer at Oxford. Crathorn was born in Yorkshire and served as a Dominican friar, lecturing on a book from Peter the Lombard entitled Sentences. Crathorn is also known to have lectured on the Bible during his time teaching. His date of birth and death are unknown; the year in which he lectured is known only by an eclipse mentioned in his manuscripts which is known to have occurred in July 1330.
Crathorn's philosophy focuses mainly upon epistemology and the problem of knowledge. His thoughts on knowledge resemble closely those of Roger Bacon, who held that knowledge of the external world comes from recognition of different "species" of objects. The species which is perceived is both a cause and a likeness in the eye of the perceiver. Crathorn asserts a somewhat Kantian view that we have no direct access to things in the external world and that we immediately perceive only their mental likenesses or representations (their species). Crathorn believed that since concepts can only belong to the category of quality, they must be mental qualities having the same nature as non-mental qualities and they must exist subjectively in the mind, which is to say that they exist in some part of the brain. To illuminate this theory, he offered theories of explaining brain function and how such relates to the philosophy of knowledge.
Crathorn affirms that whenever one is contemplating a certain concept, the mind of the person thinking it actually mirrors the concept. He thought that mental concepts cannot resemble substances but only qualities of substances because the species of substance would have to be a substance itself and our minds would turn into a new substance if we thought of it. It also cannot be a pure quantity because in thinking of infinite magnitudes, our minds would become infinite, and the same is true for the other categories besides quality. Crathorn held that one's ability to conceptualize is therefore limited to natural concepts of qualities, which in being conceived become qualities of the soul.
Crathorn also looked into the skeptical challenges which he anticipated in the problem of knowledge. To refute skeptical claims, he turned back to the cogito-argument to prove that we can at least be certain of our own mental activity, for if one were to doubt a proposition such as ‘I am’, it would follow that he exists, since he who does not exist does not doubt.
Like much philosophical discussion during his time in England, Crathorn considered the linguistic aspects of science. He questioned whether that when we know something scientifically, is that knowledge about external things, propositions, or some other more complex thing. It is believed that Crathorn popularized the notion that neither the external aspect or the proposition is the proper object of science, that the "total significance" of the proposition is most important.
He also discussed the nature of mental language, namely whether it is conventional or natural. Crathorn's predecessors had argued that thinking occurs in a universal language of concepts acquired causally via experience, and that all conventional languages are subordinated to this mental language, which is shared by everyone in an a priori fashion. But Crathorn could not accept such a position because of his view that only qualities are natural signs of their extra-mental significates. Crathorn argued that except for natural signs of qualities, mental language is conventional because it is derived from conventional language. Hence, whatever language one speaks in his head is modeled on that language used for external communication. Crathorn was the revolutionary in his time to affirm that words are prior to ideas and that ideas are shaped by words.
Crathorn differed from the standard system of Aristotle of categories. Crathorn felt the entire system had to be revised; the human mind naturally knows only qualities, and one cannot be certain that even they exist without appealing to the principle that God could not deceive us. Thinking and reasoning are of no help because they are purely conventional. For example, the category of substance is distinguished from the other categories by the fact that it has no contrary and can successively acquire contrary qualities. Thus, there are no non-substances, though a substance can be black and then white in succession, or cold and then gradually hot. But Crathorn claims that when we heat an object, not only the substance but also its qualities become hot, such that its qualities change from one state to their contrary exactly like a substance.
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Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Existence is the ability of an entity to interact with physical reality. In philosophy, it refers to the ontological property of being.
Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises. The main rival of the foundationalist theory of justification is the coherence theory of justification, whereby a body of knowledge, not requiring a secure foundation, can be established by the interlocking strength of its components, like a puzzle solved without prior certainty that each small region was solved correctly.
In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from human perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas. Idealist perspectives are in two categories: (i) Subjective idealism, which proposes that a material object exists only to the extent that a human being perceives the object; and (ii) Objective idealism, which proposes the existence of an objective consciousness that exists prior to and independently of human consciousness, thus the existence of the object is independent of human perception.
The problem of universals is an ancient question from metaphysics that has inspired a range of philosophical topics and disputes. Should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as color and shape, be considered to exist beyond those objects? And if a property exists separately from objects, what is the nature of that existence?
Platonic realism is the philosophical position that universals or abstract objects exist objectively and outside of human minds. It is named after the Greek philosopher Plato who applied realism to such universals, which he considered ideal forms. This stance is ambiguously also called Platonic idealism but should not be confused with idealism as presented by philosophers such as George Berkeley: as Platonic abstractions are not spatial, temporal, or mental, they are not compatible with the later idealism's emphasis on mental existence. Plato's Forms include numbers and geometrical figures, making them a theory of mathematical realism; they also include the Form of the Good, making them in addition a theory of ethical realism.
Substance theory, or substance–attribute theory, is an ontological theory positing that objects are constituted each by a substance and properties borne by the substance but distinct from it. In this role, a substance can be referred to as a substratum or a thing-in-itself. Substances are particulars that are ontologically independent: they are able to exist all by themselves. Another defining feature often attributed to substances is their ability to undergo changes. Changes involve something existing before, during and after the change. They can be described in terms of a persisting substance gaining or losing properties. Attributes or properties, on the other hand, are entities that can be exemplified by substances. Properties characterize their bearers, they express what their bearer is like.
Nyāya, literally meaning "justice", "rules", "method" or "judgment", is one of the six astika schools of Indian philosophy. This school's most significant contributions to Indian philosophy were systematic development of the theory of logic, methodology, and its treatises on epistemology. Ancient Mithila University was famous for Nyaya Shastra teaching.
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these conscious processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. In this sense, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.
Subjective idealism, or empirical idealism, is a form of philosophical monism that holds that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism; indeed, it is the contrary of eliminative materialism, the doctrine that all or some classes of mental phenomena do not exist, but are sheer illusions.
In philosophy, a distinction is often made between two different kinds of knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Whereas knowledge by description is something like ordinary propositional knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance is familiarity with a person, place, or thing, typically obtained through perceptual experience. According to Bertrand Russell's classic account of acquaintance knowledge, acquaintance is a direct causal interaction between a person and some object that the person is perceiving.
The question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, arises in the philosophy of perception and of mind and the debate over the nature of conscious experience; out of the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience.
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is a 1710 work, in English, by Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley. This book largely seeks to refute the claims made by Berkeley's contemporary John Locke about the nature of human perception. Whilst, like all the Empiricist philosophers, both Locke and Berkeley agreed that we are having experiences, regardless of whether material objects exist, Berkeley sought to prove that the outside world is also composed solely of ideas. Berkeley did this by suggesting that "Ideas can only resemble Ideas" – the mental ideas that we possess can only resemble other ideas and thus the external world consists not of physical form, but rather of ideas. This world is given logic and regularity by some other force, which Berkeley concludes is God.
A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class including perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense-impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.
Spinozism is the monist philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza that defines "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, with both matter and thought being attributes of such.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science is a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, published in 1783, two years after the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. One of Kant's shorter works, it contains a summary of the Critique‘s main conclusions, sometimes by arguments Kant had not used in the Critique. Kant characterizes his more accessible approach here as an "analytic" one, as opposed to the Critique‘s "synthetic" examination of successive faculties of the mind and their principles.
Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, usually known as the Ethics, is a philosophical treatise written in Latin by Baruch Spinoza. It was written between 1661 and 1675 and was first published posthumously in 1677.
This glossary of philosophy is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to philosophy and related disciplines, including logic, ethics, and theology.
Benedictus de Spinoza's philosophy encompasses nearly every area of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. It earned Spinoza an enduring reputation as one of the most important and original thinkers of the seventeenth century.
