If I intend to blog regularly, I can see that I’m going to have to spend more time writing about philosophy, because that’s one of the main things I’m spending my time thinking about these days. I shall try to make it interesting. But the problem with writing about philosophy is that it’s hard to start in the middle, and the middle is where I’m thinking. So I plan to begin by writing a post or two about my own philosophical journey, so that you all can see where I’m coming from.

My first exposure to philosophy was in an Introduction to Philosophy class my first semester of college. The format was simple: we were given a number of original sources, we were to read them, and then we discussed them in class. Occasionally we wrote papers. We started with a small smattering of Plato, because you have to start with Plato; not enough to really appreciate him, but enough to have some notion of who he was and of who Socrates was.

And then we jumped almost two-thousand years to Descartes.

Let me repeat that again. We jumped almost two-thousand years to Descartes, as though nothing in between mattered.

This didn’t concern me at the time, mind you—and from the standpoint of modern philosophy, there is a sense in which the instructor was perfectly right. From the standpoint of Descartes and those who came after him, little of that intervening time mattered because they explicitly and consciously chose to ignore it. I’ll get to that later.

The main thing for now is that Descartes consciously chose to reject that which had come before, and to start fresh. He was a mathematician, and he chose to proceed mathematically: he wanted to start with as few principles as possible, and build up everything else from them logically. He said (I paraphrase ruthlessly), “There are many things I know…but I’m going to pretend that I don’t know anything that I’m not absolutely positively logically sure of.” As all the world knows, he finally came down to one principle, Cogito ergo sum!, “I think, therefore I am.” That was his starting point, and he worked up from there.

This process made a certain amount of sense to me; though I didn’t know it, I was a budding math major, and the certainty of math appealed to me. Descartes was trying to bring the same kind of certainty to philosophy, and I liked that. At the same time, it bugged me that he was ignoring the things he knew from experience—that he was, as I’d put it now, trying to make himself stupider than he was. And the trouble with trying to make yourself stupider than you are, as C.S. Lewis noted multiple times, is that you very often succeed.

From Descartes we went on to Spinoza, who followed the model of Euclid’s Geometry much more closely; his book was full of definitions, axioms, and theorems, and first I found it fascinating. I also found it impenetrable; all I can remember now is that he went on and on about substances and their modes (very little of which I’d been given the background needed for understanding), and that he ended up with something like Pantheism.

But I hungered to get on to the Empiricists: Berkeley, Locke, and Hume. They looked at the world empirically. They paid attention to what they knew from the world. They didn’t foolishly throw all that away. Surely they’d make more sense.

Part II