Intro to Philosophy Mar 2

We finished by discussing the traditional view of Descartes as the beginning of Continental Rationalism and Hobbes as an empiricist (though Locke is traditionally viewed as the beginning of the British Empiricist tradition as we will see.) We then briefly discussed a few highlights about Pascal including his wager, his triangle, and his calculator. But Spinoza was the main topic for the day and we dived into the Ethics reading the definitions, axioms, and propositions. I argue that his conclusion that the Scholastic definitions lead to a view of Pantheism - God is all there is. How persuasive was his argument? That was one quiz question for today. The other was: given how light looks to us, how do we look to light?