History of Philosophy II

Today we went over the difference between primary qualities and secondary qualities of things according to John Locke. This is the official academic start of the problem of empiricism. I touched on Berkeley a bit too since he will be the next British Empiricist - even though he is also considered an Idealist - and the first quiz question is really more associated with Bishop Berkeley than Locke and that is: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound? We will do more with Berkeley next class. I then went on to Leibniz covering some of the reasons he was so incredible. His scholarship, his calculator, his System of the Calculus, binary code, his universal language translation project, his military plans for Egypt and the canal, his visits to England and the Netherlands, and then we began to think about his Monadology by talking about Euclid first. The second quiz question was, how can a point have no parts? See Euclid definition of a point. Compare the definition of a monad with Euclid's point. Interesting!