Chapter 10 Goals

10.1 Hobbes

• Define justice, distributive justice, and social contract theory.
• Summarize the main features of Hobbes’s social contract theory.
• Understand Hobbes’s view of human nature.
• Explain Hobbes’s definition of justice and how justice can come into being as the Leviathan assumes power.
• Know the three main similarities between Hobbes’s and Locke’s social contract theories and enumerate the dissimilarities.

10.2 Locke

• Summarize Locke’s arguments against the notion of innate ideas.
• Explain Locke’s reference to the mind as unmarked “white paper.”
• Explain in what way Locke is an empiricist.
• Understand the misgivings that philosophers have about cognitive relativism.
• Summarize the main criticism that both rationalists and empiricists have of Locke’s theory of knowledge.

10.3 Berkeley

• Know the meaning of Berkeley’s famous phrase, “To be is to be perceived.”
• Explain how Berkeley’s theory of knowledge differs from Locke’s.
• Understand why Berkeley asserts that there are no material objects.
• State and evaluate Berkeley’s logical argument that material objects cannot exist.
• Understand how Berkeley brings in the concept of God to explain how knowledge is possible.

10.4 Hume

• Define principle of induction.
• Explain Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact.
• Explain why Hume concludes that theological and metaphysical speculations are worthless.
• Trace Hume’s reasoning that ultimately leads him to strong skepticism.
• State Hume’s argument against the principle of induction.

10.5 Spinoza

• Define pantheism.
• Understand what Spinoza attempts to do by laying out his arguments in “geometrical order.”
• Grasp Spinoza’s reason for thinking that humans can have free will.
• Understand why Spinoza’s view has been labeled a form of pantheism.

10.6 Leibniz

• Understand Leibniz’s reasoning that led him to conclude that monads exist.
• Explain the meaning of Leibniz’s notion about our wills being inclined by God but not necessitated.
• State and evaluate Leibniz’s belief that this world is the best of all possible worlds.