René Descartes (1596-1650) and the Meditations on First Philosophy

Descartes is justly regarded as the Father of Modern Philosophy. This is not because of the
positive results of his investigations, which were few, but because of the questions that he raised
and problems that he created, problems that have still not been answered to everyone's
satisfaction: particularly the Problem of Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem. And in a day
when philosophy and science were not distinguished from each other, Descartes was a famous
physicist and mathematician as well as a philosopher. Descartes' physics was completely
overthrown by that of Newton, so we do not much remember him for that. But Descartes was a
great mathematician of enduring importance. He originated analytic geometry, where all of
algebra can be given geometrical expression. Like Galileo combining physics and mathematics,
this also combined two things that had previously been apart, arithmetic and geometry. The
modern world would not be the same without graphs of equations. Rectangular coordinates for
graphing are still called Cartesian coordinates (from Descartes' name: des Cartes). Descartes is
also the person who began calling the square root of -1 (i.e. -1) the "imaginary" number.
Descartes lived in an age of great mathematicians, including Marin Mersenne (1588-1648),
Pierre Fermat (1601-1665), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), and Christian Huygens (1629-1695). At a
time before scientific journals, Mersenne himself mediated a correspondence between all these
people (as well as with Galileo, Thomas Hobbes, and many others). All prime numbers that are
powers of 2 minus 1 (i.e. 2n - 1) are still called "Mersenne primes." Huygens then lived long
enough to know Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

Seeing Descartes as a mathematician explains why he was the kind of philosopher that he was.
Now it is hard to reconcile Descartes' status as a scientist and the inspiration he derived from
Galileo and others with his clear distrust of experience. Isn't science about experience? We might
think so. But the paradox of modern science is its dependence on mathematics. Where does
mathematics come from? What makes it true? Many mathematicians will still answer that they
are "Platonists," but Plato's views certainly have little to do with experience. So Descartes
belongs to this puzzling, mathematical side of science, not to the side concerned with experience.

Meditations on First Philosophy is representative of his thought. "First philosophy" simply

means what is done first in philosophy. The most important thing about Descartes as a
philosopher is that "first philosophy" changed because of what he did. What stood first in
philosophy since Aristotle was metaphysics. Thus the first question for philosophy to answer was
about what is real. That decided, everything else could be done. With such an arrangement we
can say that philosophy functions with Ontological Priority. In the Meditations we find that
questions about knowledge come to the fore. If there are problems about what we can know, then
we may not even be able to know what is real. But if questions about knowledge must be settled
first, then this establishesEpistemological Priority for philosophy. Indeed, this leads to the
creation of the Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology, as a separate discipline within philosophy
for the first time. Previously, knowledge had been treated as falling in the domain of Aristotle's
logical works (called, as a whole, the Organon), especially the Posterior Analytics. Modern
philosophy has been driven by questions about knowledge. It begins with two principal
traditions, Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism. The Rationalists, including
Descartes, believed that reason was the fundamental source of knowledge. The Empiricists
believed that experience was. Epistemological priority makes possible what has become a very
common phenomenon in modern philosophy: denying that metaphysics is possible at all, or
even that metaphysical questions mean anything. That can happen when epistemology draws the
limits of knowledge, or the limits of meaning, so tight that metaphysical statements or questions
are no longer allowed. [note]

The most important issues get raised in the first three of the six Meditations. In the first
meditation Descartes begins to consider what he can know. He applies the special method that he
has conceived (about which he had already written the Discourse on Method), known as
"methodical doubt." As applied, methodical doubt has two steps: 1) doubt everything that can be
doubted, and 2) don't accept anything as known unless it can be established with absolute
certainty. Today Descartes is often faulted for requiring certainty of knowledge. But that was no
innovation with him: ever since Plato and Aristotle, knowledge was taken to imply certainty.
Anything without certainty would just be opinion, not knowledge. The disenchantment with
certainty today has occurred just because it turned out to be so difficult to justify certainty to the
rigor that Descartes required. Logically the two parts of methodical doubt are very similar, but in
the Meditations they are procedurally different. Doubt does its job in the first meditation.
Descartes wonders what he can really know about a piece of matter like a lump of wax. He
wonders if he might actually be dreaming instead of sitting by the fireplace. Ultimately he
wonders if the God he has always believed in might actually be a malevolent Demon capable of
using his omnipotence to deceive us even about our own thoughts or our own existence. Thus,
there is nothing in all his experience and knowledge that Descartes cannot call into doubt. The
junk of history, all the things he ever thought he had known, gets swept away.

Ever since the Meditations, Descartes' Deceiving Demon has tended to strike people as a funny
or absurd idea. Nevertheless, something far deeper and more significant is going on in the first
meditation than we might think. It is a problem about the relation of causality to knowledge. The
relation of cause to effect had been of interest since Aristotle. There was something odd about it.
Given knowledge of a cause (and of the laws of nature), we usually can predict what the effect
will be. Touch the hot stove, and you'll get burned. Step off a roof, and you'll fall. But given the
effect, it is much more difficult to reason backwards to the cause. The arson squad shows up to
investigate the cause of a fire, but that is not an easy task: many things could have caused the
fire, and it is always possible that they might not be able to figure out at all what the cause was.
The problem is that the relation between cause and effect is not symmetrical. Given a cause,
there will be one effect. But given an effect, there could have been many causes able to produce
the same effect. And even if we can't predict the effect from the cause, we can always wait
around to see what it is. But if we can't determine the cause from the effect, time forever
conceals it from us. This feature of causality made for some uneasiness in mediaeval Western,
and even in Indian, philosophy. Many people tried to argue that the effect was contained in the
cause, or the cause in the effect. None of that worked, or even made much sense.

With Descartes, this uneasiness about causality becomes a terror in relation to knowledge: for, in
perception, what is the relation of the objects of knowledge to our knowledge of them? Cause to
effect. Thus what we possess, our perceptions, are the effects of external causes; and in thinking
that we know external objects, we are reasoning backwards from effect to cause. Trouble. Why
couldn't our perceptions have been caused by something else? Indeed, in ordinary life we know
that they can be. There are hallucinations. Hallucinations can be caused by a lot of things: fever,
insanity, sensory deprivation, drugs, trauma, etc. Descartes' Deceiving Demon is more
outlandish, but it employs the same principle, and touches the same raw nerve. That raw nerve is
now known as the Problem of Knowledge: How can we have knowledge through perception of
external objects? There is no consensus on how to solve this even today. The worst thing is not
that there haven't been credible solutions proposed, there have been, but that the solutions should
explain why perception is so obvious in ordinary life. Philosophical explanations are usually
anything but obvious; but no sensible person, not even Descartes, really doubts that external
objects are there. This is why modern philosophy became so centered on questions about
knowledge: it is the Curse of Descartes.

In his own discussion, Descartes does not identify his problem as resulting from the asymmetry
of cause and effect as applied to knowledge. However, this is what underlies his difficulty, and an
explicit statement of the matter does not have long to wait. In 1690, Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, a
member of the French Academy, wrote that any event can have an infinite number of possible
causes. Huet was certainly aware of Descartes' work (as any Frenchman by then would have
been), and certainly took his epistemological difficulties seriously. Indeed, Huet's book was a
celebration of epistemological difficulties, entitled a Philosophical Treatise on the Weaknesses of
the Human Mind. We also get an interesting but confused discussion of the asymmetry of cause
and effect in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

In the second meditation, Descartes wants to begin building up knowledge from the wreckage of
the first meditation. This means starting from nothing. Such an idea of building up knowledge
from nothing is called Foundationalism and is one of the mistakes that Descartes makes.
Descartes does not and cannot simply start from nothing. Nevertheless, he gets off to a pretty
good start: he decides that he cannot be deceived about his own existence, because if he didn't
exist, he wouldn't be around to worry about it. If he didn't exist, he wouldn't be thinking; so if he
is thinking, he must exist. This is usually stated in Latin: Cogito ergo sum, "I think therefore I
am." That might be the most famous statement in the history of philosophy, although it does not
seem to occur in that form in the Meditations.

But there is more to it than just Descartes' argument for his own existence. Thinking comes first,
and for Descartes that is a real priority. The title of the second meditation actually says, "the
mind is better known than the body," and the cogito ergo sum makes Descartes believe, not just
that he has proven his existence, but that he has proven his existence as a thinking substance, a
mind, leaving the body as some foreign thing to worry about later. That does not really follow,
but Descartes clearly thinks that it does and consequently doesn't otherwise provide any special
separate proof for the existence of the soul. In the end Descartes will believe that there are two
fundamental substances in the world, souls and matter. The essence of soul for him, the attribute
that makes a soul what is it, is thinking. The essence of matter for him (given to us in the fifth
meditation), the attribute that makes matter what is it, is extension, i.e. that matter takes up space.
This is known as Cartesian Dualism, that there are two kinds of things. It is something else that
people have thought funny or absurd since Descartes. The great difficulty with it was always
how souls and their bodies, made of matter, interact or communicate with one another. In
Descartes' own physics, forces are transferred by contact; but the soul, which is unextended and
so has no surface (only matter has extension), cannot contact the body because there is no
surface to press with. The body cannot even hold the soul within it, since the soul has nothing to
press upon to carry it along with the body. Problems like this occur whenever the body and soul
are regarded as fundamentally different kinds of realities.

Today it might seem easy to say that the body and soul communicate by passing energy back and
forth, which doesn't require contact, or even proximity; but the presence of real energy in the
soul would make it detectable in the laboratory: any kind of energy produces some heat (towards
which all energy migrates as it becomes more random, i.e. as energy obeys the laws of the
conservation of energy and of entropy), and heat or the radiation it produces (all heat produces
electromagnetic radiation) can be detected. But, usually, a theory of the soul wants it to be some
kind of thing that cannot be detected in a laboratory -- in great measure because souls have
not been detected in a laboratory.

Nevertheless, Descartes' problem is not just a confusion or a superstition. Our existence really
does seem different from the inside than from the outside. From the inside there is consciousness,
experience, colors, music, memories, etc. From the outside there is just the brain: gray goo. How
do those two go together? That is the enduring question from Descartes: The Mind-Body
Problem. As with the Problem of Knowledge, there is no consensus on a satisfactory answer. To
ignore consciousness, as happens in Behaviorism, or to dismiss consciousness as something that
is merely a transient state of the material brain, is a kind of reductionism, i.e. to say the one thing
is just a state or function of another even though they may seem fundamentally different and
there may be no good reason why we should regard that one thing as more real and the other less
so. Much of the talk about the Mind-Body Problem in the 20th century has been reductionistic,
starting with Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind, which said that "mind is to body as kick is to leg."
A kick certainly doesn't have much reality apart from a leg, but that really doesn't capture the
relationship of consciousness to the body or to the brain. When the leg is kicking, we see the leg.
But when the brain is "minding," we don't see the brain, and the body itself is
only represented within consciousness. Internally, there is no reason to believe the mind is even
in the brain. Aristotle and the Egyptians thought that consciousness was in the heart. In the
middle of dreaming or hallucinations, we might not be aware of our bodies at all.

At the end of the second mediation Descartes may reasonably be said to have proven his own
existence, but the existence of the body or of any other external objects is left hanging. If nothing
further can be proven, then each of us is threatened with the possibility that I am the only thing
that exists. This is calledsolipsism, from Latin solus, "alone" (sole), and ipse, "self." Solipsism is
not argued, advocated, or even mentioned by Descartes, but it is associated with him because
both he and everyone after him have so much trouble proving that something else does exist.

The third meditation is Descartes' next step in trying to restore the common sense limits of
knowledge. Even though he is ultimately aiming to show that external objects and the body exist,
he is not able to go at that directly. Instead the third meditation is where Descartes attempts to
prove the existence of God. This is surprising, since the existence of objects seems much more
obvious than the existence of God; but Descartes, working with his mathematician's frame of
mind, thinks that a pure rational proof of something he can't see is better than no proof of
something he can.

Descartes' proof for God is not original. It is a kind of argument called the Ontological
Argument (named that by Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804). It is called "ontological" because it is
based on an idea about the nature of God's existence: that God is a necessary being, i.e. it
is impossible for him not to exist. We and everything else in the universe, on the other hand,
are contingent beings; it is possible for us not to exist, and in the past (and possibly in the future)
we have indeed not existed. But if God is a necessary being, then there must be something about
his nature that necessitates his existence. Reflecting on this, a mediaeval Archbishop of
Canterbury, St. Anselm (1093-1109), decided that all we needed to prove the existence of God
was the proper definition of God. With such a definition we could understand how God's nature
necessitates his existence. The definition Anselm proposed was: God is that than which no
greater can be conceived. The argument then follows: If we conceive of a non-existing God, we
must always ask, "Can something greater than this be conceived?" The answer will clearly be
"Yes"; for an existing God would be greater than a non-existing God. Therefore we can only
conceive of God as existing; so God exists.

This simple argument has mostly not found general favor. The definitive criticism was given by
St. Thomas Aquinas (who otherwise thought that there were many ways to prove the existence of
God): things cannot be "conceived" into existence. Defining a concept is one thing, proving that
the thing exists is another. The principle involved is that, "Existence is not a predicate," i.e.
existence is not like other attributes or qualities that are included in definitions. Existence is not
part of the meaning of anything. Most modern philosophers have agreed with this, but every so
often there is an oddball who is captivated by Anselm. Descartes was such an oddball.

Descartes' argument for God is not even as good as Anselm's. It runs something like this:

1. I have in my mind an idea of perfection.

2. Degrees of perfection correspond to degrees of reality.
3. Every idea I have must have been caused by something that is at least as real [in objective
reality, what Descartes calls "formal reality"] as what it is that the idea represents [in the
subjective reality of my mind, what Descartes confusingly calls "objective reality"].
4. Therefore, every idea I have must have been caused by something that is at least
as perfect as what it is that the idea represents.
5. Therefore, my idea of perfection must have been caused by the perfect thing.
6. Therefore, the perfect thing exists.
7. By definition, the perfect thing is God.
8. Therefore, God exists.

Here Descartes uses "perfection" instead of Anselm's "greatness." The difficulties with the
argument are, first, that the second premise is most questionable. Most Greek philosophers
starting with Parmenides would have said that either something exists or it doesn't. "Degrees" of
reality is a much later, in fact Neoplatonic, idea. The second problem is that the third premise is
convoluted and fishy in the extreme. It means that Descartes is forced into arguing that our idea
of infinity must have been caused by an infinite thing, since an infinite thing is more real than us
or anything in us. But it seems obvious enough that our idea of infinity is simply the negation of
finitude: the non-finite. The best that Descartes can ever do in justifying these two premises is
argue that he can conceive them "clearly and distinctly" or "by the light of nature." "Clear and
distinct ideas," are how Descartes claims something is self-evident, and something is self-evident
if we know it to be true just by understanding it's meaning. That is very shaky ground in
Descartes' system, for we must always be cautious about things that the Deceiving Demon
could deceive us into believing. The only guarantee we have that our clear and distinct ideas are
in fact true and reliable is that God would not deceive us about them. But then the existence of
God is to be proven just in order that we can prove God reliable. Assuming the reliability of
clear and distinct ideas so as to prove that God is reliable, so as to prove that clear and distinct
ideas are reliable, makes for a logically circular argument: we assume what we wish to prove.

Descartes' argument for God violates both logic and his own method. In sweeping away the junk
of history through methodical doubt, Descartes wasn't supposed to use anything from the past
without justifying it. He is already violating that in the second mediation just by using concepts
like "substance" and "essence," which are technical philosophical terms that Descartes has not
made up himself. In the third meditation Descartes' use of the history of philosophy explodes out
of control: technical terminology ("formal cause," etc.) flies thick and fast, the argument itself is
inspired by Anselm, and the whole process is very far from the foundational program of starting
from nothing. All by itself, it looks like a good proof of how philosophy cannot start over from
nothing.

With the existence of God, presumably, proven, Descartes wraps things up in the sixth
meditation: if God is the perfect thing, then he would not deceive us. That wouldn't be perfect.
On the other hand, when it comes to our perceptions, God has set this all up and given us a very
strong sense that all these things that we see are there. So, if God is no deceiver, these things
really must be there. Therefore, external objects ("corporeal things") exist. Simple enough, but
fatally flawed if the argument for the existence of God is itself defective.

In the fourth and fifth meditations Descartes does some tidying up. In the fourth he worries why
there can be falsehood if God is reliable. The answer is that if we stuck to our clear and distinct
ideas, there would be no falsehood; but our ambitions leap beyond those limits, so falsehood
exists and is our own fault. Descartes does come to believe that all our clear and distinct ideas
are innate: they are packed into the soul on its creation, like a box lunch. Most important is the
idea of perfection, or the idea of God, itself, which is then rather like God's hallmark on the soul.
Once we notice that idea, then life, the universe, and everything falls into place. Thus, Descartes
eventually decides that the existence of God is better known to him than his own existence, even
though he was certain about the latter first.

The fifth meditation says it is about the "essence" of material things. That is especially
interesting since Descartes supposedly doesn't know yet whether material things existed. It's like,
even if they don't exist, he knows what they are. That is Descartes the mathematician speaking.
Through mathematics, especially geometry, he knows what matter is like -- extended, etc. He
even knows that a vacuum is impossible: extended space is the same thing as material substance.
This is the kind of thing that makes Descartes look very foolish as a scientist. But the important
point, again, is not that Descartes is unscientific, but that he chose to rely too heavily on the role
of mathematics in the nova scientia that Galileo had recently inaugurated. Others, like Francis
Bacon (1561-1626), had relied too heavily on the role of observation in explaining the new
knowledge; and Bacon wasn't a scientist, or a mathematician, at all. Descartes was. It really
would not be until our own time that some understanding would begin to emerge of the
interaction and interdependency between theory and observation, mathematics and experience in
modern science. Even now the greatest mathematicians (e.g. Kurt Gödel, 1906-1978) tend to be
kinds of Platonists at heart.
2. The Modern Turn

a. Against Scholasticism
Descartes is often called the “Father of Modern Philosophy,” implying that he provided the seed for a
new philosophy that broke away from the old in important ways. This “old” philosophy is Aristotle’s
as it was appropriated and interpreted throughout the later medieval period. In fact, Aristotelianism
was so entrenched in the intellectual institutions of Descartes’ time that commentators argued that
evidence for its the truth could be found in the Bible. Accordingly, if someone were to try to refute
some main Aristotelian tenet, then he could be accused of holding a position contrary to the word of
God and be punished. However, by Descartes’ time, many had come out in some way against one
Scholastic-Aristotelian thesis or other. So, when Descartes argued for the implementation of his
modern system of philosophy, breaks with the Scholastic tradition were not unprecedented.

Descartes broke with this tradition in at least two fundamental ways. The first was his rejection of
substantial forms as explanatory principles in physics. A substantial form was thought to be an
immaterial principle of material organization that resulted in a particular thing of a certain kind. The
main principle of substantial forms was the final cause or purpose of being that kind of thing. For
example, the bird called the swallow. The substantial form of “swallowness” unites with matter so as
to organize it for the sake of being a swallow kind of thing. This also means that any dispositions or
faculties the swallow has by virtue of being that kind of thing is ultimately explained by the goal or
final cause of being a swallow. So, for instance, the goal of being a swallow is the cause of the
swallow’s ability to fly. Hence, on this account, a swallow flies for the sake of being a swallow.
Although this might be true, it does not say anything new or useful about swallows, and so it seemed
to Descartes that Scholastic philosophy and science was incapable of discovering any new or useful
knowledge.

Descartes rejected the use of substantial forms and their concomitant final causes in physics
precisely for this reason. Indeed, his essay Meteorology, that appeared alongside the Discourse on
Method, was intended to show that clearer and more fruitful explanations can be obtained without
reference to substantial forms but only by way of deductions from the configuration and motion of
parts. Hence, his point was to show that mechanistic principles are better suited for making progress
in the physical sciences. Another reason Descartes rejected substantial forms and final causes in
physics was his belief that these notions were the result of the confusion of the idea of the body with
that of the mind. In theSixth Replies, Descartes uses the Scholastic conception of gravity in a stone,
to make his point. On this account, a characteristic goal of being a stone was a tendency to move
toward the center of the earth. This explanation implies that the stone has knowledge of this goal, of
the center of the earth and of how to get there. But how can a stone know anything, since it does not
think? So, it is a mistake to ascribe mental properties like knowledge to entirely physical things. This
mistake should be avoided by clearly distinguishing the idea of the mind from the idea of the body.
Descartes considered himself to be the first to do this. His expulsion of the metaphysical principles of
substantial forms and final causes helped clear the way for Descartes’ new metaphysical principles
on which his modern, mechanistic physics was based.

The second fundamental point of difference Descartes had with the Scholastics was his denial of the
thesis that all knowledge must come from sensation. The Scholastics were devoted to the Aristotelian
tenet that everyone is born with a clean slate, and that all material for intellectual understanding
must be provided through sensation. Descartes, however, argued that since the senses sometimes
deceive, they cannot be a reliable source for knowledge. Furthermore, the truth of propositions based
on sensation is naturally probabilistic and the propositions, therefore, are doubtful premises when
used in arguments. Descartes was deeply dissatisfied with such uncertain knowledge. He then
replaced the uncertain premises derived from sensation with the absolute certainty of the clear and
distinct ideas perceived by the mind alone, as will be explained below.

b. Descartes’ Project
In the preface to the French edition of the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes uses a tree as a
metaphor for his holistic view of philosophy. “The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and
the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three
principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals” (AT IXB 14: CSM I 186). Although
Descartes does not expand much more on this image, a few other insights into his overall project can
be discerned. First, notice that metaphysics constitutes the roots securing the rest of the tree. For it is
in Descartes’ metaphysics where an absolutely certain and secure epistemological foundation is
discovered. This, in turn, grounds knowledge of the geometrical properties of bodies, which is the
basis for his physics. Second, physics constitutes the trunk of the tree, which grows up directly from
the roots and provides the basis for the rest of the sciences. Third, the sciences of medicine,
mechanics and morals grow out of the trunk of physics, which implies that these other sciences are
just applications of his mechanistic science to particular subject areas. Finally, the fruits of the
philosophy tree are mainly found on these three branches, which are the sciences most useful and
beneficial to humankind. However, an endeavor this grand cannot be conducted haphazardly but
should be carried out in an orderly and systematic way. Hence, before even attempting to plant this
tree, Descartes must first figure out a method for doing so.

3. Method
Aristotle and subsequent medieval dialecticians set out a fairly large, though limited, set of
acceptable argument forms known as “syllogisms” composed of a general or major premise, a
particular or minor premise and a conclusion. Although Descartes recognized that these syllogistic
forms preserve truth from premises to conclusion such that if the premises are true, then the
conclusion must be true, he still found them faulty. First, these premises are supposed to be known
when, in fact, they are merely believed, since they express only probabilities based on sensation.
Accordingly, conclusions derived from merely probable premises can only be probable themselves,
and, therefore, these probable syllogisms serve more to increase doubt rather than knowledge
Moreover, the employment of this method by those steeped in the Scholastic tradition had led to
such subtle conjectures and plausible arguments that counter-arguments were easily constructed,
leading to profound confusion. As a result, the Scholastic tradition had become such a confusing web
of arguments, counter-arguments and subtle distinctions that the truth often got lost in the cracks.
(Rules for the Direction of the Mind, AT X 364, 405-406 & 430: CSM I 11-12, 36 & 51-52).

Descartes sought to avoid these difficulties through the clarity and absolute certainty of geometrical-
style demonstration. In geometry, theorems are deduced from a set of self-evident axioms and
universally agreed upon definitions. Accordingly, direct apprehension of clear, simple and
indubitable truths (or axioms) by intuition and deductions from those truths can lead to new and
indubitable knowledge. Descartes found this promising for several reasons. First, the ideas of
geometry are clear and distinct, and therefore they are easily understood unlike the confused and
obscure ideas of sensation. Second, the propositions constituting geometrical demonstrations are not
probabilistic conjectures but are absolutely certain so as to be immune from doubt. This has the
additional advantage that any proposition derived from some one or combination of these absolutely
certain truths will itself be absolutely certain. Hence, geometry’s rules of inference preserve
absolutely certain truth from simple, indubitable and intuitively grasped axioms to their deductive
consequences unlike the probable syllogisms of the Scholastics.

The choice of geometrical method was obvious for Descartes given his previous success in applying
this method to other disciplines like optics. Yet his application of this method to philosophy was not
unproblematic due to a revival of ancient arguments for global or radical skepticism based on the
doubtfulness of human reasoning. But Descartes wanted to show that truths both intuitively grasped
and deduced are beyond this possibility of doubt. His tactic was to show that, despite the best
skeptical arguments, there is at least one intuitive truth that is beyond all doubt and from which the
rest of human knowledge can be deduced. This is precisely the project of Descartes’ seminal
work, Meditations on First Philosophy.

In the First Meditation, Descartes lays out several arguments for doubting all of his previously held
beliefs. He first observes that the senses sometimes deceive, for example, objects at a distance appear
to be quite small, and surely it is not prudent to trust someone (or something) that has deceived us
even once. However, although this may apply to sensations derived under certain circumstances,
doesn’t it seem certain that “I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing gown, holding
this piece of paper in my hands, and so on”? (AT VII 18: CSM II 13). Descartes’ point is that even
though the senses deceive us some of the time, what basis for doubt exists for the immediate belief
that, for example, you are reading this article? But maybe the belief of reading this article or of sitting
by the fireplace is not based on true sensations at all but on the false sensations found in dreams. If
such sensations are just dreams, then it is not really the case that you are reading this article but in
fact you are in bed asleep. Since there is no principled way of distinguishing waking life from dreams,
any belief based on sensation has been shown to be doubtful. This includes not only the mundane
beliefs about reading articles or sitting by the fire but even the beliefs of experimental science are
doubtful, because the observations upon which they are based may not be true but mere dream
images. Therefore, all beliefs based on sensation have been called into doubt, because it might all be
a dream.

This, however, does not pertain to mathematical beliefs, since they are not based on sensation but on
reason. For even though one is dreaming, for example, that, 2 + 3 = 5, the certainty of this
proposition is not called into doubt, because 2 + 3 = 5 whether the one believing it is awake or
dreaming. Descartes continues to wonder about whether or not God could make him believe there is
an earth, sky and other extended things when, in fact, these things do not exist at all. In fact, people
sometimes make mistakes about things they think are most certain such as mathematical
calculations. But maybe people are not mistaken just some of the time but all of the time such that
believing that 2 + 3 = 5 is some kind of persistent and collective mistake, and so the sum of 2 + 3 is
really something other than 5. However, such universal deception seems inconsistent with God’s
supreme goodness. Indeed, even the occasional deception of mathematical miscalculation also seems
inconsistent with God’s goodness, yet people do sometimes make mistakes. Then, in line with the
skeptics, Descartes supposes, for the sake of his method, that God does not exist, but instead there is
an evil demon with supreme power and cunning that puts all his efforts into deceiving him so that he
is always mistaken about everything, including mathematics.

In this way, Descartes called all of his previous beliefs into doubt through some of the best skeptical
arguments of his day But he was still not satisfied and decided to go a step further by considering
false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt. So, by the end of the First Meditation,
Descartes finds himself in a whirlpool of false beliefs. However, it is important to realize that these
doubts and the supposed falsehood of all his beliefs are for the sake of his method: he does not really
believe that he is dreaming or is being deceived by an evil demon; he recognizes that his doubt is
merely hyperbolic. But the point of this “methodological” or ‘hyperbolic” doubt is to clear the mind of
preconceived opinions that might obscure the truth. The goal then is to find something that cannot
be doubted even though an evil demon is deceiving him and even though he is dreaming. This first
indubitable truth will then serve as an intuitively grasped metaphysical “axiom” from which
absolutely certain knowledge can be deduced. For more, see Cartesian skepticism.

4. The Mind

a. Cogito, ergo sum

In the Second Meditation, Descartes tries to establish absolute certainty in his famous
reasoning: Cogito, ergo sum or “I think, therefore I am.” These Meditations are conducted from the
first person perspective, from Descartes.’ However, he expects his reader to meditate along with him
to see how his conclusions were reached. This is especially important in the Second
Meditation where the intuitively grasped truth of “I exist” occurs. So the discussion here of this truth
will take place from the first person or “I” perspective. All sensory beliefs had been found doubtful in
the previous meditation, and therefore all such beliefs are now considered false. This includes the
belief that I have a body endowed with sense organs. But does the supposed falsehood of this belief
mean that I do not exist? No, for if I convinced myself that my beliefs are false, then surely there
must be an “I” that was convinced. Moreover, even if I am being deceived by an evil demon, I must
exist in order to be deceived at all. So “I must finally conclude that the proposition, ‘I am,’ ‘I exist,’ is
necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (AT VII 25: CSM II 16-
17). This just means that the mere fact that I am thinking, regardless of whether or not what I am
thinking is true or false, implies that there must be something engaged in that activity, namely an “I.”
Hence, “I exist” is an indubitable and, therefore, absolutely certain belief that serves as an axiom
from which other, absolutely certain truths can be deduced.

b. The Nature of the Mind and its Ideas

The Second Meditation continues with Descartes asking, “What am I?” After discarding the
traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian concept of a human being as a rational animal due to the inherent
difficulties of defining “rational” and “animal,” he finally concludes that he is a thinking thing, a
mind: “A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines
and has sense perceptions” (AT VII 28: CSM II 19). In the Principles, part I, sections 32 and 48,
Descartes distinguishes intellectual perception and volition as what properly belongs to the nature of
the mind alone while imagination and sensation are, in some sense, faculties of the mind insofar as it
is united with a body. So imagination and sensation are faculties of the mind in a weaker sense than
intellect and will, since they require a body in order to perform their functions. Finally, in the Sixth
Meditation, Descartes claims that the mind or “I” is a non-extended thing. Now, since extension is
the nature of body, is a necessary feature of body, it follows that the mind is by its nature not a body
but an immaterial thing. Therefore, what I am is an immaterial thinking thing with the faculties of
intellect and will.

It is also important to notice that the mind is a substance and the modes of a thinking substance are
its ideas. For Descartes a substance is a thing requiring nothing else in order to exist. Strictly
speaking, this applies only to God whose existence is his essence, but the term “substance” can be
applied to creatures in a qualified sense. Minds are substances in that they require nothing except
God’s concurrence, in order to exist. But ideas are “modes” or “ways” of thinking, and, therefore,
modes are not substances, since they must be the ideas of some mind or other. So, ideas require, in
addition to God’s concurrence, some created thinking substance in order to exist (see Principles of
Philosophy, part I, sections 51 & 52). Hence the mind is an immaterial thinking substance, while its
ideas are its modes or ways of thinking.

Descartes continues on to distinguish three kinds of ideas at the beginning of the Third Meditation,
namely those that are fabricated, adventitious, or innate. Fabricated ideas are mere inventions of the
mind. Accordingly, the mind can control them so that they can be examined and set aside at will and
their internal content can be changed. Adventitious ideas are sensations produced by some material
thing existing externally to the mind. But, unlike fabrications, adventitious ideas cannot be examined
and set aside at will nor can their internal content be manipulated by the mind. For example, no
matter how hard one tries, if someone is standing next to a fire, she cannot help but feel the heat as
heat. She cannot set aside the sensory idea of heat by merely willing it as we can do with our idea of
Santa Claus, for example. She also cannot change its internal content so as to feel something other
than heat–say, cold. Finally, innate ideas are placed in the mind by God at creation. These ideas can
be examined and set aside at will but their internal content cannot be manipulated. Geometrical
ideas are paradigm examples of innate ideas. For example, the idea of a triangle can be examined and
set aside at will, but its internal content cannot be manipulated so as to cease being the idea of a
three-sided figure. Other examples of innate ideas would be metaphysical principles like “what is
done cannot be undone,” the idea of the mind, and the idea of God.

Descartes’ idea of God will be discussed momentarily, but let’s consider his claim that the mind is
better known than the body. This is the main point of the wax example found in the Second
Meditation. Here, Descartes pauses from his methodological doubt to examine a particular piece of
wax fresh from the honeycomb:

It has not yet quite lost the taste of the honey; it retains some of the scent of flowers from which it was
gathered; its color shape and size are plain to see; it is hard, cold and can be handled without difficulty; if
you rap it with your knuckle it makes a sound. (AT VII 30: CSM II 20)

The point is that the senses perceive certain qualities of the wax like its hardness, smell, and so forth.
But, as it is moved closer to the fire, all of these sensible qualities change. “Look: the residual taste is
eliminated, the smell goes away, the color changes, the shape is lost, the size increases, it becomes
liquid and hot” (AT VII 30: CSM II 20). However, despite these changes in what the senses perceive
of the wax, it is still judged to be the same wax now as before. To warrant this judgment, something
that does not change must have been perceived in the wax.

This reasoning establishes at least three important points. First, all sensation involves some sort of
judgment, which is a mental mode. Accordingly, every sensation is, in some sense, a mental mode,
and “the more attributes [that is, modes] we discover in the same thing or substance, the clearer is
our knowledge of that substance” (AT VIIIA 8: CSM I 196). Based on this principle, the mind is
better known than the body, because it has ideas about both extended and mental things and not just
of extended things, and so it has discovered more modes in itself than in bodily substances. Second,
this is also supposed to show that what is unchangeable in the wax is its extension in length, breadth
and depth, which is not perceivable by the senses but by the mind alone. The shape and size of the
wax are modes of this extension and can, therefore, change. But the extension constituting this wax
remains the same and permits the judgment that the body with the modes existing in it after being
moved by the fire is the same body as before even though all of its sensible qualities have changed.
One final lesson is that Descartes is attempting to wean his reader from reliance on sense images as a
source for, or an aid to, knowledge. Instead, people should become accustomed to thinking without
images in order to clearly understand things not readily or accurately represented by them, for
example, God and the mind. So, according to Descartes, immaterial, mental things are better known
and, therefore, are better sources of knowledge than extended things.
Natural Law, Natural Rights, and Private
Property
In this essay I present a sketch of a classical natural law approach to natural rights and private
property. The approach is “classical” insofar as it is grounded in metaphysical assumptions of
the sort defended by ancient and medieval philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas —
assumptions very different from the paradigmatically modern, post-Cartesian metaphysical
assumptions that underlie other so-called natural law theories, such as those of early modern
thinkers like John Locke or the contemporary “new natural law theory” associated with John
Finnis and Robert P. George.

How exactly do the classical metaphysical assumptions in question differ from modern ones? To
paint with an admittedly broad brush, classical philosophy tends towardessentialism, while
modern philosophy tends toward nominalism and related views; that is to say, classical
philosophers tended to take the view that things have essences or natures as a matter of objective
fact, while modern philosophers have tended to hold either that things have no essences or that
their essences are conventional, made by man rather than found in nature. Classical philosophy
also tends toward a teleological view of nature, while modern philosophy tends toward
a mechanistic one; or in other words, classical philosophers generally held that things are
naturally oriented toward the realization of certain ends or goals (“final causes,” as followers of
Aristotle famously call them), while modern philosophers generally deny this.
It is often claimed that the classical metaphysical theses in question were refuted by modern
science. That is not the case. In fact early modern philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes, and
Locke rejected the assumptions in question for a combination of political and philosophical
reasons, and then simply redefined science in such a way that no explanation that made reference
to essences (as classical thinkers understood that concept) or final causes would be allowed to
count as scientific. And in fact the actual results of modern science are perfectly compatible with
these classical metaphysical theses when rightly understood (as they rarely are by contemporary
writers who lack expertise in the history of ancient or medieval philosophy). Indeed,
contemporary “new essentialist” metaphysicians and philosophers of science like Brian Ellis,
Nancy Cartwright, C. B. Martin, John Heil, and George Molnar have advocated a return to
something like these older categories precisely as a way of making sense of modern science.
These are, needless to say, large issues, and I have defended classical metaphysics at length, and
polemically, in my book The Last Superstition — and non-polemically in my book Aquinas.
Natural law
The differences between classical and modern philosophers over metaphysics entail, at any rate,
crucial differences over morality. For the classical tradition, the essence or nature of a thing
determines an objective standard of goodness. To take a simple example, the fact that the
essence of a Euclidean triangle is to be a closed plane figure with three straight sides entails that
a triangle drawn slowly and carefully on art paper with a fine tip pen and a straight edge is
a good triangle and one drawn hastily in crayon on the cracked plastic seat of a moving bus
a bad one, because the former will at least closely approximate the essence while the latter (with
its inevitable broken and wavy lines) will fall far short of doing so. Similarly, there is an obvious
sense in which a whole and healthy squirrel which likes to scamper up trees and gather nuts for
the winter is a good squirrel while a sickly squirrel missing a tail or a leg which prefers to stay in
a cage eating toothpaste on Ritz crackers is a bad squirrel. For the former more closely
approximates the normal anatomy and pattern of life that nature has set for squirrels, as defined
in part by the ends, goals, or tendencies (such as scampering about and gathering nuts) that are
typical of the species.
Obviously the examples given so far are not examples of moral goodness per se. (It would make
no sense to accuse a badly drawn triangle or an injured squirrel of an ethical lapse!) But for the
classical tradition in philosophy they illustrate a general concept of goodness of which the moral
kind is a species. As the contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethicist Philippa Foot has emphasized
(and as the squirrel example indicates), with living things especially, their “natural goodness” or
lack thereof is to be defined in largely teleologicalterms. The lioness who nurtures her cubs is
a good lioness because she fulfills (to that extent anyway) the ends set for her by nature, while
the lioness who allows her cubs to starve is to that extent defective, just as a three-legged squirrel
or badly drawn triangle is defective. Unlike the goodness or defectiveness of triangles and the
like, that of a living thing has to do not only with the static realization of some archetypical
shape or structure, but also with the development over time of certain paradigmatic behavioral
patterns. In human beings, this standard of goodness or defectiveness takes on a moral character
to the extent that our realization of, or failure to realize, the ends set for us by nature results from
our freely chosen actions. Hence, to take a simple example, the human intellect is according to
the classical tradition naturally oriented toward the pursuit of truth; that is its purpose, its final
cause, even if it does not always realize that purpose (just as it is the natural end or purpose of
the heart to pump blood, even if it sometimes fails to do so because of genetic defect or injury, or
because Hannibal Lecter decides to make of it a meal instead). For us to fulfill this end or
purpose is for us to flourish as the kind of beings we are, while to fail to do so is to that extent to
atrophy as a human being. It follows that to pursue truth is good for us and to fail to do so is
bad, and that those who pursue it are to that extent good or virtuous while those who do not are
to that extent bad or vicious.
Now practical reason, on this view, has as its own natural end the pursuit of what the intellect
perceives to be good for us and the avoidance of what it takes to be bad. Hence Aquinas’s
famous claim that the self-evident first principle of natural law is that good is to be done and
pursued and evil is to be avoided. Aquinas was not suggesting that it is self-evident that we are
bound by the moral law. What he means is that it is self-evident that whenever we choose to do
something, we do so because we regard it as good in some way or other, and that when we avoid
doing something we do so because we regard it as bad in some way or other. This is true even of
someone who is convinced that what he is doing is morally wrong. The mugger who admits that
robbery is evil nevertheless takes his victim’s wallet because he thinks it would be good to have
some money to pay for his drugs; the drug addict who knows that his habit is wrong and
degrading nevertheless thinks it would be bad to suffer the unpleasantness of withdrawal; and so
forth. We are simply built to pursue good and avoid evil in this thin sense. But suppose that the
intellect comes to perceive that what is in fact good for us is to realize the ends that nature has set
for us and to avoid anything that frustrates the realization of those ends. Then to the extent that
we are rational we will strive to realize those ends. In short, reason is built to pursue what it
takes to be good; what is in fact good is the realization of the ends set for us by nature; and thus a
rational person apprised of the facts will seek to realize those ends. In this sense to be moral is
simply to act rationally and to be immoral is to be irrational. The obligatory force of morality
thus follows from the natural end or final cause of reason, just as the content of morality follows
from the natural ends or final causes of our various capacities more generally. Morality, for the
classical philosophical tradition, is thus doubly dependent on an essentialist and teleological
conception of nature.

Natural rights
Where do natural rights come in? The basic argument is this. We are rationally obliged to
pursue what is good for us and to avoid what is bad, where “good” and “bad” are to be
understood in terms of the classical metaphysical picture described above. Hence we are obliged
(for example) to pursue truth and avoid error, to sustain our lives and health and avoid what is
damaging to them, and so forth (ignoring for present purposes the various qualifications and
complications a fully developed natural law theory would have to spell out). The force and
content of these obligations derive from our nature as human beings. Now it is part of that
nature that we are social animals, as Aristotle famously noted. That is to say, we naturally live in
communities with other human beings and depend on them for our well-being in various ways,
both negative (such as our need not to be harmed by others) and positive (such as our need for
various kinds of assistance from them). Most obviously, we are related to others by virtue of
being parents or children, siblings, grandparents or grandchildren, cousins, and so on. Within the
larger societies that collections of families give rise to, other kinds of relationships form, such as
that of being a friend, an employee or employer, a citizen, and so forth. To the extent that some
of these relationships are natural to us, their flourishing is part of what is naturally good for us.
For example, as Foot has noted in her book Natural Goodness, “like lionesses, human parents are
defective if they do not teach their young the skills that they need to survive.” It is part of our
nature to become parents, and part of our nature that while we are children we depend on our
own parents. Accordingly, it is as a matter of objective fact good for us to be good parents to our
children and bad for us to be bad parents, just as it is (even more obviously) an objective fact that
it is good for children to be taken care of by their parents. Now if it is good for a parent to
provide for his children, then given that we are obliged to do what is good for us, it follows that a
parent has an obligation to provide for them. Similarly, since given their need for instruction,
discipline, and the like, it is good for children to obey and respect their parents, it follows that
they have an obligation to obey and respect them. But an obligation on the part of a person A
toward another person B entails a right on the part of B against A. It follows in turn, then, that
children have a right to be provided for by their parents, and parents have a right to be obeyed
and respected by their children. And since the obligations that generate the rights in question are
obligations under natural law (rather than positive law) it follows that they arenatural rights,
grounded not in human convention but in human nature.
Other obligations we have under natural law toward various other human beings will similarly
generate various other natural rights. At the most general level, we are all obliged to refrain from
interfering with others’ attempts to fulfill the various moral obligations placed on them by the
natural law; the most basic natural right is the right to do what is good and not to be coerced into
doing evil. Individual talents and circumstances inevitably leave open several possible equally
legitimate ways in which one might concretely pursue the goods set for him by nature, so that the
natural law also entails a right to a significant measure of personal liberty (e.g. with respect to
choice of spouse, career path, where to live, and so forth). And of course we cannot pursue any
good or fulfill any obligation at all if our very lives could be taken from us by others as they saw
fit, so that the natural law entails that every human being (or at least every innocent human
being) has a right not to be killed. Yet other rights would follow from various other aspects of
the ends set for us by nature.
This gives us some idea of how rights are generated under classical natural law theory, though it
is, of course, very general, and natural law theorists would add a great many further details,
complications, and qualifications to this basic account. It is particularly important to emphasize
that the classical natural law approach to rights theory puts definite limits on what we can be said
to have a natural right to. While the very concept of a right entails a certain measure of liberty,
that liberty cannot be absolute; for since the point of natural rights is to enable us to realize the
ends set for us by nature, there cannot, even in principle, be a natural right to do what is contrary
to the realization of those ends. In short, there cannot be a natural right to do wrong. That
does not mean that classical natural law theory entails a paternalistic nanny state or the
institution of a morality police. There might be all sorts of reasons, including moral ones, why
that would be a bad idea even from a natural law point of view. The point is just that there can
be no question of a natural right to indulge in vice, even if there might be pragmatic grounds, or
moral grounds apart from rights-based ones, to tolerate such indulgence.

In this paper I have used several different definitions of natural law, often without
indicating which definition I was using, often without knowing or caring which
definition I was using. Among the definitions that I use are:

 The medieval/legal definition: Natural law cannot be defined in the way that
positive law is defined, and to attempt to do so plays into the hands of the
enemies of freedom. Natural law is best defined by pointing at particular
examples, as a biologist defines a species by pointing at a particular animal, a
type specimen preserved in formalin. (This definition is the most widely used,
and is probably the most useful definition for lawyers)
 The historical state of nature definition: Natural law is that law which
corresponds to a spontaneous order in the absence of a state and which is
enforced, (in the absence of better methods), by individual unorganized
violence, in particular the law that historically existed (in so far as any law
existed) during the dark ages among the mingled barbarians that overran the
Roman Empire.
 The medieval / philosophical definition: Natural law is that law, which it is
proper to uphold by unorganized individual violence, whether a state is present
or absent, and for which, in the absence of orderly society, it is proper to punish
violators by unorganized individual violence. Locke gives the example of Cain,
in the absence of orderly society, and the example of a mugger, where the state
exists, but is not present at the crime. Note Locke's important distinction
between the state and society. For example trial by jury originated in places and
times where there was no state power, or where the state was violently hostile
to due process and the rule of law but was too weak and distant to entirely
suppress it.
  The scientific/ sociobiological/ game theoretic/ evolutionary definition: Natural
law is, or follows from, an ESS for the use of force: Conduct which violates
natural law is conduct such that, if a man were to use individual unorganized
violence to prevent such conduct, or, in the absence of orderly society, use
individual unorganized violence to punish such conduct, then such violence
would not indicate that the person using such violence, (violence in accord with
natural law) is a danger to a reasonable man. This definition is equivalent to the
definition that comes from the game theory of iterated three or more player non
zero sum games, applied to evolutionary theory. The idea of law, of actions
being lawful or unlawful, has the emotional significance that it does have,
because this ESS for the use of force is part of our nature.

Natural rights theories

The existence of natural rights has been asserted by different individuals on different premises, such as a
priori philosophical reasoning or religious principles. For example,Immanuel Kant claimed to derive
natural rights through reason alone. The Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, is based upon the
"self-evident" truth that "all men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". [7]

Likewise, different philosophers and statesmen have designed different lists of what they believe to be
natural rights; almost all include the right to life and liberty as the two highest priorities. H. L. A.
Hart argued that if there are any rights at all, there must be the right to liberty, for all the others would
depend upon this. T. H. Green argued that “if there are such things as rights at all, then, there must be a
right to life and liberty, or, to put it more properly to free life.” [8] John Locke emphasized "life, liberty and
property" as primary. However, despite Locke's influential defense of the right of revolution, Thomas
Jefferson substituted "pursuit of happiness" in place of "property" in the United States Declaration of
Independence.

Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) included a discussion of natural rights in his moral and political philosophy.
Hobbes' conception of natural rights extended from his conception of man in a "state of nature". Thus he
argued that the essential natural (human) right was "to use his own power, as he will himself, for the
preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which
in his own judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto." (Leviathan.
1,XIV)

Hobbes sharply distinguished this natural "liberty", from natural "laws", described generally as "a precept,
or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his
life, or taketh away the means of preserving his life; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may best be
preserved." (ibid.)

In his natural state, according to Hobbes, man's life consisted entirely of liberties and not at all of laws –
"It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has the right to every thing; even to one another's body.
And therefore, as long as this natural Right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security
to any man... of living out the time, which Nature ordinarily allow men to live." (ibid.)

This would lead inevitably to a situation known as the "war of all against all", in which human beings kill,
steal and enslave others in order to stay alive, and due to their natural lust for "Gain", "Safety" and
"Reputation". Hobbes reasoned that this world of chaos created by unlimited rights was highly
undesirable, since it would cause human life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". As such, if
humans wish to live peacefully they must give up most of their natural rights and create moral obligations
in order to establish political and civil society. This is one of the earliest formulations of the theory of
government known as the social contract.

Hobbes objected to the attempt to derive rights from "natural law," arguing that law ("lex") and right ("jus")
though often confused, signify opposites, with law referring to obligations, while rights refer to the
absence of obligations. Since by our (human) nature, we seek to maximize our well being, rights are prior
to law, natural or institutional, and people will not follow the laws of nature without first being subjected to
a sovereign power, without which all ideas of right and wrong are meaningless – "Therefore before the
names of Just and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power, to compel men equally to
the performance of their Covenants..., to make good that Propriety, which by mutual contract men
acquire, in recompense of the universal Right they abandon: and such power there is none before the
erection of the Commonwealth." (Leviathan. 1, XV)

This marked an important departure from medieval natural law theories which gave precedence to
obligations over rights.

John Locke
John Locke (1632–1704) was another prominent Western philosopher who conceptualized rights as
natural and inalienable. Like Hobbes, Locke was a major social contract thinker. He said that man's
natural rights are life, liberty, and property. It was once conventional wisdom that Locke greatly influenced
the American Revolutionary War with his writings of natural rights, but this claim has been the subject of
protracted dispute in recent decades. For example, the historian Ray Forrest Harvey declared that
Jefferson and Locke were at "two opposite poles" in their political philosophy, as evidenced by Jefferson’s
use in the Declaration of Independence of the phrase "pursuit of happiness" instead of "property." [9]More
recently, the eminent[10] legal historian John Phillip Reid has deplored contemporary scholars’ "misplaced
emphasis on John Locke," arguing that American revolutionary leaders saw Locke as a commentator on
established constitutional principles.[11][12] Thomas Pangle has defended Locke's influence on the
Founding, claiming that historians who argue to the contrary either misrepresent the classical republican
alternative to which they say the revolutionary leaders adhered, do not understand Locke, or point to
someone else who was decisively influenced by Locke.[13] This position has also been sustained by
Michael Zuckert.[14][15][16]

According to Locke there are three natural rights:

 Life: everyone is entitled to live once they are created.

 Liberty: everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn't conflict with the first
right.
 Estate: everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn't
conflict with the first two rights.

The social contract is an agreement between members of a country to live within a shared system of
laws. Specific forms of government are the result of the decisions made by these persons acting in their
collective capacity. Government is instituted to make laws that protect these three natural rights. If a
government does not properly protect these rights, it can be overthrown.

Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine (1731–1809) further elaborated on natural rights in his influential work Rights of
Man (1791), emphasizing that rights cannot be granted by any charter because this would legally imply
they can also be revoked and under such circumstances they would be reduced to privileges:

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of
taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in
the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. ... They...consequently are instruments of
injustice. The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and
sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only
mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to
exist.