Justification and Crisis of Modern Science - Essay Example

He clearly understood the Deists and was greatly influenced by the brilliant Unitarians in social concepts. Rene Descartes on the other hand was known to be the vicar of modern science. He initiated a new clear means of thinking about science and philosophy through ignoring all notions centered on supposition or emotional conviction and concurring with the ideas proved by direct observation (Dunn, 1999). The ultimate aim of this paper is to examine how John Locke attempted to justify modern science in terms of bringing in his own ideas and views as a way to bridge the gap between Descarte’s res cogitans and res extensa.

It also examines the way he was opposed by several other scholars Locke’s Justification of Modern Science John Locke was one of the most influential especially in An Essay about Human Understanding (1690), fundamentally rejected the Cartesian theory of the continuation of innate notions – like that of God, or time without end – and upholded that the infant during birth has no any form of knowledge and he compared it to a blank page, and in severe terms, it does not stay alive yet. It is important to note that when he selects the subject of his title, Locke never used the term “mind” which could propose a notion of something really stays alive like an object or a permanent structure (Dunn, 1999).

In opposition to that, he chose the term “understanding” which proposes the idea of a continous process. What he meant here is that a child is never born with any knowledge and he only gets to understand things once hegrows up. This is because Locke believed that knowledge is mainly based on learning from “expereince”. According to him, a newly born baby has no form of expereince therefore has no type of knowledge. Although Locke understood that expereince depicts two forms – one centered on “reflection” or reasoning and the other on “sensation”, he openly implied that all automated expereinces are secondary derived from those obtained through the senses (Dunn, 1999).

This happens even if the mind may generate completely new forms of automated expereince. This means that reflection is not only the meager copy of sensation, although its natural fabricis developed from it. It is clear from the theory of Human Understanding that Locke supported Modern science which suggests similar notions about human beings. Modern science assumes a child to be of little knowledge who does what he does not understand. For example, a baby can relieve himself and still eat the same waste because he doe not understand what he is doing.

At the same time, a child can dare touch fire or hot substance and until it burns him is when he realizes that that is dangerous. Therefore, modern science and Jonk Locke’s theory of Human Understanding are more less the same because they contain same notions about human being. Although Locke was sometimes depicted as a christian due to his attendance and knowledge about church, he evidently attempted to justify modern science. Moreover, his other influential theory is that of availability of simple and complicated ideas.

According to him, both of them belong to fields of expereince (Dunn, 1999). While simple notions are basically data that is received by the mind meaning that it is non-reducible to more basic ones. Complicated notions on the other hand are made up of a combination of basic ones. This theory was very instrumental during the aristotle