Facts : 1 Subject-centred reason in early modern philosophy The early modern era was marked by a number of significant changes in the understanding of reason, starting in Europe
Facts : 2 One of the most important of these changes involved a change in the metaphysical understanding of human beings
Facts : 3 Scientists and philosophers began to question the teleological understanding of the world
Facts : 4 Nature was no longer assumed to be human-like, with its own aims or reason, and human nature was no longer assumed to work according to anything other than the same laws of nature which affect inanimate things
Facts : 5 This new understanding eventually displaced the previous world view that derived from a spiritual understanding of the universe
Facts : 6 Any grounds of knowledge outside that understanding was, therefore, subject to doubt
Facts : 7 This eventually became known as epistemological or subject-centred reason, because it is based on the knowing subject, who perceives the rest of the world and itself as a set of objects to be studied, and successfully mastered by applying the knowledge accumulated through such study
Facts : 8 Breaking with tradition and many thinkers after him, Descartes explicitly did not divide the incorporeal soul into parts, such as reason and intellect, describing them as one indivisible incorporeal entity
Facts : 9 A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes described reason as a broader version of addition and subtraction which is not limited to numbers
Facts : 10 Similar to Descartes, Hobbes asserted that No discourse whatsoever, can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past, or to come but that sense and memory is absolute knowledge
Facts : 11 In the late 17th century, through the 18th century, John Locke and David Hume developed Descartes line of thought still further
Facts : 12 Hume took it in an especially skeptical direction, proposing that there could be no possibility of deducing relationships of cause and effect, and therefore no knowledge is based on reasoning alone, even if it seems otherwise
Facts : 13 Hume famously remarked that, We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason
Facts : 14 Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them
Facts : 15 Hume also took his definition of reason to unorthodox extremes by arguing, unlike his predecessors, that human reason is not qualitatively different