CONDILLAC
by
F.C.T.
Moore
Department
of Philosophy
The
University of Hong Kong
(This article was written in 1996,
in the mistaken belief that it had been commissioned by an encyclopedia.
I put it here in case it is useful to anyone.)
brief outline
Condillac was a major but independent figure of Enlightenment France.
His first book was subtitled "a supplement to Mr Locke's Essay on Human
Understanding", and he has often been depicted as the thinker who brought
British Empiricism to France. However, he differed from Locke in
several crucial ways.
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First, he claimed that all mental operations could be derived from
sensation alone, rejecting reflection as a source of ideas.
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Second, he took Locke's attack on innate ideas a major step further,
by denying the existence of any innate faculties. Mental faculties
too (e.g. attention and memory) were themselves generated from the occurrence
of simple sensations.
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Third, where Locke claimed that the function of language was to communicate
ideas which could exist independently of it, Condillac insisted that the
function of language was constitutive in their formation.
-
This claim culminated in the view that knowledge itself is a well-made
language, and that the basic form of a well-made language is algebra, which
consists of tautological propositions.
Condillac influenced the encyclopedists in his own time,
and the idéologues after him. Nevertheless, Condillac's "empiricism"
is tempered by his putting forward, in a posthumous work, an early form
of finitism in mathematics. The metaphysical implications of this were
already prefigured in one of his earliest treatises, published anonymously,
in which he gave an a priori argument for the existence of "monads".
Click for an account of Condillac's life
and thought, or for a bibliography.
