Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Associate Professor, Cultural and Social Research Institute
Abstract
In John Locke's thought, through an active function, the mind synthesizes sensible and successive forms acquired by internal and external senses; and, makes scientific (mental) objects against external ones. In this way, it finds quidditive concepts of objects. Then, the power of understanding selects some common ideas which concern some similar object, and introduces them as essentials of such objects, and thus as their "types". According to this view, components of types are selected by us and they are, therefore, products of selection and mind's contract.
On the contrary, according to Kant, the mind is merely abstracting the final and pure forms of objects or their types and genera. According to this approach, reflective judgment, in a complete action and far from a priori concepts and principles of understanding, reflects upon types of objects, and unites objects and a lot of laws of experience through abstracting types and genera. This position, according to which such universal forms are fully mental and non-cognitive and ascribed to the supersensible substrate of nature or nature in itself, is a realist one; and, it is, therefore, against Locke's contractualism; though neither Locke's contractualism nor Kant's realism is described in an extremist way. The present writing seeks to describe the opposite positions of the two philosophers concerning the mind's contribution in acquisition of types.
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