‘Ideas’ as the new criterion of truth

Abstract

History of Ideas is a subject which deals with abstract entities. In dealing, for example, with such a question as ‘The Idea of Europe’, historians generally describe the set of conditions which could explain causally or conceptually ‘a certain state of consciousness’, ‘a sense of belonging’, ‘a sense of identity’, in terms of religious, cultural, political, or economic development. Most of the distinguished contributors to this first issue of the Journal present the rise of ‘The Idea of Europe’ around the seventeenth century, by assuming that what is clear and distinct is the term ‘idea’ but what is obscure (and needs therefore to be clarified) is the expression ‘Idea of Europe’. However, in the present article, we shall consider the term ‘idea’ itself: we shall elucidate how it was used by philosophers and understood by their readers at the end of the seventeenth century. To this end, we have chosen to examine how the term ‘idea’ was used by John Locke, whose Essay is said to have been responsible for the dissemination of the word among philosophers and men of letters both in England and throughout the whole of Europe. Furthermore, Locke is even held responsible for the adoption of the word ‘idea’ into common language. But it is especially for his use of the word in his philosophical writings that Thomas Reid criticizes Locke, Reid argues that, although Descartes had tried to discard Aristotle’s occult entities from philo_ sophy, he only partially succeeded, so that ‘ideas’ simply perpetuate these entities in another form. Recently Locke seems to have come in for more criticism along similar lines. In sum, not only eighteenth-century authors, but also some twentieth-century ones take the language of ideas as leading to philosophical confusion. Our analysis, on the other hand, which is based on the history of the term ‘idea’ during the seventeenth century, will try to recapture how the very term came to embody the new logical criterion of truth. In fact, this new use of the term coincided with the coming of the New Age in Europe.