Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
1714-1780 · French Enlightenment · Obscure
Condillac was a French abbe who pushed Locke's empiricism as far as it would go. His test case was a marble statue given one sense at a time, smell first, then the rest, so he could watch a mind assemble itself power by power. He argued that from raw sensation alone you can build attention, memory, judgment and the feeling of being a self, with nothing added from anywhere else. Every mental faculty is sensation transformed.
Signature
The position Condillac is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Universals
- leans Nominalism
- Knowledge
- Sense Experience
Positions on the 2 axes the sources answer
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
18 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Condillac refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Economy
- Market Capitalism
What is the ideal organization of economic life? - Language
- Representation
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Human Nature
- Tabula Rasa
What is human nature?