Hobbes attaches his nominalism to the ontology of material substance;
this in turn opens still further controversies. The Cambridge Platonists sprang
to the defense of religion by attacking belief in a material reality, as if it could
be known without going through subjective ideas. Locke in turn (who ap-
pears at the intersection of the networks of both the Cambridge Neoplatonic
circle and the Hobbesian-Cartesian materialists) put forward a moderated
version of sensory empiricism. Locke recognized not only particular sensory
experiences but also particular ideas which come from them, followed by
general ideas which arise by abstracting the resemblances among particular
ideas. The difficulties which Locke opened up (as to in what sense resemblance
may be understood) became fruitful ground for a number of other philosophies
in the next generations of his network, including those of Berkeley (who
rejected the realist underpinnings entirely) and Hume (who ended with the
defense of commonsense realism as resting on nothing but psychological pro-
pensities). Difficulties in accounting for the universal aspect in experience have
remained unsolved; after Hume the attention space of Western philosophers
generally turned to other disputes.
We could make another set of world comparisons about recurrent deep
troubles found in the Indian sequence, such as the relations among multiple
substances. Such issues are even more obviously entwined with the dynamics
of religious positions. This brings us to the third major cause driving the
epistemology-metaphysics sequence.monotheism as philosophers’ puzzle
A long-standing tradition holds theist religion inimical to intellectual advance.
The historical consciousness of liberal anglophone philosophy takes its sign-
posts from a series of disputes along this divide, from Abelard’s condemnation
for heresy, down through the triumphantly secularized schools of the 1930s
and thereafter. This conception makes for poor sociology of ideas, reducing a
multi-dimensional process of structured oppositions into a single-line evolu-
tion, and all too glibly identifying that line with rationality and with empirical
science.
The onset of rapid-discovery science in Europe provided a jolt leading to
a renewed round of philosophical creativity, but this was essentially a separa-
tion of networks and a shift in the organizational base, leading to internal
realignment in the philosophical attention space; contrary to the ideologies of
contemporary philosophers, it was not the substitution of scientific method for
core philosophical tools and puzzles. The revolution of rapid-discovery science
happened to coincide with the period of European secularization in the stale-
mate of religious conflicts; and still later the wresting of control of the univer-
sity base from theologians into the hands of research scholars—philosophers,
scientists, and humanists alike—generated a united front ideology of the forces830 •^ Meta-reflections