Daniel Schulthess

In the concrete exercise of practical reason, certain pieces of knowledge are required: they relate to the obligations to which the agent is committed (according to the deontological orientation in practical philosophy), to the actions themselves, as well as to the situations in which the agent operates. It appears that these pieces of knowledge are themselves required by what may be called here “second-order obligations”. The purpose of the article is to identify the place of these obligations and to show the link that they establish between practical and theoretical reason.

The article proposes a comparison between the critique that Antoine Arnault (1612-1694) raises against Malebranche’s views on perception and the critique that Thomas Reid (1710-1796) moves against the theory of ideas defended by Berkeley and Hume. Both Arnault and Reid advocate a position according to which our perceptions allow us to have direct knowledge of material objects existing independently of us and not only of representations of them. Arnault proposes different arguments to refute Malebranche. In doing that he doesn’t completely reject the Cartesian representational account of perception. Reid is more radical: in order to refuse Berkeley and Hume he rejects the whole theory of ideas, and focuses instead on the mental powers through which we cognize reality.