The unbearable lightness of the Enlightenment …

… Perception Is Everything. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Pagden claims that Scholastic natural law theory was inadequate insofar as it rested on a dubious doctrine of “innate ideas,” and he devotes a few pages to criticizing the notion. This is embarrassingly incompetent. In fact, as good Aristotelians, Scholastic natural law theorists like Aquinas explicitly rejected the doctrine of innate ideas. (“There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses” is a famous Scholastic maxim.) And in fact, it was some of the heroes of the Enlightenment thinkers — rationalist philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz — who championed innate ideas.