Mavi Atlas

Öz

Our current article, as the title indicate, deals with comparisons made by four philosophers on sensible qualities in the Early Modern Age. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities constitutes the principal axis of these comparisons in the Early Modern Age. It is occasionally witnessed that to be the distinction’s pioneer in the Early Modern Age was exclusively attributed to Locke. This attribution has an important mistake: it was indeed Galilei who pioneered in the Early Modern Age the distinction between primary and secondary qualities; Locke details this distinction. We began our article with the historical background of the doctrine of sensible qualities and explained that the roots of the doctrine date back to Aristotle in Antiquity. We ascertained that the doctrine was transferred to the Early Modern Age through the tradition of Scholastic philosophy. Following the distinction made by Galilei between primary and secondary qualities, we examined the comparisons of Hobbes, Descartes, Locke and Berkeley: Hobbes pointed out to the “great deception” of the senses that make us think that their qualities exist really in the world, and argued that all the sensible qualities, without exception, are misleading phenomena that do not reflect reality. He resolutely refused to impose epistemological objectivity status on any type of sensible qualities. He argued that primary qualities as well as secondary ones were subjective. We ascertained that a certain distinction exists between primary and secondary qualities in Descartes’ philosophy, although not so named. But he argued that, unlike Hobbes, primary qualities are objective and secondary qualities are subjective. We observed that Locke brought to agenda the tertiary qualities as a class of sensible qualities that were not found in his predecessors, and also that Berkeley subordinated the primary qualities to the subject who perceives, as much as the secondary qualities.