Molyneux's Problem And It's Philosophical Discussions In The Eighteenth Century

Molyneux's Problem was formulated by William Molyneux in 1688 in one of his letters to Locke. At that time, the answers to this problem are purely a way of thinking. With the development of science and philosophy, Molyneux's Problem gradually became the topic of other subjects, such as neurophysiology, developmental psychology and other disciplines each have different answers to the problem.Current researches on the Molyneux's Problem are mainly from the foreign scholars. They not only discuss the background of the problem and its philosophical application, but also combine them with some modern positivism methods, such as cognitive science and experimental research methods, to make new exploration on this problem. These answers are not only from the perspective of historical development, but also extended to other disciplines such as cognitive science, developmental psychology, neurophysiology and other relevant disciplines, based on Molyneux's Problem.In this paper, we focus our research on the philosophical discussion in the eighteenth century. There were so many influential philosophers who had different answers about the issue. We will divide the answers into two camps. The first group, such as Willam Molyneux, Locke, Berkeley and Reid, had given the negative answers to this problem, although each of them took a different way from others among the first camp. The second camp, including Edward Synge, Henry Lee, Leibniz, and Francis Hutcheson, had given the positive answers to this problem. We discuss the main idea about these answers. Finally, this paper analyzes the reasons why the answer to Molyneux's Problem failed and point out its significance. Basically, there are two sides on the failure: First of all, there is a formidable difficulty on the interpretation of Molyneux's Problem. Secondly, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the nature of the philosophical exploration to this problem was doomed to failure. In other words, being as thought experiments and lacking of empirical studies of scientific experiments, the solutions about Molyneux's Problem was destined to failure. However, the philosophical discussions about Molyneux's Problem in eighteenth century were of great significance in science and philosophy. They have two aspects. Firstly, based on the scientific exploration on this problem, it makes great progress on physiology, neuroscience and cognitive science. Secondly, it has greatly promoted the development of philosophy itself,which makes Molyneux's Problem not a pure thought experiment any more, and promotes further development on this problem.