Condillac Étienne Bonnot de (1714–80), French philosopher, an empiricist who was considered the great analytical mind of his generation. Close to Rousseau and Diderot, he stayed within the church. He is closely (perhaps excessively) identified with the image of the statue that, in the Traité des sensations (Treatise on Sense Perception, 1754), he endows with the five senses to explain how perceptions are assimilated and produce understanding (cf. also his Treatise on the Origins of Human Knowledge, 1746). He maintains a critical distance from precursors: he adopts Locke’s tabula rasa but from his first work to Logique (Logic, 1780) insists on the creative role of the mind as it analyzes and compares sense impressions. His Traité des animaux (Treatise on Animals, 1755), which includes a proof of the existence of God, considers sensate creatures rather than Descartes’s animaux machines and sees God only as a final cause. He reshapes Leibniz’s monads in the Monadologie (Monadology, 1748, rediscovered in 1980). In the Langue des calculs (Language of Numbers, 1798) he proposes mathematics as a model of clear analysis. The origin of language and creation of symbols eventually became his major concern. His break with metaphysics in the Traité des systèmes (Treatise on Systems, 1749) has been overemphasized, but Condillac does replace rational constructs with sense experience and reflection. His empiricism has been mistaken for materialism, his clear analysis for simplicity. The ‘ideologues,’ Destutt de Tracy and Laromiguière, found Locke in his writings. Jefferson admired him. Maine de Biran, while critical, was indebted to him for concepts of perception and the self; Cousin disliked him; Saussure saw him as a forerunner in the study of the origins of language.
See also LEIBNIZ, LOCKE, SENSATIONALIS. O.A.H. condition, a state of affairs or ‘way things are,’ most commonly referred to in relation to something that implies or is implied by it. Let p, q, and r be schematic letters for declarative sentences; and let P, Q, and R be corresponding nominalizations; e.g., if p is ‘snow is white’, then P would be ‘snow’s being white’. P can be a necessary or sufficient condition of Q in any of several senses. In the weakest sense P is a sufficient condition of Q iff (if and only if): if p then q (or if P is actual then Q is actual) – where the conditional is to be read as ‘material,’ as amounting merely to not-(p & not-q). At the same time Q is a necessary condition of P iff: if not-q then not-p. It follows that P is a sufficient condition of Q iff Q is a necessary condition of P. Stronger senses of sufficiency and of necessity are definable, in terms of this basic sense, as follows: P is nomologically sufficient (necessary) for Q iff it follows from the laws of nature, but not without them, that if p then q (that if q then p). P is alethically or metaphysically sufficient (necessary) for Q iff it is alethically or metaphysically necessary that if p then q (that if q then p). However, it is perhaps most common of all to interpret conditions in terms of subjunctive conditionals, in such a way that P is a sufficient condition of Q iff P would not occur unless Q occurred, or: if P should occur, Q would; and P is a necessary condition of Q iff Q would not occur unless P occurred, or: if Q should occur, P would. See also CAUSATION, PROPERTY, STATE OF AFFAIR. E.S.