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Descartes The Autonomy Of The Human Understanding
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Book Synopsis Descartes & the Autonomy of the Human Understanding by : John Carriero
Download or read book Descartes & the Autonomy of the Human Understanding written by John Carriero and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, originally published in 1990, delineates the transition Descartes effects from a prevalent medieval conception of understanding to a modern conception of it. Through the examination of the continuities and discontinuities between Descartes' account of the understanding and that of high scholasticism, a characterization emerges of two way in which the understanding is autonomous in Descartes' view. These two sorts of autonomy shed light on the origin of a set of related concerns that give modern philosophy its coherence, setting it apart from medieval philosophy as a distinct tradition. The first sort - the independence of the understanding of the senses - creates the modern problem of scepticism with regard to the external world. The second sort, concerning the ontological status of the mind, provides the background against which modern discussions of the mind/body problem take shape.
Book Synopsis Descartes and the Autonomy of the Human Understanding by : John Peter Carriero
Download or read book Descartes and the Autonomy of the Human Understanding written by John Peter Carriero and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Scepticism, Freedom and Autonomy by : Marcelo de Araujo
Download or read book Scepticism, Freedom and Autonomy written by Marcelo de Araujo and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How much does what we think depend on what we want? Descartes' much-discussed position has often been interpreted to mean that we hold an opinion as the result of a decision. In Scepticism, Freedom and Autonomy, Araujo argues against this interpretation, asserting that we retain control over our opinions only through selective attention. Even for this limited control, however, Cartesian Scepticism implies the possibility of self-delusion, symbolized in the writings of Descartes by the figure of the evil god. Hence, the existence of an evil god would not only cast doubt on our claims to knowledge but also jeopardize our freedom. In this new interpretation, the Cartesian Scepticism, which is usually ascribed only epistemic significance, proves relevant for a fundamental moral question, that of human autonomy in general.
Book Synopsis Rules for the Direction of the Mind by : René Descartes
Download or read book Rules for the Direction of the Mind written by René Descartes and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-06-03 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes was an eighteenth-century mathematician and musician, He believed that all problems could be solved using mathematical logic. In this book which was published in 1701 after his death, he outlines the four main rules: (1) accept nothing as true that is not self-evident, (2) divide problems into their simplest parts, (3) solve problems by proceeding from simple to complex, and (4) recheck the reasoning.
Book Synopsis Descartes and the Autonomy of the Human Understanding by : John Peter Carriero
Download or read book Descartes and the Autonomy of the Human Understanding written by John Peter Carriero and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Descartes: Philosophical Essays and Correspondence by : René Descartes
Download or read book Descartes: Philosophical Essays and Correspondence written by René Descartes and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2000-03-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A superb text for teaching the philosophy of Descartes, this volume includes all his major works in their entirety, important selections from his lesser known writings, and key selections from his philosophical correspondence. The result is an anthology that enables the reader to understand the development of Descartes’s thought over his lifetime. Includes a biographical Introduction, chronology, bibliography, and index.
Book Synopsis Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature by : Justin Skirry
Download or read book Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature written by Justin Skirry and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-11-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional account of mind/body union attributed to Descartes supposes that the immaterial, thinking mind and the material, non-thinking body interact by means of efficient causation - that the mind causes events in the body, e.g. the voluntary raising of an arm, and vice versa, e.g. the visual sensation of a tree. But this gives rise to a notorious philosophical problem: how can this causal interaction occur between the spiritual mind and the physical body since they have absolutely nothing in common and cannot come into contact with one another?Justin Skirry's book shows how Descartes in fact avoids this enormous problem. Skirry argues, through a critical re-examination of Cartesian metaphysics, that the union of mind and body is not, as most scholars have always maintained, constituted by efficient causal interaction for Descartes, because this would not result in one, complete human nature but in an aggregate of two numerically distinct natures. Descartes argues in the 6th Meditation and elsewhere that mind/body union is constituted by what the scholastics called a 'substantial union', i.e. the union that form (mind) has with matter (body). This substantial union produces a whole that is more than the sum of its parts; the capacity for modes of sensation and voluntary bodily movement are emergent properties of the whole, substantially united mind and body. Therefore, the 'Cartesian' problem of mind-body efficient causal interaction is avoided altogether, since efficient causal occurrences between mind and body play no role in explaining the existence of these modes.
Book Synopsis Cartesian Reflections by : John Cottingham
Download or read book Cartesian Reflections written by John Cottingham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-11 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cottingham explores central areas of Descartes's rich and wide-ranging philosophical system, including his accounts of thought and language, of freedom and action, of our relationship to the animal domain, and of human morality and the conduct of life. He also examines ways in which his philosophy has been misunderstood. The Cartesian mind-body dualism that is so often attacked is only a part of Descartes's account of what it is to be a thinking, sentient, human creature, and the way he makes the division between the mental and the physical is considerably more subtle, and philosophically more appealing, than is generally assumed. Although Descartes is often considered to be one of the heralds of our modern secular worldview, the 'new' philosophy which he launched retains many links with the ideas of his predecessors, not least in the all-pervasive role it assigns to God (something that is ignored or downplayed by many modern readers); and the character of the Cartesian outlook is multifaceted, sometimes anticipating Enlightenment ideas of human autonomy and independent scientific inquiry, but also sometimes harmonizing with more traditional notions of human nature as created to find fulfilment in harmony with its creator.
Book Synopsis Descartes's Theory of Mind by : Desmond M. Clarke
Download or read book Descartes's Theory of Mind written by Desmond M. Clarke and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes is possibly the most famous of all writers on the mind, but his theory of mind has been almost universally misunderstood, because his philosophy has not been seen in the context of his scientific work. Desmond Clarke offers a radical and convincing rereading, undoing the received perception of Descartes as the chief defender of mind/body dualism. For Clarke, the key is to interpret his philosophical efforts as an attempt to reconcile his scientific pursuits with the theologically orthodox views of his time.
Download or read book Treatise of Man written by René Descartes and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Besides his more famous works of philosophy - Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy - Descartes devoted a great deal of time and thought to the study of physiology and anatomy. An account of his activities in 1629 reports that he visited butcher shops on an almost daily basis to study specific animal organs, and he practiced dissection and even vivisection to explore the workings of major organ systems. In the 1630s, he assisted in the dissection of human cadavers - all to satisfy his intense curiosity about how bodies, animal and human, work. The fruits of this research can be found in his Treatise of Man, a work that he decided not to publish for fear of suffering the same fate as Galileo. Consequently, this fascinating treatise did not appear until twelve years after his death. Among its many intriguing features are his detailed descriptions of the nervous system and its interactions with the muscles to create movement in response to stimulus. Though we now know that many of these details are wrong, Descartes' understanding that much of the body functions as a machine was a stroke of genius. He is the first to describe the reflex arc, anticipating Pavlov and the behaviorists by almost 300 years. The idea of the body as a kind of animal machine that functions according to physical laws was an immense advance over the previous scholastic notions based on Aristotle, which merely begged the question of how the various organs of the body work by stating that it is in their nature to perform their specific functions. This is a landmark work that students of history, medicine, biology, and the history of science will find richly rewarding.
Book Synopsis Discourse on the Method for Conducting One's Reason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences by : Rene Descartes
Download or read book Discourse on the Method for Conducting One's Reason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences written by Rene Descartes and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the "Discourse on Method for Conducting One's Reason Well and for Searching for Truth in the Sciences" (1637) Descartes suggests that perfect knowledge can be achieved by means of perfect, individual reasoning. According to Descartes, reason can only guarantee its truth-seeking value in the personal sphere, and even then only when it is gradually and systematically applied. Descartes demonstrates his own method for generating perfectly reasoned knowledge, but it is the model of this behavior and not the knowledge itself that ought benefit his readers. The text is in this sense a testament to Descartes' own progress as a practitioner of his own method. Descartes exerts himself as the ultimate critic whose default stance is one of doubt and who wishes to reform his own thought according to the most rigorous standards of reason possible. He does not succeed in following most of his maxims. Nevertheless, his experiment is a notable instance of the struggle for individual enlightenment. First, Descartes addresses the harms of the status quo organization of knowledge and its acquisition. He identifies the vector by which falsehoods propagate themselves undetected among the disciplines of human knowledge. The current realm of human knowledge is the product of "design by committee" in the sense that it is cumulative and collaborative, meaning that previous errors in reasoning may serve as the ostensibly firm foundations for the current order of knowledge. He alleges that no discipline of knowledge can be said to be entirely reasoned from empirical data. He criticizes even the apparently objective systems of mathematics and logic for a deficiency of application. Descartes points to controversies and inconsistencies between disciplines as evidence of imperfection among the sciences, for if they were perfectly conceived, they would be a single and uniform science. In theory, these unstable foundations could be reformed at the individual level with individual reason alone. To this end, Descartes performs his own experiment, isolating himself from the order of human knowledge to the best of his ability. He recommends that the individual reasoner enter a knowledge vacuum that is void of the mental constructs with which other humans think. Like Bacon, Descartes wishes to distance himself from the logic of syllogism and abandon the "Idols of the Theater." Starting from a single absolutely true concept, if one can reason it out, one might gradually construct knowledge by the sole mechanism of pure reasoning, resulting in trustworthy and verified blocks of knowledge which have been thought out by the individual reasoner and which ideally have empirical evidence in the world. Descartes performs this role to demonstrate the solvency of the method to himself. His first building block is perhaps the first warning signal with regard to the rest of his project, but it is also one of the only reasoning sessions to which the readers have detailed access. Descartes falls short even at this primary stage because he is unable to achieve a point zero of knowledge from which to start. Beyond this, it is evident from Descartes own writing that his "good sense" frequently makes reasoned but unreasonable leaps. Indeed, readers may only ponder the interim years in which Descartes moved from his starting point of "I think therefore I am" to his much more specific "knowledge" concerning the heart. Descartes' task of operating solely by means of individual reason is both impossible and inadvisable. Furthermore, his project is a performative contradiction: the notion of individual reason opposes the adoption of collectively achieved knowledge, yet the text serves the very purpose of intruding upon the reader's individual sphere of reason. But, for all of this project's weaknesses in practice, Descartes' project shifts the responsibility and procedure of enlightenment away from the elite class of thinkers into the domain of the autonomous reasoner.
Book Synopsis The Philosophy of Childhood by : Gareth Matthews
Download or read book The Philosophy of Childhood written by Gareth Matthews and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adult preconceptions about the mental life of children tend to discourage a child’s philosophical bent. By exposing the underpinnings of adult views of childhood, Matthews clears the way for recognizing the philosophy of childhood as a legitimate field of inquiry and conducts us through influential models for understanding what it is to be a child.
Book Synopsis Descartes and the Enlightenment by : Peter A. Schouls
Download or read book Descartes and the Enlightenment written by Peter A. Schouls and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1989-02-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schouls limits himself to a discussion of these three concepts in order to escape facile and vague generalizations. For the same reason, in relating Descartes to eighteenth-century thinkers, Schouls limits his attention to a single part of the spectrum of acknowledged Enlightenment reflection, the French "philosopes." From their writings he demonstrates that they are, and acknowledge themselves to be, Descartes' progeny.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Descartes’s Substance Dualism by : Lynda Gaudemard
Download or read book Rethinking Descartes’s Substance Dualism written by Lynda Gaudemard and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph presents an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, which differs from the standard reading called 'classical separatist dualism' claiming that the mind can exist without the body. It argues that, contrary to what it is commonly claimed, Descartes’s texts suggest an emergent creationist substance dualism, according to which the mind is a nonphysical substance (created and maintained by God), which cannot begin to think without a well-disposed body. According to this interpretation, God’s laws of nature endow each human body with the power to be united to an immaterial soul. While the soul does not directly come from the body, the mind can be said to emerge from the body in the sense that it cannot be created by God independently from the body. The divine creation of a human mind requires a well-disposed body, a physical categorical basis. This kind of emergentism is consistent with creationism and does not necessarily entail that the mind cannot survive the body. This early modern view has some connections with Hasker’s substance emergent dualism (1999). Indeed, Hasker states that the mind is a substance emerging at one time from neurons and that consciousness has causal powers which effects cannot be explained by physical neurons. An emergent unified self-existing entity emerges from the brain on which it acts upon. For its proponents, Hasker’s view explains what Descartes’s dualism fails to explain, especially why the mind regularly interacts with one and only one body. After questioning the notion of emergence, the author argues that the theory of emergent creationist substance dualism that she attributes to Descartes is a more appropriate alternative because it faces fewer problems than its rivals. This monograph is valuable for anyone interested in the history of early modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind.
Book Synopsis Discourse on Method and Meditations by : Rene Descartes
Download or read book Discourse on Method and Meditations written by Rene Descartes and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two works from the father of modern philosophy. In Discourse on Method, he formulated a scientific approach comprising four principles, including to accept only what reason recognizes as "clear and distinct." In Meditations, he explores the mind/body distinction, the nature of truth and error, the existence of God, and the essence of material things.
Book Synopsis Spinoza on Human Freedom by : Matthew J. Kisner
Download or read book Spinoza on Human Freedom written by Matthew J. Kisner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment, but his often obscure metaphysics makes it difficult to understand the ultimate message of his philosophy. Although he regarded freedom as the fundamental goal of his ethics and politics, his theory of freedom has not received sustained, comprehensive treatment. Spinoza holds that we attain freedom by governing ourselves according to practical principles, which express many of our deepest moral commitments. Matthew J. Kisner focuses on this theory and presents an alternative picture of the ethical project driving Spinoza's philosophical system. His study of the neglected practical philosophy provides an accessible and concrete picture of what it means to live as Spinoza's ethics envisioned.
Book Synopsis Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy by : René Descartes
Download or read book Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy written by René Descartes and published by Agora Publications, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-09-07 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: · René Descartes is often described as the first modern philosopher, but much of the content of his Meditations on First Philosophy can be found in the medieval period that had already existed for more than a thousand years. Does God exist? If so, what is his nature? Is the human soul immortal? How does it differ from the body? What role do sense experience and pure reason play in knowing? Descartes stands out from his predecessors because of the method he developed to treat these and other fundamental questions. Drawing on his study of mathematics, he searches for a way to establish absolutely certain conclusions based on indubitable premises. His importance in modern philosophy lies in the challenge he offers to every subsequent thinker in philosophy and science.
