Cartesian Reflections
Cartesian Reflections

Author: John Cottingham

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781383036084

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John Cottingham explores central areas of his philosophy, including his views on the nature of thought, the relationship between mind and body, his scientific worldview and its influence on modern thinking, the place of God in his philosophical system, and his account of the emotions and the good life.

Idea and Ontology
Idea and Ontology

Author: Marc A. Hight

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0271047658

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"A wide-ranging study of the 'way of ideas' and its metaphysics, culminating in a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley."

Cartesian Questions
Cartesian Questions

Author: Jean-Luc Marion

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1999-04-15

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0226505448

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Jean-Luc Marion is one of the most prominent young philosophers working today and one of the best contemporary Descartes scholars. Cartesian Questions, his fifth book on Descartes, is a collection of seven essays on Descartes' method and its relation to his metaphysics. Marion reads the philosopher's Discourse on Method in light of his Meditations, examining how Descartes' metaphysics changed from one book to the other and pursuing such questions as the status of the ontological argument before and after Descartes. The essays touch on the major themes of Marion's career, including the connection between metaphysics and method, the concept of God, and the constitution of the thinking subject. In their range, the essays are an excellent introduction to Marion's thought as well as a subtle and complex interpretation of Descartes. The collection is a crucial work not only for scholars of Descartes but also for anyone interested in the state of contemporary French philosophy. "Besides the impact of their content, the clarity and reach of these essays force one to consider foundational questions concerning philosophy and its history."—Richard Watson, Journal of the History of Philosophy

Locke and Cartesian Philosophy
Locke and Cartesian Philosophy

Author: Philippe Hamou

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-06-13

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0192546643

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This volume presents twelve original essays, by an international team of scholars, on the relation of John Locke's thought to Descartes and to Cartesian philosophers such as Malebranche, Clauberg, and the Port-Royal authors. The essays, preceded by a substantial introduction, cover a large variety of topics from natural philosophy to religion, philosophy of mind and body, metaphysics and epistemology. The volume shows that in Locke's complex relationship to Descartes and Cartesianism, stark opposition and subtle 'family resemblances' are tightly intertwined. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the theory of knowledge has been the main comparative focus. According to an influential historiographical conception, Descartes and Locke form together the spearhead in the 'epistemological turn' of early modern philosophy. In bringing together the contributions to this volume, the editors advocate for a shift of emphasis. A full comparison of Locke's and Descartes's positions should cover not only their theories of knowledge, but also their views on natural philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. Their conflicting claims on issues such as cosmic organization, the qualities and nature of bodies, the substance of the soul, and God's government of the world, are of interest not only in their own right, to take the full measure of Locke's complex relation to Descartes, but also as they allow a better understanding of the continuing epistemological debate between the philosophical heirs of these thinkers.

The Flight to Objectivity
The Flight to Objectivity

Author: Susan R. Bordo

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1987-07-01

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 0791497127

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The Flight to Objectivity offers a new reading of Descartes' Meditations informed by cultural history, psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology, and feminist thought. It focuses not on Descartes' arguments as "timeless," culturally disembodied events, but on the psychological drama and imagery of the Meditations explored in the context of the historical instability of the seventeenth century and deep historical changes in the structure of human experience. The study includes textual and cultural material that together comprise a gradually unfolding psychocultural reading of the Meditations. Descartes' famous doubt, and the ideal of objectivity which conquered that doubt, are considered as philosophical expressions of a cultural "drama of parturition" from the medieval universe, a process that generated new forms of experience, new cultural anxieties, and ultimately, new strategies for control and mastery of an utterly changed and alien world. Themes that figure prominently in recent literature on seventeenth-century philosophy and science—the birth of the mind as "mirror of nature," and the "masculine" nature of modern science, the "death of nature"—are explored with reference to Descartes as a pivotal figure in the birth of modernity.

Cartesian Metaphysics
Cartesian Metaphysics

Author: Jorge Secada

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-04-20

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1139429051

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This is the first book-length study of Descartes's metaphysics to place it in its immediate historical context, the Late Scholastic philosophy of thinkers such as Suárez against which Descartes reacted. Jorge Secada views Cartesian philosophy as an 'essentialist' reply to the 'existentialism' of the School, and his discussion includes careful analyses and original interpretations of such central Cartesian themes as the role of scepticism, intentionality and the doctrine of the material falsity of ideas, universals and the relation between sense and understanding, causation and the proofs of the existence of God, the theory of substance, and the dualism of mind and matter. His study offers a picture of Descartes's metaphysics that is both novel and philosophically illuminating.

An Essay on Metaphysics
An Essay on Metaphysics

Author: Robin George Collingwood

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2001-05-24

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 9780199241415

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"With 'The nature of metaphysical study'; 'Function of metaphysics in civilizsation'; 'Notes for an Essay on logic.'"

Essays on Descartes
Essays on Descartes

Author: Paul Hoffman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-04-17

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0199717540

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This is a collection of Paul Hoffman's wide-ranging essays on Descartes composed over the past twenty-five years. The essays in Part I include his celebrated "The Unity of Descartes' Man," in which he argues that Descartes accepts the Aristotelian view that soul and body are related as form to matter and that the human being is a substance; a series of subsequent essays elaborating on this interpretation and defending it against objections; and an essay on Descartes' theory of distinction. In the essays in Part II he argues that Descartes retains the Aristotelian theory of causation according to which an agent's action is the same as the passion it brings about, and explains the significance of this doctrine for understanding Descartes' dualism and physics. In the essays in Part III he argues that Descartes accepts the Aristotelian theory of cognition according to which perception is possible because things that exist in the world are also capable of a different way of existing in the soul, and he shows how this theory figures in Descartes' account of misrepresentation and in the controversy over whether Descartes is a direct realist or a representationalist. The essays in Part IV examine Descartes' theory of the passions of the soul: their definition; their effect on our happiness, virtue, and freedom; and methods of controlling them.