The Descartes Legacy
The Descartes Legacy

Author: Nina Croft

Publisher: Entangled: Select Otherworld

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1622661060

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Her truth is more deadly than his revenge... Lucas Grafton has spent the last ten years hunting the Conclave, a secret organization who took everything from him: his wife, his child, his very identity. Now he has a lead—an imminent terrorist attack on London—code-named Descartes. Born with a genetic illness, Jenna Young has always known she was different. But the unexpected death of her father catapults her into a world of murder and terrorism she never expected. In order to stay alive, she must solve a twenty-five year old mystery—and her only ally a hard bitter man in search or retribution, her only clue the Descartes Highlands, an area on the near side of the moon. Luke's need for revenge collides with Jenna's hunt for the past, and together they must stand against the Conclave. All the while uncovering the truth behind Jenna's illness, a truth that will make Jenna question her very humanity.

The Failure of Modernism
The Failure of Modernism

Author: Brendan Sweetman

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780966922615

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The contributors to The Failure of Modernism are influenced by the view that modernism has failed, and most of the essays attempt to critique specific features of modernism, often from a more traditional perspective. Modernism in philosophy is characterized by skepticism and anti-realism in epistemology, and by relativism in ethics and politics.

Another Mind-Body Problem
Another Mind-Body Problem

Author: John Harfouch

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2018-05-22

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1438469977

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The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human,' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems.

Soul, Mind and Brain from Descartes to Cognitive Science
Soul, Mind and Brain from Descartes to Cognitive Science

Author: Paolo Pecere

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 3030514633

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This interdisciplinary book ties the historical work of Descartes to his successors through current research and critical overviews on the neuroscience of consciousness, the brain, and cognition. This text is the first historical survey to focus on the cohesions and discontinuities between historical and contemporary thinkers working in philosophy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience. The book introduces and analyzes early discussions of consciousness, such as: metaphysical alternatives to scientific explanations of consciousness and its connection to brain activity; claims about the possibilities and limits of neuroscientific accounts of consciousness and cognition; and the proposition of a “non-reductive naturalism” concerning phenomenal consciousness and rationality. The author assesses the contributions of early philosophers and scientists on brain, consciousness and cognition, among them: Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, Haller, Kant, Fechner, Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond. The work of these pioneers is related to that of modern researchers in physiology, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, including: Freud, Hilary Putnam, Herbert Feigl, Gerald Edelman, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, amongst others. This text appeals to researchers and advanced students in the field.

Diderot and Descartes
Diderot and Descartes

Author: Aram Vartanian

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-12-08

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1400877180

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A study of scientific naturalism in the Enlightenment. In tracing the materialism of Diderot, La Mettrie, Buffon, and D'Holbach to its sources, it offers a fresh appraisal of the total influence of Descartes on the Enlightenment. Originally published in 1953. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Descartes's Legacy
Descartes's Legacy

Author: David Hausman

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1997-12-15

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1442655577

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Debates current in the philosophy of mind regarding the gathering and processing of information, and the nature of perception and representation, also animated some of the most important figures in early modern philosophy, among them Descartes, Hume, and Berkeley. The authors of Descartes's Legacy: Minds and Meaning in Early Modern Philosophy use certain problems in contemporary information theory to elucidate the concerns of the early modern philosophers. This critical study attempts to uncover what was once called the logic of the theory of ideas, and to explore the questions it was meant to solve, given the limits of the ontological categories available. The authors begin their discussion of Descartes by examining his response to established models of perception in light of his understanding of the contemporary new science. Since Descartes proposed that any likeness between representation and the thing represented was unreliable, what was his solution to how an internal representation, an idea, gives us information? The authors' central claim is that Descartes's answer to the problem of how the mind knows matter involves a theory of 'intentional ideas.' This provocative divergence from recent discussions of Descartes's philosophy of mind, which have revolved around whether he is a 'realist' or a 'representationalist,' leads the authors to consider the idealism of Hume and Berkeley in light of Descartes's notion of the intentional. Hume and Berkeley, they maintain, explored alternatives to Descartes's conception, which led them to abandon traditional notions of meaning and truth. Descartes's Legacy concludes by suggesting that Descartes's picture can be reconciled with twentieth-century materialism, and asking whether the philosophy of mind can live without a primitive notion of the intentional. By shedding light on Descartes's crucial ontological innovation and on Hume's and Berkeley's reactions to it, the authors of Descartes's Legacy have repositioned early modern philosophy within a truly contemporary framework.

A Companion to Descartes
A Companion to Descartes

Author: Janet Broughton

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-11-08

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 144433784X

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A collection of more than 30 specially commissioned essays, this volume surveys the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, while integrating unique essays detailing the context and impact of his work. Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on the work of Descartes Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals Explores the philosophical significance of his contributions to mathematics and science Concludes with a section on the impact of Descartes's work on subsequent philosophers

Reading Descartes Otherwise
Reading Descartes Otherwise

Author: Kyoo Lee

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2014-04-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0823261255

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Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book’s series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes’ signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. The author patiently unravels the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes, the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes, the father of modern philosophy”—a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere. In the process, she revitalizes and reframes the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way more mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces.

Meditations, Objections, and Replies
Meditations, Objections, and Replies

Author: René Descartes

Publisher: Hackett Publishing

Published: 2006-03-30

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1603840567

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This edition features reliable, accessible translations; useful editorial materials; and a straightforward presentation of the Objections and Replies, including the objections from Caterus, Arnauld, and Hobbes, accompanied by Descartes' replies, in their entirety. The letter serving as a reply to Gassendi--in which several of Descartes' associates present Gassendi's best arguments and Descartes' replies--conveys the highlights and important issues of their notoriously extended exchange. Roger Ariew's illuminating Introduction discusses the Meditations and the intellectual environment surrounding its reception.