Download or read book Essays on Descartes Meditations written by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume form a commentary on Descartes' Meditations. Following the sequence of the meditational stages, the authors analyze the function of each stage in transforming the reader, to realize his essential nature as a rational inquirer, capable of scientific, demonstrable knowledge of the world. There are essays on the genre of meditational writing, on the implications of the opening cathartic section of the book on Descartes' theory of perception and his use of skeptical arguments; essays on the theory of ideas and their role of Descartes' reconstructive analytic method; essays on the proofs for the existence of God, on the role of the will in the formation and malformation of judgments; and the essays on the foundations of the science of extension and on Descartes' account of the union of mind and body.
Download or read book The Flight to Objectivity written by Susan Bordo and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Descartes Meditations written by Karen Detlefsen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides new insights into understanding Descartes' philosophy of mind, especially the role and significance of the senses and emotions.
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.
Download or read book Descartes s Meditations written by Vere Claiborne Chappell and published by Critical Essays on the Classic. This book was released on 1997 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of recent articles by leading scholars is designed to illuminate one of the greatest and most influential philosophical books of all time. It includes incisive commentary on every major theme and argument in the Meditations, and will be valuable not only to philosophers but to historians, theologians, literary scholars, and interested general readers. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Download or read book Philosophical Essays Discourse on Method Meditations Rules for the Direction of the Mind written by René Descartes and published by Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill. This book was released on 1964 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Discourse on the Method written by René Descartes and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes' ideas not only changed the course of Western philosophy but also led to or transformed the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, physics and mathematics, political theory and ethics, psychoanalysis, and literature and the arts. This book reprints Descartes' major works, Discourse on Method and Meditations, and presents essays by leading scholars that explore his contributions in each of those fields and place his ideas in the context of his time and our own. There are chapters by David Weissman on metaphysics and psychoanalysis, John Post on epistemology, Lou Massa on physics and mathematics, William T. Bluhm on politics and ethics, and Thomas Pavel on literature and art. These essays are accompanied by others by David Weissman and by Stephen Toulmin that introduce the idea of intellectual lineages, discuss the period in which Descartes wrote, and reexamine the premises of his philosophy in light of contemporary philosophical, political, and social thinking.
Download or read book An Essay on the Metaphysics of Descartes written by Marthinus Versfeld and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1940, this book provides a thorough discussion of René Descartes philosophy of metaphysics, examining the three major points of the mind and body, freedom of the will and religion and science. Specific chapters are devoted to the Cartesian theory and the Meditations, in particular the Sixth.
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.
Download or read book Descartes and His Contemporaries written by Roger Ariew and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-10-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before publishing his landmark Meditations in 1641, Rene Descartes sent his manuscript to many leading thinkers to solicit their objections to his arguments. He included these objections, along with his own detailed replies, as part of the first edition. This unusual strategy gave Descartes a chance to address criticisms in advance and to demonstrate his willingness to consider diverse viewpoints—critical in an age when radical ideas could result in condemnation by church and state, or even death. Descartes and his Contemporaries recreates the tumultuous intellectual community of seventeenth-century Europe and provides a detailed, modern analysis of the Meditations in its historical context. The book's chapters examine the arguments and positions of each of the objectors—Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld, Morin, Caterus, Bourdin, and others whose views were compiled by Mersenne. They illuminate Descartes' relationships to the scholastics and particularly the Jesuits, to Mersenne's circle with its debates about the natural sciences, to the Epicurean movements of his day, and to the Augustinian tradition. Providing a glimpse of the interactions among leading 17th-century intellectuals as they grappled with major philosophical issues, this book sheds light on how Descartes' thought developed and was articulated in opposition to the ideas of his contemporaries.
Download or read book Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy written by René Descartes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-04-18 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Meditations, one of the key texts of Western philosophy, is the most widely studied of all Descartes' writings. This authoritative translation by John Cottingham, taken from the much acclaimed three-volume Cambridge edition of the Philosophical Writings of Descartes, is based upon the best available texts and presents Descartes' central metaphysical writings in clear, readable modern English. As well as the complete text of the Meditations, the reader will find a thematic abridgement of the Objections and Replies (which were originally published with the Meditations) containing Descartes' replies to his critics. These extracts, specially selected for the present volume, indicate the main philosophical difficulties which occurred to Descartes' contemporaries and show how Descartes developed and clarified his arguments in response. This edition contains a new comprehensive introduction to Descartes' philosophy by John Cottingham and the classic introductory essay on the Meditations by Bernard Williams.
Download or read book The Blackwell Guide to Descartes Meditations written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consisting of twelve newly commissioned essays and enhanced by William Molyneux’s famous early translation of the Meditations, this volume touches on all the major themes of one of the most influential texts in the history of philosophy. Situates the Meditations in its philosophical and historical context. Touches on all of the major themes of the Meditations, including the mind-body relation, the nature of the mind, and the existence of the material world.
Download or read book Meditations on First Philosophy written by René Descartes and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Ren Descartes written by Stephen Voss and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In English, with some essays translated from French. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Download or read book Method Intuition and Meditation in Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy written by Stanley Tweyman and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-07 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with Descartes’ efforts in his Meditations to discover the first principles of human knowledge, that is, what must be known before anything else can be known. In order for these principles to be first principles, they cannot be conclusions obtained through deductive reasoning. Further, Descartes insists that these first principles cannot be known through the senses, but only through intuition or meditation, our only cognitive faculties for grasping self-evident first principles. This book provides Descartes’ reasons for rejecting the senses as the source of these first principles, and offers textual support for the role of intuition and meditation in apprehending the first principles of human knowledge. Although the bulk of the book is largely exegetical in nature, the last chapter proceeds more critically to show the failures of Descartes’ approach.
Download or read book Essays on the Concept of Mind in Early Modern Philosophy written by Petr Glombíček and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-02-19 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important task for every major philosopher is to offer us an understanding of the nature of mind. The essays in this volume discuss different aspects of the philosophical theories of mind put forward in the century and a half that followed Descartes’ Meditations of 1641. These years, often referred to as the ‘early-modern’ period, are probably unparalleled for originality and diversity in conceiving the mind. The volume not only includes two essays on Descartes’ own thinking, but there are also examinations of what Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, the Cambridge Platonists, and others, have to say about the nature of mind. The aim of the volume is to represent some of the best contemporary research and reflection on mind in early-modern philosophy. The contributors, who teach at a range of universities in mainland Europe, Great Britain and North America, are Margaret Atherton, Miran Božovič, Petr Glombíček, Boris Hennig, James Hill, Nicholas Jolley, Jan Palkoska, G. A. J. Rogers, and Anthony Savile. All the essays appear here for the first time.
Download or read book Argument and Persuasion in Descartes Meditations written by David Cunning and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy has proven to be not only one of the canonical texts of Western philosophy, but also the site of a great deal of interpretive activity in scholarship on the history of early modern philosophy over the last two decades. David Cunning's monograph proposes a new interpretation, which is that from beginning to end the reasoning of the Meditations is the first-person reasoning of a thinker who starts from a confused non-Cartesian paradigm and moves slowly and awkwardly toward a grasp of just a few of the central theses of Descartes' system. The meditator of the Meditations is not a full-blown Cartesian at the start or middle or even the end of inquiry, and accordingly the Meditations is riddled with confusions throughout. Cunning argues that Descartes is trying to capture the kind of reasoning that a non-Cartesian would have to engage in to make the relevant epistemic progress, and that the Meditations rhetorically models that reasoning. He proposes that Descartes is reflecting on what happens in philosophical inquiry: we are unclear about something, we roam about using our existing concepts and intuitions, we abandon or revise some of these, and then eventually we come to see a result as clear that we did not see as clear before. Thus Cunning's fundamental insight is that Descartes is a teacher, and the reader a student. With that reading in mind, a significant number of the interpretive problems that arise in the Descartes literature dissolve when we make a distinction between the Cartesian and non-Cartesian elements of the Meditations, and a better understanding of surrounding texts is achieved as well. This important volume will be of great interest to scholars of early modern philosophy.
