Download or read book Descartes Temporal Dualism written by Rebecca Lloyd Waller and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time plays many crucial roles in Descartes’ physics, metaphysics, and epistemology, but has been an understudied area of his philosophy. Rebecca Lloyd Waller argues for a new interpretation of Descartes’ account of time in light of the views held by his major predecessors. By studying Descartes’ account of time through its historical context, Lloyd Waller contends that Descartes’ views are actually consistent, comprehensive, and more historically significant than has been recognized. Descartes offers a type of temporal dualism composed of intrinsic duration and an innate idea of time-in-thought. Lloyd Waller's explanation of Descartes' time-in-thought is also the key to resolve many significant problems in the contemporary literature. Given both its historical sensitivity and its ability to directly engage and address common interpretive puzzles, Descartes' temporal Dualism offers a significant contribution to the understanding of an important, but frequently neglected component of Descartes’ ontology.
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.
Download or read book Descartes Dualism written by Gordon Baker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was Descartes a Cartesian Dualist? In this controversial study, Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris argue that, despite the general consensus within philosophy, Descartes was neither a proponent of dualism nor guilty of the many crimes of which he has been accused by twentieth century philosophers. In lively and engaging prose, Baker and Morris present a radical revision of the ways in which Descartes' work has been interpreted. Descartes emerges with both his historical importance assured and his philosophical importance redeemed.
Download or read book Descartes s Dualism written by Marleen ROZEMOND and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes, an acknowledged founder of modern philosophy, is identified particularly with mind-body dualism--the view that the mind is an incorporeal entity. But this view was not entirely original with Descartes, and in fact to a significant extent it was widely accepted by the Aristotelian scholastics who preceded him, although they entertained a different conception of the nature of mind, body, and the relationship between them. In her first book, Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes's aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism. Her approach includes discussion of central differences from and similarities to the scholastics and how these discriminations affected Descartes's defense of the incorporeity of the mind and the mechanistic conception of body. Confronting the question of how, in his view, mind and body are united, she examines his defense of this union on the basis of sensation. In the course of her argument, she focuses on a few of the scholastics to whom Descartes referred in his own writings: Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suarez, Eustachius of St. Paul, and the Jesuits of Coimbra. This new systematic account of Descartes's dualism amply demonstrates why he still deserves serious study and respect for his extraordinary philosophical achievements.
Download or read book What Am I written by Joseph Almog and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book articulates and defends Descartes's dual key project: the separation of human mind and body as distinct substances and their integration into a single human being. The central challenge faced by Descartes's dualism is the prove too much/prove too little dilemma: too keen a separation of mind and body gets in the way of reuniting them into a full bloodied real human subject, whereas emphasizing the primality of the full human being is not enough to preserve the distinctness of mind and body as separate complete substances
Download or read book Descartes Dualism written by Gordon P. Baker and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was Descartes a Cartesian dualist? In this controversial study, Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris argue that, despite a textbook consensus within philosophy, Descartes was not a dualist nor is he guilty of the many philosophical crimes 20th-century philosophers have foisted upon him. Contemporary philosophy has made Descartes into everyone's anti-hero, whose vices range from being unscientific through licensing cruelty to animals to a commitment to a private language. Baker and Morris argue that such a role has been manufactured largely to fulfil 20th century intellectual needs.
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 Descartes written by Margaret Dauler Wilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-05-20 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most significant studies of Descartes in recent times. It concentrates on the Meditations to show Descartes' philosophy in the context of his overall scientific objectives, not all of them fully explicit in the texts.
Download or read book Rethinking Descartes s Substance Dualism written by Lynda Gaudemard and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 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.
Download or read book On Descartes Passive Thought written by Jean-Luc Marion, and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Descartes’ Passive Thought is the culmination of a life-long reflection on the philosophy of Descartes by one of the most important living French philosophers. In it, Jean-Luc Marion examines anew some of the questions left unresolved in his previous books about Descartes, with a particular focus on Descartes’s theory of morals and the passions. Descartes has long been associated with mind-body dualism, but Marion argues here that this is a historical misattribution, popularized by Malebranche and popular ever since both within the academy and with the general public. Actually, Marion shows, Descartes held a holistic conception of body and mind. He called it the meum corpus, a passive mode of thinking, which implies far more than just pure mind—rather, it signifies a mind directly connected to the body: the human being that I am. Understood in this new light, the Descartes Marion uncovers through close readings of works such as Passions of the Soul resists prominent criticisms leveled at him by twentieth-century figures like Husserl and Heidegger, and even anticipates the non-dualistic, phenomenological concepts of human being discussed today. This is a momentous book that no serious historian of philosophy will be able to ignore.
Download or read book Descartes s Changing Mind written by Peter Machamer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes's works are often treated as a unified, unchanging whole. But in Descartes's Changing Mind, Peter Machamer and J. E. McGuire argue that the philosopher's views, particularly in natural philosophy, actually change radically between his early and later works--and that any interpretation of Descartes must take account of these changes. The first comprehensive study of the most significant of these shifts, this book also provides a new picture of the development of Cartesian science, epistemology, and metaphysics. No changes in Descartes's thought are more significant than those that occur between the major works The World (1633) and Principles of Philosophy (1644). Often seen as two versions of the same natural philosophy, these works are in fact profoundly different, containing distinct conceptions of causality and epistemology. Machamer and McGuire trace the implications of these changes and others that follow from them, including Descartes's rejection of the method of abstraction as a means of acquiring knowledge, his insistence on the infinitude of God's power, and his claim that human knowledge is limited to that which enables us to grasp the workings of the world and develop scientific theories.
Download or read book Consciousness and the Limits of Objectivity written by Robert J. Howell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert J. Howell offers a new account of the relationship between conscious experience and the physical world, based on a neo-Cartesian notion of the physical and careful consideration of three anti-materialist arguments. His theory of subjective physicalism reconciles the data of consciousness with the advantages of a monistic, physical ontology.
Download or read book Essays on Descartes written by Paul Hoffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-17 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Radical Cartesianism written by Tad M. Schmaltz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-22 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book-length study of two of Descartes's most innovative successors, Robert Desgabets and Pierre-Sylvain Regis, and of their highly original contributions to Cartesianism. The focus of the book is an analysis of radical doctrines in the work of these thinkers that derive from arguments in Descartes: on the creation of eternal truths, on the intentionality of ideas, and on the soul-body union. As well as relating their work to that of fellow Cartesians such as Malebranche and Arnauld, the book also establishes the important though neglected role played by Desgabets and Regis in the theologically and politically charged reception of Descartes in early modern France. This is a major contribution to the history of Cartesianism that will be of special interest to historians of early modern philosophy and historians of ideas.
Download or read book Descartes and the Possibility of Science written by Peter A. Schouls and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joining these topics together within the context of Cartesian doctrine, Schouls opens up a substantially new reading of the Meditations and a more complete picture of Descartes as a scientist."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Passions of the Soul written by René Descartes and published by Newcomb Livraria Press. This book was released on 1955 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new 2023 translation directly from the original manuscripts into English of Descartes' famous work "The Passions of the Soul" (Les passions de l'ame). This edition contains a new introduction and afterword from the translator, as well as a timeline of Descartes' life and summaries of each of his works. Descartes explores the nature of human emotions and their relationship to the mind and body he in "the passions of the soul". This is a critical text to Psychology because it helped to establish the idea that emotions are caused by physical processes in the body, and had a significant impact on the development of the field psychology, which did not exist in Descartes' time.
Download or read book Descartes written by Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Descartes: His Life and Times The works of Descartes have, up to the present time, been known to modern literature through the celebrated edition prepared by Victor Cousin, and published, 1824-1826, in eleven octavo volumes. This edition is entirely written in French, while Descartes' writings are largely in the Latin tongue; it has no index, biography, or notes, and though at the time it was published it was considered fairly complete, none knew better than the editor that much revision was required, that the correspondence was not correctly dated, and that it was an immature piece of work. Still, such as it was, we must feel for ever grateful to one who did his utmost to provide his country with an edition of the works of him who did so much to give her glory. But, as Cousin himself came to find, the edition was not complete. He himself added certain letters in his Fragments philosophiques, and other material has been discovered since. The purpose of the work, however, to draw men to the study of the great philosopher, was fully realised. It is left for the present century to complete the work which Cousin so nobly began. The third centenary of Descartes' birth was celebrated at the Sorbonne on the 31st of March 1896, under the presidency of M. Liard, who had, when professor at Bordeaux, himself contemplated issuing a new edition of Descartes' works in conjunction with M. Tannery. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
