Search results for ` Descartes, rejecting natural inclinations and appetites ‐ in physical world because they presuppose understanding`

Plato: Metaphysics, Misc in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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πολλαχῶς ἔστι; Plato’s Neglected Ontology.Mohammad Bagher Ghomi - manuscript

This paper aims to suggest a new approach to Plato’s theory of being in Republic V and Sophist based on the notion of difference and the being of a copy. To understand Plato’s ontology in these two dialogues we are going to suggest a theory we call Pollachos Esti; a name we took from Aristotle’s pollachos legetai both to remind the similarities of the two structures and to reach a consistent view of Plato’s ontology. Based on this theory, when Plato (...)

Object-Oriented Ontology in Continental Philosophy

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Meillassoux’s Virtual Future.Graham Harman - 2011 - Continent 1 (2):78-91.

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...)

Filipino Philosophy in Asian Philosophy

Speculative Materialism in Continental Philosophy

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345

The Indefinite within Descartes' Mathematical Physics.Françoise Monnoyeur-Broitman - 2013 - Eidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 19:107-122.

Descartes' philosophy contains an intriguing notion of the infinite, a concept labeled by the philosopher as indefinite. Even though Descartes clearly defined this term on several occasions in the correspondence with his contemporaries, as well as in his Principles of Philosophy, numerous problems about its meaning have arisen over the years. Most commentators reject the view that the indefinite could mean a real thing and, instead, identify it with an Aristotelian potential infinite. In the first part of this article, I (...) show why there is no numerical infinity in Cartesian mathematics, as such a concept would be inconsistent with the main fundamental attribute of numbers: to be comparable with each other. In the second part, I analyze the indefinite in the context of Descartes' mathematical physics. It is my contention that, even with no trace of infinite in his mathematics, Descartes does refer to an actual indefinite because of its application to the material world within the system of his physics. This fact underlines a discrepancy between his mathematics and physics of the infinite, but does not lead a difficulty in his mathematical physics. Thus, in Descartes' physics, the indefinite refers to an actual dimension of the world rather than to an Aristotelian mathematical potential infinity. In fact, Descartes establishes the reality and limitlessness of the extension of the cosmos and, by extension, the actual nature of his indefinite world. This indefinite has a physical dimension, even if it is not measurable. La filosofía de Descartes contiene una noción intrigante de lo infinito, un concepto nombrado por el filósofo como indefinido. Aunque en varias ocasiones Descartes definió claramente este término en su correspondencia con sus contemporáneos y en sus Principios de filosofía, han surgido muchos problemas acerca de su significado a lo largo de los años. La mayoría de comentaristas rechaza la idea de que indefinido podría significar una cosa real y, en cambio, la identifica con un infinito potencial aristotélico. En la primera parte de este artículo muestro por qué no hay infinito numérico en las matemáticas cartesianas, en la medida en que tal concepto sería inconsistente con el principal atributo fundamental de los números: ser comparables entre sí. En la segunda parte analizo lo indefinido en el contexto de la física matemática de Descartes. Mi argumento es que, aunque no hay rastro de infinito en sus matemáticas, Descartes se refiere a un indefinido real a causa de sus aplicaciones al mundo material dentro del sistema de su física. Este hecho subraya una discrepancia entre sus matemáticas y su física de lo infinito, pero no implica ninguna dificultad en su física matemática. Así pues, en la física de Descartes, lo indefinido se refiere a una dimensión real del mundo más que a una infinitud potencial matemática aristotélica. De hecho, Descartes establece la realidad e infinitud de la extensión del cosmos y, por extensión, la naturaleza real de su mundo indefinido. Esta indefinición tiene una dimensión física aunque no sea medible. (shrink)

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Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy (review).Margaret J. Osler - 2003 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (4):558-559.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 558-559 [Access article in PDF] Stephen Gaukroger. Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 258. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $22.00. Stephen Gaukroger, author of a definitive biography of Descartes, has now written an excellent account of Descartes's natural philosophy as presented in his Principia philosophiae. Gaukroger claims that the roots of modernity lay (...) in the philosophies of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, both of whom regarded natural philosophy, rather than either moral philosophy or metaphysics, as the core of the philosophical enterprise. Whereas Bacon developed his ideas from a background steeped in the writings of the Renaissance humanists who emphasized moral philosophy, Descartes developed his ideas in the context of Scholastic philosophy, particularly the textbooks of the Jesuits that he had encountered at La Flèche and that located the foundations of philosophy in metaphysics.Regarding the unpublished early works, Le monde and L'homme, as suppressed parts of Descartes's mature project and taking seriously Descartes's stated intention of dealing with living things and humans along with the physical world in his natural philosophy, Gaukroger presents a detailed account of this "complete" version of the Principia philosophiae. In a series of six chapters, he explicates Descartes's views on the principles of knowledge, the principles of material objects, the visible universe, the Earth, living things, and man. In addition to Le monde and L'homme, Gaukroger draws on Les Passions de l'âme as an important source for Descartes's views on human nature.Gaukroger situates Descartes's natural philosophy in the context of the Scholastic textbook tradition in a chapter preceding his account of the Principa philosophiae. He delves into the history of medieval universities, the place of natural philosophy in the medieval curriculum, and the changing relationship between metaphysics and natural philosophy, particularly after the Condemnations of 1277. Difficulties in reconciling Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian theology, which had been formulated in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, continued into the sixteenth century and provided the immediate background to the Jesuit commentaries and textbooks to which Descartes was exposed as a student. In these works, Jesuit philosophers attempted to derive a coherently unified Christian Aristotelianism from first principles. Gaukroger reminds us that Descartes's Principia philosophiae was a deliberate attempt to replace these Jesuit textbooks with one based on mechanistic principles.Despite the strength of Gaukroger's book as a contextualized study of a major philosophical figure who is frequently treated in an entirely ahistorical way, the book is not without its problems. The main problem is one that plagues many studies of Descartes (and other canonical figures in the history of philosophy), to wit, the presumption that he is somehow unique. For example, Gaukroger writes at length about Descartes's views about the differences between animals and humans with regard to cognition, arguing that Descartes did not consider animals to be automata because they lack rational souls but rather that they actually experience some but not all of the more abstract or reflexive forms of cognition usually ascribed to humans. Gaukroger does not mention the fact that many other early modern philosophers held a view like this. For example, Descartes's contemporary and fellow mechanical philosopher Pierre Gassendi claimed that animals could know universals, as when a dog recognizes that it is a human that is approaching, but differ from humans in not being capable of contemplating the nature of universality per se. Descartes was part of a community of thinkers concerned with similar problems, and his natural philosophy can be illuminated by viewing him in that context as well as against the backdrop of Scholasticism.Gaukroger underplays the significance of theology for Descartes's philosophy. Although he discusses how God's attributes, especially immutability, provide the basis for Descartes's laws of motion, he does not explore the specific aspects of Descartes's theological presuppositions and the way they influenced his entire natural philosophical project. Gaukroger repeats the received view that "One of the principal tasks of a mechanistic natural philosophy... (shrink)

Plato: Divided Soul in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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Plato’s Metaphysical Development before Middle Period Dialogues.Mohammad Bagher Ghomi - manuscript

Regarding the relation of Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, scholars have been divided to two opposing groups: unitarists and developmentalists. While developmentalists try to prove that there are some noticeable and even fundamental differences between Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, the unitarists assert that there is no essential difference in there. The main goal of this article is to suggest that some of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological principles change, both radically and fundamentally, between the early and (...)

Plato: Metaphysics, Misc in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

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Psychoanalysis as Natural Philosophy.R. D. Hinshelwood - 2005 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 12 (4):325-329.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 325-329 [Access article in PDF] Psychoanalysis as Natural Philosophy R. D. Hinshelwood Keywords evolution, psychopathology, ethics, unconscious phantasy Andreas De Block has offered us a most fascinating paper. We do not have to agree with all his points to be profoundly stimulated by them. His core proposition is that Freud pathologizes ordinary psychology and personalities, as well as the abnormal. There has (...) been a perennial debate about whether, psychoanalytically speaking, there is a continuum from pathology to normality or if there is a discontinuity at some point between the two. Freud's famous quote—"much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness" (Breuer and Freud 1895, 305)—is ambiguous. Interestingly, De Block takes a hard stand on this; he not only assumes a continuum, but further he reads Freud as saying that all normality is neurotic. This is not a usual reading of Freud. De Block then expands this into a philosophical position. It is, he says, Freud's philosophy on the nature of mind.Freud himself was not interested in philosophy, and thought it largely irrelevant to psychoanalysis. In fact, he mused about the traffic being inevitably in the opposite direction—that philosophy might come to psychoanalysis. In discussing the work of a philosophically inclined analyst, he remarked, The decisive reason for the rejection of Putnam's proposals was the doubt as to which of the countless philosophical systems should be accepted, since they all seem to rest on an equally insecure basis.... It seemed more prudent to wait, and to discover whether a particular attitude towards life might be forced upon us with all the weight of necessity by analytical investigation itself. (Freud 1921, 270) Psychoanalysis, Freud thought, might be the very substance from which a philosophical system could emerge. De Block has followed that route; he has gone to Freud's writing to discovery a weltanshaung on which we might develop a philosophy of life. He has come back from his intellectual expedition with Freud's fascinating paper, published only in 1987 (discovered in 1983), "A Phylogenetic Phantasy." This was actually written in 1914, but Freud never published it and in fact destroyed his own copy of the draft. The paper has been called a "metabiology" (Gubrich-Simitis 1987), and deals with Freud's speculation on how a threatened species during the ice age developed certain biological and biopsychological traits1 necessary to survive the harsh environmental conditions. These traxits, which included the repression of libido, had significant side effects, namely, the pathologies arising from repression: the neuroses, perversions and psychoses. Moreover, today the environmental conditions no longer apply, so we are left with the side effects of traits that are no longer biologically useful. [End Page 325]So, De Block indicates at least the possibility of an evolutionary theory of the nature of mind. Even if Freud's Lamarckianism makes his particular speculative metabiology implausible, it is a way of thinking that suggests that a theory of mind can arise from biological understanding of its evolutionary development. However, De Block goes further. As a corollary, because Freud's view of the evolution of mind is to involve the evolutionary nature of psychopathology, then Freud's psychoanalysis can suggest an evolutionary psychiatry—that is to say, psychiatry can look for distant causes of mental disturbance in the vagaries of evolutionary influence.This way of approaching philosophy is interesting because it starts with the outcome of a scientific investigation of the human mind, just as Freud suggested in the passage quoted (Freud 1921, 270). The prospect is for a natural philosophy of mind, just as the physics of fundamental particles and the "big bang" prompt us toward a kind of natural ontology of the universe and its contents, arising from empirically tested facts.However, De Block is on rather uncertain ground with the evidence for his argument; he commits Freud to this biological speculation on the basis of a paper that Freud did not in fact publish and tore up.2 Even if Freud's reading of the evolutionary origins of man... (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

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On Leo Strauss’s Understanding of the Natural Law Theory of Thomas Aquinas.Douglas Kries - 1993 - The Thomist 57 (2):215-232.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ON LEO STRAUSS'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS * DOUGLAS KRIES Gonzaga University Spokane, Washington IN COMPOSING the introduction to Natural Right and History in the early 1950's, Leo Strauss described the situation in American social science as a division between two parties : the modern liberals of one persuasion or another, who had largely abandoned natural right altogether, and the (...) students of Thomas Aquinas.1 Since the fundamental goal of that book was a recovery of the classical or pre-modern theory of natural right, one might have anticipated that Strauss's work would have been received enthusiastically by the latter group. If nothing else, Strauss and the Thomists were natural allies because they shared the same modern enemies: namely, historicism (the view that all human thought is confined to the immediate historical horizon of the thinker) and positivism (the view that human thought cannot make value judgments, but only judgments about observable matters of fact). Beyond that, Strauss explored very seriously the issues of reason and revelation.and of religion and politics-both of which are crucial for Thomistic political thought. Yet, despite such favorable auguries, a congenial affiliation of *The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful criticisms he received in the preparation of this manuscript from David Calhoun of the Philosophy Department at Gonzaga University. 1 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 2, 7. 215 216 DOUGLAS KRIES Straussians and Thomists was never formed.2 Many factors probably contributed to the losing of the opportunity,8 but presumably chief among them was the fact that, even though Strauss's view of Thomas was genuinely respectful, it was not unequivocally sympathetic. Strauss preferred classical natural right theory to modern natural right theory, and he came to the conclusion that Thomas's teaching on natural right-while certainly ' pre-modern ' 4-introduced novelties into the classical position which weakened it rather than improved it. The goal of this essay is to analyze Strauss's reservations about Thomas's statement of the problem of natural right. Such an analysis will, I hope, contribute to a more fruitful exchange between the students of Leo Strauss and those of Thomas Aquinas. I Perhaps the best way to initiate an explanation of Strauss's view of the differences between classical and Thomistic natural right is to contrast the starting points of the two theories. The classical approach begins with what is said about right, with the everyday opinions that are held about what is just. From such an immediate starting point the classical approach ascends toward true knowledge through the process of dialectics. Although all people have views about what is just, in fact such opinions, when examined through friendly disputation with a philosopher, are almost always found to be self-contradictory; however, the 2 This is not to suggest that Strauss was completely ignored and rejected by the Thomists. For an overview of the Thomistic literature which has considered Strauss, see James V. Schall, "Revelation, Reason and Politics: Catholic Reflexions on Strauss," Gregorianum 62 (1981), 349-365, 467-497. s See Ernest L. Fortin, "Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers: A Straussian Perspective," Interpretation 12 (1984), 349-350. 4 For Strauss, the fundamental division within the history of political philosophy was between the ancients and the moderns. He understood Thomas to be in the former camp and was critical of contemporary Thomists who, under pressure from the success of modern physics, had attempted to ' modernize ' Thomas by jettisoning his teleological view of nature. See Natural Right and History, pp. 7-8; What is Political Philosophy? (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1959), pp. 285-6. NATURAL LAW THEORY OF THOMAS AQUINAS 217 very fact that one comes to realize that contradiction and seeks to rectify it points to the fact that human beings realize that a more comprehensive, non-contradictory view might be possible. The contradictions thus force one to ascend beyond the opinions that are at best only partially true toward an ever more consistent view, a view based on nature; if such a process could reach culmination, the culmination would constitute a statement of what is right by nature.5 The starting... (shrink)

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Greek Returns: The Poetry of Nikos Karouzos.Nick Skiadopoulos & Vincent W. J. Van Gerven Oei - 2011 - Continent 1 (3):201-207.

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...)

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Reality bubbles:Can we know anything about the physical world?Christian de Quincey - 2008 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (8):94-101.

From Plato's eidos, to Descartes' cogito, to Kant's numenon, our understanding of reality has faltered at a seemingly impossible, double-edged, impasse. First, an ontological 'hard problem': If mind and matter are so radically different and separate, how do they ever interact? Second, a related epistemological conundrum: How is it possible for mind to ever know anything about matter--including whether it even exists? Then came Whitehead. By shifting the mind-matter relation from substances interacting in space to complementary phases in (...)

Epistemology, Misc in Epistemology

History of Physics in Philosophy of Physical Science

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Understanding Scientific Inquiries of Galileo’s Formulation for the Law of Free Falling Motion.Jun-Young Oh - 2016 - Foundations of Science 21 (4):567-578.

The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the role of abstraction and idealization in Galileo’s scientific inquiries into the law of free falling motion, and their importance in the history of science. Because there is no consensus on the use of the terms “abstraction” and “idealization” in the literature, it is necessary to distinguish between them at the outset. This paper will argue for the importance of abstraction and idealization in physics and the (...)

Idealization in General Philosophy of Science

Thought Experiments in Metaphilosophy

Justification of Induction in General Philosophy of Science

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Understand all, forgive nothing: The self-indictment of Humbert Humbert.Yuval Eylon - 2006 - Philosophy and Literature 30 (1):158-173.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Understand All, Forgive Nothing:The Self-Indictment of Humbert HumbertYuval EylonFor me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.—Vladimir Nabokov, "On a Book Entitled Lolita"Pride is the tendency to overestimate oneself, or underestimate others. In either case, (...) a proud person overestimates his own qualities. Since such a person is inclined to view others as inferior and his own actions as admirable, a proud person is disposed to underestimate the suffering he inflicts on others, or worse—to try and justify it. Curiosity about others, tenderness, and kindness, rarely accompanies pride. Thus, it often conflicts with a charitable view of others, and begets cruelty and callousness. Pride is often accompanied by the desire to be admired by others. This desire gives rise to vanity, or vainglory: a vice that seems destined to give rise to further vices. Aquinas clearly expresses this view in the Summa Theologia:1... the vices which by their very nature are such as to be directed to the end of a certain capital vice, are called its daughters. Now the end of vainglory is the manifestation of one's own excellence, as stated above (A1, 4). To this end a man may tend in two ways. On one way directly, [End Page 158] either by words, and this is boasting, or by deeds, and then if they be true and call for astonishment, it is love of novelties which men are wont to wonder at most; but if they be false, it is hypocrisy. On another way a man strives to make known his excellence by showing that he is not inferior to another, and this in four ways. First, as regards the intellect, and thus we have "obstinacy," by which a man is too much attached to his own opinion, being unwilling to believe one that is better. Secondly, as regards the will, and then we have "discord," whereby a man is unwilling to give up his own will, and agree with others. Thirdly, as regards "speech," and then we have "contention," whereby a man quarrels noisily with another. Fourthly as regards deeds, and this is "disobedience," whereby a man refuses to carry out the command of his superiors.However, whereas pride is an attitude that a person has towards himself, vanity involves a relation with others which pride does not: it emanates from the need to manifest one's excellence to others and gain their approval. Thus, since the proud person does not engage with the opinions of others, his view of himself remains secure. Vanity, on the hand, can prove to be a blessing in disguise: the attempt to gain approval could lead to self-awareness.The pride of Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator in Nabokov's Lolita, is the pride of an aesthete: intellectually superior, and determined to pursue his appetites. But Humbert is not only proud.2 He is also vain. Vanity leads him to seek the approval of others, and underlines his artistic aspirations. He undertakes the writing of a manuscript, designed to be a masterpiece that vindicates his actions. In his manuscript, Humbert tries to elicit the reader's sympathy, in the conviction that sympathetic identification would lead to acceptance. However, while he successfully challenges and threatens the reader's moral outlook, writing the manuscript has an unintended effect: it shatters Humbert's own convictions and leads to moral transformation. The reason for this transformation is that he recognizes the aesthetic faults of his work, and traces these faults to his own moral faults.The claim that aesthetic considerations can play an important role in moral thinking cannot be taken for granted. First, the threat of an empty aestheticism must be addressed, because it seems that aesthetic considerations and the pursuit of aesthetic ideals compete with moral considerations, rather than complete them. As Humbert illustrates, aesthetic pursuit motivates acts of cruelty and callousness, and aesthetic ideals are often devoid of any moral significance. Second, if aesthetic [End Page 159] considerations... (shrink)

Ethics in Value Theory, Miscellaneous

Philosophy of Literature in Aesthetics

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(1 other version)Has Science Established that the Cosmos is Physically Comprehensible?Nicholas Maxwell - 2013 - In Recent Advances in Cosmology. Nova Science Publishers. pp. 1-56.

Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically untestable, or metaphysical thesis. It thus lies beyond the scope of science. Only when physics has formulated a testable unified theory of everything which has been amply corroborated empirically will science be in a position to declare that it has established that the cosmos (...) is physically comprehensible. But this argument presupposes a widely accepted but untenable conception of science which I shall call standard empiricism. According to standard empiricism, in science theories are accepted solely on the basis of evidence. Choice of theory may be influenced for a time by considerations of simplicity, unity, or explanatory capacity, but not in such a way that the universe itself is permanently assumed to be simple, unified or physically comprehensible. In science, no thesis about the universe can be accepted permanently as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. Granted this view, it is clear that science cannot have established that the universe is physically comprehensible. Standard empiricism is, however, as I have indicated, untenable. Any fundamental physical theory, in order to be accepted as a part of theoretical scientific knowledge, must satisfy two criteria. It must be sufficiently empirically successful, and sufficiently unified. Given any accepted theory of physics, endlessly many empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted – disunified because they assert that different dynamical laws govern the diverse phenomena to which the theory applies. These disunified rivals are not considered for a moment in physics, despite their greater empirical success. This persistent rejection of empirically more successful but disunified rival theories means, I argue, that a big, highly problematic, implicit assumption is made by science about the cosmos, to the effect, at least, that the cosmos is such that all seriously disunified theories are false. Once this point is recognized, it becomes clear, I argue, that we need a new conception of science which makes explicit, and so criticizable and improvable the big, influential, and problematic assumption that is at present implicit in physics in the persistent preference for unified theories. This conception of science, which I call aim-oriented empiricism, represents the assumption of physics in the form of a hierarchy of assumptions. As one goes up the hierarchy, the assumptions become less and less substantial, and more and more nearly such that their truth is required for science, or the pursuit of knowledge, to be possible at all. At each level, that assumption is accepted which best accords with the next one up, and has, associated with it the most empirically progressive research programme in physics, or holds out the greatest hope of leading to such an empirically progressive research programme. In this way a framework of relatively insubstantial, unproblematic, fixed assumptions and associated methods is created, high up in the hierarchy, within which much more substantial and problematic assumptions and associated methods, low down in the hierarchy, can be changed, and indeed improved, as scientific knowledge improves. One assumption in this hierarchy of assumptions, I argue, is that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – that is, such that some yet-to-be-discovered unified theory of everything is true. Hence the conclusion: improve our ideas about the nature of science and it becomes apparent that science has already established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – in so far as science can ever establish anything theoretical. (shrink)

Philosophy of Physics, Misc in Philosophy of Physical Science

Scientific Metamethodology in General Philosophy of Science

Scientific Method, Miscellaneous in General Philosophy of Science

Simplicity and Parsimony in General Philosophy of Science

Inductive Reasoning in General Philosophy of Science

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Has science established that the universe is physically comprehensible?Nicholas Maxwell - 2013 - In Anderson Travena & Brady Soren, Recent Advances in Cosmology. Nova Science. pp. 1-56.

Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically untestable, or metaphysical thesis. It thus lies beyond the scope of science. Only when physics has formulated a testable unified theory of everything which has been amply corroborated empirically will science be in a position to declare that it has established that the cosmos (...) is physically comprehensible. But this argument presupposes a widely accepted but untenable conception of science which I shall call standard empiricism. According to standard empiricism, in science theories are accepted solely on the basis of evidence. Choice of theory may be influenced for a time by considerations of simplicity, unity, or explanatory capacity, but not in such a way that the universe itself is permanently assumed to be simple, unified or physically comprehensible. In science, no thesis about the universe can be accepted permanently as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. Granted this view, it is clear that science cannot have established that the universe is physically comprehensible. Standard empiricism is, however, as I have indicated, untenable. Any fundamental physical theory, in order to be accepted as a part of theoretical scientific knowledge, must satisfy two criteria. It must be (1) sufficiently empirically successful, and (2) sufficiently unified. Given any accepted theory of physics, endlessly many empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted – disunified because they assert that different dynamical laws govern the diverse phenomena to which the theory applies. These disunified rivals are not considered for a moment in physics, despite their greater empirical success. This persistent rejection of empirically more successful but disunified rival theories means, I argue, that a big, highly problematic, implicit assumption is made by science about the cosmos, to the effect, at least, that the cosmos is such that all seriously disunified theories are false. Once this point is recognized, it becomes clear, I argue, that we need a new conception of science which makes explicit, and so criticizable and improvable the big, influential, and problematic assumption that is at present implicit in physics in the persistent preference for unified theories. This conception of science, which I call aim-oriented empiricism, represents the assumption of physics in the form of a hierarchy of assumptions. As one goes up the hierarchy, the assumptions become less and less substantial, and more and more nearly such that their truth is required for science, or the pursuit of knowledge, to be possible at all. At each level, that assumption is accepted which (a) best accords with the next one up, and (b) has, associated with it the most empirically progressive research programme in physics, or holds out the greatest hope of leading to such an empirically progressive research programme. In this way a framework of relatively insubstantial, unproblematic, fixed assumptions and associated methods is created, high up in the hierarchy, within which much more substantial and problematic assumptions and associated methods, low down in the hierarchy, can be changed, and indeed improved, as scientific knowledge improves. One assumption in this hierarchy of assumptions, I argue, is that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – that is, such that some yet-to-be-discovered unified theory of everything is true. Hence the conclusion: improve our ideas about the nature of science and it becomes apparent that science has already established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – in so far as science can ever establish anything theoretical. (shrink)

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Philosophy of Cosmology in Philosophy of Physical Science

Philosophy of Physics, Misc in Philosophy of Physical Science

Philosophy, Misc

Scientific Change in General Philosophy of Science

Simplicity and Parsimony in General Philosophy of Science

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Human Beings // Human Freedom.Mariam Thalos - 2019 - In Graham Oppy & Joseph W. Koterski, Theism and Atheism: Opposing Viewpoints in Philosophy. Farmington Hills: MacMillan Reference. pp. 429-448.

The traditional philosophical questions around human freedom are to do with how to square freedom for human organisms with increasingly scientific understandings of the universe itself. At the beginning of Western philosophical consciousness, Plato, unlike later philosophers eligible of the label rationalist, maintained that there are obstacles to free and rational agency, owing in no small measure to pressures exerted by the human psyche from what later were referred to as biological drives and drives for social status. In subsequent eras, (...) these obstacles came under the heading of “weakness of will”—a conception shared widely in popular and traditional culture. Today the realities of addiction, social stresses, forces of habit, culture, social position, and group identity, together with psychological findings about cognitive biases, have come to dominate the landscape of empirically-based obstacles to agency. Can the image of the human being under the microscope of contemporary science, including cognitive and social science, be reconciled with the “manifest image” of human beings as sources of their individual behaviors (and held responsible accordingly), particularly if the scientific image is best construed in terms of governance by laws of nature? (The phrases manifest image and scientific image were coined by the twentieth-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, see Sellars 1962.) How is it possible to square the idea of laws of nature with the manifest image in which humans exercise free agency as they play their various parts in the drama that is life? Does the manifest image thus square better with a theistic image of the world, as both seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant seem to have thought, and by contrast the scientific image square better with atheism? A deterministic universe, such as was proposed during the Enlightenment, was early on thought to pose a threat to the idea of human freedom. (It does not pose the same threat to the idea of a sovereign creator, however, because the notion of a creator of the universe already puts the entity who qualifies for the office outside the regime of those laws, ahead of them both in time and in ontological status.) One traditional answer to the threat has been the notion of compatibilism— which simply asserts that freedom and determinism are not incompatible. The devil, of course, has been in the details of explaining how this can be so, and many schools of thought on the matter exist. It is worthwhile noting that there are enormously compelling reasons, from the quantum regime so well described by quantum theory, to reject determinism: the laws governing the universe are simply not fully deterministic. This, of course, vitiates the need to confront the threat as originally posed. However, the trouble, if one follows along this line of thought, is to make sense of the nature of freedom in a world governed partly by deterministic laws and partly by nondeterministic ones that admit of an element of chance. Is such a world itself any more compatible with the idea of human freedom? In this section we grapple with the question of human freedom, what it could mean, and whether it is best accepted in the context of a form of theism. We find that theism has no more resources for addressing these difficulties than atheism does. (shrink)

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Perception & reality: a history from Descartes to Kant.John W. Yolton - 1996 - Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

In 1984, John W. Yolton published Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. His most recent book builds on that seminal work and greatly extends its relevance to issues in current philosophical debate. Perception and Reality examines the theories of perception implicit in the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers which centered on the question: How is knowledge of the body possible? That question raises issues of mind-body relation, the way that mentality links with physicality, and the nature of the known (...)

History: Skepticism in Epistemology

Hume and Other Philosophers in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Hume: Metaphysics and Epistemology in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Kant: Metaphysics and Epistemology, Misc in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Philosophy of Consciousness, General Works in Philosophy of Mind

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211

A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World.Gregg Rosenberg - 2004 - New York, US: Oxford: Oxford University Press.

What place does consciousness have in the natural world? If we reject materialism, could there be a credible alternative? In one classic example, philosophers ask whether we can ever know what is it is like for bats to sense the world using sonar. It seems obvious to many that any amount of information about a bat's physical structure and information processing leaves us guessing about the central questions concerning the character of its experience. A Place for (...)

Russellian Monism in Philosophy of Mind

The Unity of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind

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Philosophy of Biology, Miscellaneous in Philosophy of Biology

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59

Hauptgedanken Des holismus.Adolf Meyer-Abich - 1940 - Acta Biotheoretica 5 (2):85-116.

The question dealt with in the article is the following: Is reality a Unity, a Plurality or a Whole. We do not expect to get definit results, we are only interested in pointing out a new ideal of scientific research.Under the predominance of physical thinking science was inclined upon nature as a Unity. The philosophy corresponding with this conception is Monism, to which belong all philosophical systems founded on the mecanistic idea from the primitive Monism ofHaeckel to the most (...) sophisticated Positivism. All these conceptions had to be rejected, because they were not able to eliminate the contingences of reality.Every conception of nature consistent with experience must recognize these contingences of reality. On this bases one can take reality either as a plurality or as a whole. According to the doctrine of pluralism contingence of the laws of nature is an original phenomenon which has to be accepted as such. This would mean the definit solution of the philosophical problems, if this would prove to be the only philosophy founded on the principle of contingence.But there is still such an another conception that is Holism. Here contrary to Pluralism, the domains of reality are not absolutely autonomous but form an organic whole comparable to that of the organs of a living body. In a living body each organ besides having its autonomous life, fulfils a special function in the whole of the organism. In the same science the different domains of reality are only the functionally differenciated organs of the whole nature. Consequently nature is not a passive and mecanistic unity, but an active and creative whole. Each cell is a member of a tissue, each tissue a member of an organ and the organ a member of the whole organism; each of them however has its personal and relatively “autonomous” existence. In the same way physical reality forms a member of organical reality, organical reality a member of psiquical reality, psiquical reality a member of social reality and social reality a member of historical reality. These domains also keep their autonomy and contingence. So the members of an organism can only be explained starting from the superior organ, i.e. in order to understand the functions of the cell one must first know those of the tissue etc. Though different domains of reality can only be understood by deriving in each case the less complicated reality from the more complicated, for instance the physical reality must be derived from organical reality, organical reality from psiquical reality etc. ... The details of the argumentation are given in the treatise itself. In summary the result is a biological conception of nature as a whole instead of physical conception prevalent up to now.La question formulée est la suivante: il s' agit de prouver si la réalité est une unité, une pluralité ou une totalité. Nous ne nous proposons pas trouver des résultats définitifs; nous nous bornerons plutôt à renseigner un nouveau ideal de la connaissance des choses, pour ainsi servir les buts de la science avenir.Sous la prévalence de l'orientation physicale la science tendait à comprendre la nature comme une seule unité. La philosophie qui corresponde à cette conception est le Monisme, qui embrasse tous les systèmes philosophiques fondés sur l'idée mécanistique du monisme primitif deHaeckel jusqu'au positivisme sublime. Toutes ces conceptions ont échoué, car ils n'étaient pas capables d'éliminer les contingences de la réalité.Toute la conception de la nature soutenable du point de vue empirique, doit reconnaître ces contingences de la réalité. Sur cette base on peut comprendre la réalité ou comme une pluralité ou comme une totalité. Selon la doctrine de pluralisme “la contingence des lois de la nature” est un phénomène, qu'on doit accepter comme tel. Il donnerait la solution définitive des problèmes philosophiques, à moins qu'il n'existât une autre philosophie de la réalité fondée, elle aussi, sur la contingence de la nature.Cette nouvelle philosophie est le Holisme.À la difference du pluralisme les rayons de la réalité ne constituent pas des domaines absolument autonomes, mais ils forment une totalité organique comparable à celle des membres d'un corps vivant. Dans un corps vivant chaque organe, entre la vie autonome, remplit une fonction spécifique dans l'ensemble total de l'organisme. De la même façon les différents rayons de la réalité ne sont que des organes fonctionnellement différenciés de la nature totale. Par conséquent, la nature n'est pas une unité passive et mécanistique, mais une totalité active et créatrice. Chaque cellule est un membre du tissu, chaque tissu un membre de l'organe et chaque organe un membre de l'organisme total; cependant chacun d'eux a sa propre existence. D'une manière analogue la réalité physique forme un membre de la réalité organique, la réalité organique un membre de la réalité psychique, la réalité psychique un membre de la réalité sociale, et enfin la réalité sociale un membre de la réalité historique. Toute fois ces rayons conservent leur autonomie et leur contingence. Or, les membres d'un organisme ne peuvent être expliqués qu'en partant de l'organe supérieur, c'est à dire pour comprendre les fonctions de la cellule il faut d'abord connaître celle du tissu et ainsi de suite etc. Les différents rayons de la réalité ne peuvent donc être compris qu'en dérivant, en chaque cas, la réalité moins compliquée, ce qui signifie par exemple qu'on doit dériver la réalité physique de la réalité organique, la réalité organique de la réalité psychique etc. Les détails de l'argumentation sont donnés dans le traité lui-même.En résumé il résulte une conception biologique de la réalité totale au lieu de la conception physique qui prévalait jusqu'ici. (shrink)

Kant: Metaphysics and Epistemology in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

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46

Natural Versus Transcendental Philosophy.Pierre Kerszberg - 1995 - Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18 (2):17-61.

Kant argues at the beginning of his critical work that transcendental philosophy completely banishes anything that is merely of the order of an hypothesis. Does this rejection reveal his assurance that he, like Newton, makes no hypotheses? Newton’s famous “Hypothesis non fingo” was meant to stem the multiplication of redundant hypotheses in mathematical physics. Thus, according to Newton, a Cartesian vortex dragging material particles into itself does not really explain the motion of the particles. The problem of the origin of (...)

Kant: Philosophy of Science in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Husserl and Other Philosophers in Continental Philosophy

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Naturalizing phenomenology – A philosophical imperative.Maurita Harney - 2015 - Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 119 (3):661-669.

Phenomenology since Husserl has always had a problematic relationship with empirical science. In its early articulations, there was Husserl's rejection of ‘the scientific attitude’, Merleau-Ponty's distancing of the scientifically-objectified self, and Heidegger's critique of modern science. These suggest an antipathy to science and to its methods of explaining the natural world. Recent developments in neuroscience have opened new opportunities for an engagement between phenomenology and cognitive science and through this, a re-thinking of science and its hidden assumptions more (...) generally. This is so partly because of the shortcomings of conventional mechanistically-conceived science in dealing with complex and dynamic phenomena such as climate change, brain plasticity, the behaviour of collectives, the dynamics of various microbiological processes, etc. But it is also due to recent phenomenological scholarship focussed on the ‘embodied’ phenomenology of Husserl's Ideen II and Merleau Ponty's later ontology of nature which have helped to extend the insights of phenomenology beyond the narrowly ‘human’ to an understanding of nature (which includes the human) more generally. Thus recontextualised, phenomenology is well placed to examine some of the assumptions that give rise to the reductionism and associated scientism which has characterised conventional science in its approach to the study of natural processes. In light of this, it might be suggested that the ‘anti-science’ of early articulations of phenomenology is more a hostility to the underlying assumptions of science as conventionally understood than to science itself e that it is scientism rather than science that is targeted. In this paper, I aim to show how a phenomenological naturalism might be seen as a necessary step towards the development of a non-reductionist and non-scientistic approach to scientific inquiry. A key to this is a reconceptualization of nature as inclusive of meanings and of mind. It is a conception developed by Merleau-Ponty, especially in his later ontology of nature, and one that is shared by American pragmatist philosopher of science, C.S. Peirce (1839e1914). For both philosophers, meaning must be understood in terms of an ontology which is relational rather than atomistic, and dynamic or processual rather than static and substance-based. For Merleau-Ponty this is an experientially-derived ontology; for Peirce it is a more conceptually-based one. In this paper, I explore this connection between these two philosophers in two stages. The first is by reference to Peirce's theory of signs or semiotics. More specifically, I look at the application of this theory to the study of biological processes as developed in Peirce-inspired biosemiotics. In the light of this, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty's account of intentional relations in nature might be articulated as semiotic relations, and can serve as a philosophical basis for a non-reductive biological science. I then turn to questions relating to the ontology of nature. I explore Merleau-Ponty's experientially-based “ontology of flesh” and Peirce's distinctive form of naturalism to show affinities at this ontological level. These affinities consist in commitments to a reality that includes possibility, meaning, temporality, and final causation e that is, an ontology which is far more inclusive than that of conventional positivistic science. Peirce's broader scientific metaphysics enables us to extend Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological naturalism beyond the biological to the physical sciences. Whilst Merleau-Ponty's ontology of nature provides the experiential basis necessary for a critique of scientism, Peirce establishes the relevance of that ontology for a re-conceived empirical science. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Continental Philosophy

Metaphysics and Epistemology

Semiotics in Social Sciences

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Aristotle’s Concept of Nature.Stasinos Stavrianeas - 2004 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 7 (1):27-51.

What is the nature or essence of a living thing? According to contemporary modal accounts a natural, i.e. essential, property of an entity x is a property that x cannot exist without or one that x possesses in all possible worlds where it exists. In Aristotle, given the way he introduces "nature" in the Physics, it is doubtful whether such a criterion spells out a sufficient or even a necessary condition for essential properties. This is because Aristotle determines (...)

Ontology in Metaphysics

Charles Sanders Peirce in 19th Century Philosophy

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72

Intentionalität aus semiotischer Sicht. Peirceanische Perspektiven. [REVIEW]Christian Strub - 2006 - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (3):439-445.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Intentionalität aus semiotischer Sicht. Peirceanische PerspektivenChristian StrubStefan Kappner Intentionalität aus semiotischer Sicht. Peirceanische Perspektiven. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter2004, ISBN 3–11-018288–2, 432 pp.1. Problem focusKappner intended only partially a Peirce-interpretation; he attempts to think further along with Peirce, and he succeeds as well. The first chapter serves as a sketch of the problem of intentionality from a historical perspective, starting from Brentano. Kappner formulates the problem correctly by stating (...) that from the contemporary standpoint on the one hand every sort of methodological mind—body dualism is obsolete, because the mainstream of research has adopted a methodological physicalism along with an anti-foundationalistic epistemology; yet on the other hand our common sense view of psychic and thus also of intentional phenomena, which is inclined towards just such a dualism, must be taken into consideration. The systematic task thus consists in describing the particular quality of psychic phenomena in such a manner that this description "is compatible with methodological naturalism" (47). Kappner's main concern is thus the attempt to anchor the intentionality of thoughts and of human consciousness in more primitive forms of intentionality which are already exhibited by non-psychic goal-oriented natural processes. The solution to this task must accomplish two things: firstly, Kappner must justify the distinction between three types of "carriers" of "intentionality": concrete objects which intentionally contain an object in themselves, i.e. signs (381f.): Ch. 7; organisms which are capable of producing "inner signs for the simulation of external processes" (cf. 320–326: insightful behavior) (382f): Ch. 8; organisms which are capable of understanding this production as their own (self-consciousness) (383): Ch. 9. I will call this distinction the "internal differentiation thesis" (IDT). Secondly, Kappner must demonstrate that these three types of carriers are founded in one another. Over and above this, Kappner asserts that sign-intentionality is founded in something which he (with Arno Ros, 263, cf. 144) calls "quasi-intentionality" (Ch. 6). I will call this the "founding thesis" (FT). Obviously FT presupposes IDT, but not vice versa. Kappner claims to have successfully concluded such an ambitious naturalization program (342). Even when one [End Page 439] does not always agree with the partial solutions of Kappner, reading the book is definitely rewarding, as it shows in what a precisely differentiated manner one can reflect on a central problem of the "philosophy of mind" using Peirce's array of semiotic instruments.The reader is, naturally, astonished to hear the name Peirce in the context of a program for the naturalization of intentionality, for Peirce himself never used the concepts of "intention" and "intentionality" in the sense in which Brentano used them (47, 66), and himself clearly espoused an antifoundationalism and a methodological monism—but never a methodological naturalism; rather its opposite, namely a methodological idealism which can only conceive of physical properties as derived from psychic properties (synechism; 50–54). The reader is all the more eager to see how Kappner will prove his thesis to the effect that Peirce nevertheless has made a systematic contribution to the solution of the problem of intentionality under contemporary conditions. The decisive methodological step of Kappner (60) in Ch. 2 consists in declaring Peirce's metaphysics to be independent of his epistemic realism, which holds reality to be independent of the subject's mode of access to this reality. It is first at the end of the work that Kappner can precisely formulate what he means by Peircean naturalism: "For [Peirce], it is not primarily a question of how in (mere) thought relations to real things can be produced [as it is for Brentano and Husserl], but rather the opposite, namely how the progressive distancing of humans from the linguistic or mentally denoted object was and is possible [ellipsis]. In my opinion Peirce's approach can above all for this reason be characterized as 'naturalistic'" (376). This is plausible—of course, only under the assumption (not acknowledged as such by Kappner) that something like a "protodistancing" from the world can already be ascertained in the realm of quasi-intentionality. Nevertheless, Kappner employs two different concepts of "naturalistic": a naturalistic theory of intentionality means (1... (shrink)

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Rationalist Roots of Modern Psychology.Gary Hatfield - 2009 - In Sarah Robins, John Symons & Paco Calvo, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 3--21.

The philosophers René Descartes (1596–1650), Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), Benedict Spinoza (1632–77), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) are grouped together as rationalists because they held that human beings possess a faculty of reason that produces knowledge independently of the senses. In this regard, they contrast with empiricist philosophers, such as John Locke and David Hume, who believed that all knowledge arises from the senses. The rationalists contended that proper use of reason would yield the first principles of metaphysics, (...)

History of Psychology, Misc in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Non-Human Animals, Misc in Philosophy of Biology

Rationalism, Misc in Metaphilosophy

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(1 other version)The Birth of Peace.René Descartes - 2014 - Common Knowledge 20 (2):371-386.

Apparently, Queen Christina had asked Descartes to dance at the celebration of her twenty-third birthday; he pleaded physical incapacity and instead wrote verse in honor of the event—verse also meant to celebrate the recent signing of the Treaty of Münster that ended the ultramurderous Thirty Years' War. The title of his piece was La Naissance de la Paix. Descartes died a few weeks later. -/- There is dispute over the claim that the verses are by Descartes (Richard A. Watson (...)

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17th/18th Century Philosophy

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Natural or violent motion? Galileo's conjectures on the fall of heavy bodies.Roberto de Andrade Martins - 1998 - Dialoghi Â Rivista di Studi Italici 2:45-67.

According to Aristotelian physics, there was a fundamental distinction between natural and violent motion. When the cause of the motion was internal to the moving body, that motion was regarded as natural. Violent motion was supposed to have an external efficient cause. It should stop as soon as this external cause ceased its action. The fall of a body was believed to have an internal cause – the very nature of the heavy body – but the motion of (...)

Cambridge Platonism in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

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Descartes on the Ethical Reliability of the Passions: A Morean Reading.Matthew Kisner - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 8:39-67.

This paper is concerned with Descartes’s view on the passions’ moral value, that is, their value with respect to achieving the ethical ends of virtue and happiness. In this regard, there is no question that the passions possess a kind of conative value because of their power to move or incline us in ways that contribute to ethical ends. This paper’s question is whether the passions also contribute to ethical ends in a cognitive sense by informing us of the (...)

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Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary by Alister E. McGRATH (review).Jack Zupko - 2023 - Review of Metaphysics 77 (1):158-159.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary by Alister E. McGRATHJack ZupkoMcGRATH, Alister E. Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. viii + 248 pp. Cloth, $39.95This book attempts to retrieve and reimagine the tradition of natural philosophy as an antidote for what the author sees as the fragmented, instrumentalized, and ethically disengaged understanding of the (...) world most of us have today. The idea is not to reinstate the older vision of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, with its final causes and animated spheres, or even the early modern culmination of natural philosophy in Newton’s universe of mathematically fixed natural laws; rather, the author hopes to engender a newer and deeper understanding of nature that is at once scientific, ethical, and poetic, which he explains in terms of the conceptual framework of Popper’s “Three Worlds”: objective, subjective, and theoretical. What is recovered thereby is said to be a “lost conceptual space” wherein human beings learn both about and from nature, modes of knowing rendered obsolete by disciplinary specialization in the sciences as well as our commitment to objective methods that leave no room for ethical or spiritual approaches to understanding the natural world and our place in it.The author covers quite a bit of ground on the historical side, from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages, moving on to the idea of natural philosophy as it was gradually transformed during the early modern period by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, and Newton—a picture finally eclipsed by the objective, empirical concept of natural science familiar to us today. Curiously, the book says very little about the Platonic tradition of natural philosophy that grew up around the Timaeus. Because it was available in Latin (or the first half of it, anyway, in a Latin translation by the Roman Neoplatonist Calcidius, who also wrote an influential commentary on the work), the Timaeus was, for almost a millennium, the authoritative text in natural philosophy in the West, at least until Aristotle’s nonlogical and scientific writings were recovered in the twelfth century. The Timaeus was the subject of many commentaries and philosophical discussions, from Calcidius in the fourth century to Bernardus Silvestris, William of Conches, and Alan of Lille in the twelfth. It fell out of favor among philosophers with the rise of Aristotle’s Physics and Aristotelian natural philosophy, though it continued to shape the popular imagination of nature in other genres, such as art and literature—recall, for example, the well-known image of “God the Geometer” (c. 1230), measuring the cosmos with a compass. If the author’s project is about “retrieving” natural philosophy “as a lost disciplinary imaginary” (the book’s subtitle), then surely the Platonic vision of the universe deserves equal billing with the Aristotelian. [End Page 158]That said, there is much to like in the project sketched here. The author’s diagnosis of the epistemic malaise of modern-day science sounds right to anyone familiar with the history of philosophy and natural science. So, even though we can now correctly describe the velocity constant of earth’s gravity as 9.8 m/s2, among other scientific achievements, we take ourselves to be wearing a different hat when we wax poetic at the beauty of the sky and the stars. Early-and pre-modern authors were more adept at bringing together science and poetry, but that might be because their epistemic position was radically different from our own. Calcidius, for example, finds it easy to draw moral and aesthetic conclusions from the motions of the cosmos because he really believed heavenly bodies are, like us, animated by souls. Even a materialist like Lucretius accepts that the gods exist; his (still) very radical thesis is that they don’t care about us. (And why should they? The Pythagorean theorem is much more beautiful and edifying to consider than the troubles of ignorant and weak-willed mortals.) Enlightened moderns that we are, we no longer believe the heavens are populated by super-intelligent beings; yet we continue to marvel at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and feel it is wrong to cause gratuitous... (shrink)

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Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes (review).Dennis Des Chene - 2005 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (1):113-115.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René DescartesDennis Des CheneRichard Watson. Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes. Boston: David R. Godine, 2002. pp. viii + 375. Cloth, $35.00.Somewhere between hagiography and debunking lies truth. Or so we may think: the biographer's sources are almost always tipped one way or the other, and it is his or her job to establish, or divine, the way of authentic (...) fact and, if facts fall short, then of sturdy sober hypothesis. In general the debunker has more fun, especially when the weight of tradition favors the ennobling, if not the beatification, of its subject.Descartes is a case in point. Until a few years ago, there was in English no satisfactory biography. Now there are three: an "intellectual biography" by Stephen Gaukroger, the Descartes of Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, and Watson's. Gaukroger dwells on Descartes's natural philosophy, especially in the early years. Only after 300 pages does he reach the period of the Discourse, Descartes's first published work. Rodis-Lewis offers a more even-handed treatment, the fruits of a lifetime of study. Her Descartes resembles, not the modern scientist or professional philosopher, but the ancient sage for whom metaphysics is a once-in-a-lifetime affair, and even natural philosophy subordinate to wisdom. Watson's Descartes is an altogether more worldly type, born into a family of lawyers, well-connected, touchy [End Page 113] about his place in social and scientific circles, and not all that interested in what we think of now as philosophy. Nor, for that matter, is Watson: you will look in vain for an analysis of the Meditations, a discussion of method, or a definition of générosité. (Watson does conclude, I should note, with a discussion of Descartes's doctrine on the soul, whose title might well have been "The future of an illusion" if Freud had not used it already.)If you like your philosophy uncluttered by context, if you find it worthwhile to read or write about "Cartesian skepticism" or "Cartesian dualism" without troubling yourself to understand who the historical Descartes was, or what might have moved him to confront the skeptics and save the soul, then Watson is not for you. It is emphatically a Life, not a Life and Works. It is, moreover, a life in the manner of many modern biographers, in which the biographer, rather than conceal himself behind the curtains of scholarly convention, figures into the narrative, retracing the steps of Descartes's passage to Italy, examining the baptismal certificate of Descartes's illegitimate daughter Francine, and eating lunch at the Queen Kristina restaurant "next door to the house in which Descartes died" (303). The quality of a biography thus written depends in part on the personality of its author (and in the case of Cogito Ergo Sum, the author's wife, who intervenes more than once on the side of common sense during their peregrinations). Watson is, to my mind, an agreeable companion, dedicated to the search for biographical truth, impatient with hagiographic fog and time-hallowed error, down-to-earth in his assessment of Descartes's motives and circumstances.One example to show the differences among the three biographies. In November 1618 Descartes met the future Latin schoolmaster Isaac Beeckman in Breda. Beeckman records with enthusiasm their joint endeavors in physico-mathematics over the next few months (Gaukroger has the details). It seems clear that the impetus for studying the various problems mentioned in Beeckman's Journal came from Beeckman, who had been pondering physical questions since 1613 or before. Descartes's contribution, at least at first, was his immense mathematical skill. Their interests lay largely within the "mixed mathematics" of the period, especially hydrostatics and mechanics. They also discussed music, an aspect of the "new science" now often neglected (but see H. F. Cohen, Quantifying Music [Dordrecht, 1984]). On New Year's day 1619 Descartes presented Beeckman with his Compendium musicæ (Gaukroger 74, Rodis-Lewis 51/29). A decade later, Descartes, having heard that Beeckman had appropriated the Compendium to himself, became angry and eventually, late in 1630, dismissed Beeckman with a masterpiece of de haut... (shrink)

Metaphysics and Epistemology

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The Elements of the Physical Universe.Paul Weiss - 1961 - Review of Metaphysics 15 (1):3 - 18.

Our inquiry begins, as it must, with the robust, familiar world of everyday, for one can start only from the place where one in fact is. We are now in a room where there are men and women, tables and chairs, pens, pencils, and books, dust, light, wood, and metal. Those who, with Descartes and Hume, try to ignore or cancel out that world, not only seek to reject what they themselves presuppose, but deny themselves and (...)

Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Philosophy of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind

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33

Mild Cognitive Impairment: Which Kind Is It?Andy Hamilton - 2006 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 13 (1):51-52.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mild Cognitive Impairment:Which Kind Is It?Andy Hamilton (bio)Keywordshuman kinds, mild cognitive impairment, multiple personality disorder, practical kinds, social constructionThere is much stimulating material in the Graham and Ritchie's paper (2006), concerning not just disease-classification but also the ethics of diagnosis. My concern is with the way in which they adduce Ian Hacking's views in the philosophy of science in support of their own. The authors quote with approval (...) his "dynamic nominalism" and its influence on Zachar's concept of "practical kinds." Hacking's view, as the authors quote it, is that "People classified in a certain way tend to conform to or grow into the ways that they are described; but they also evolve in their own ways, so that the classifications and descriptions have to be constantly revised" (1995, 21). The act of classifying changes both the classifier and the subject of classification, resulting in facts and categories that are both socially created and real. Hacking calls this "the looping effect of human kinds," and comments that "Multiple personality [disorder] is an almost too perfect illustration of this feedback effect" (1995, 21). The authors comment that Zachar (2000) builds on Hacking's position, discarding essentialist notions of classification that are limited to inherent biological properties, and turning instead to "practical kinds—nonarbitrary cultural artifacts intended to meet pragmatic needs (e.g. therapeutic, predictive prognostic, labeling effects, and physiology)" (Graham and Ritchie 2006, 36). Practical kinds, they believe, offer a way out of the clinical approach focused on mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as a precursor to, or mild form of, Alzheimer's disease. The inclination of the authors, as I read them, is to treat MCI as a practical or human kind, and not, like Alzheimer's disease, as a natural kind.My concern is whether the "looping effect of human kinds" can be transferred to the case of MCI from Hacking's original case study in Rewriting the Soul, multiple personality disorder (MPD). Hacking wished there to undermine the traditional debate over whether MPD is a "social or psychiatric artifact." He claims, correctly I think, that the presupposition behind the question "Is MPD a real disorder as opposed to a product of social circumstances?" should be rejected. The fact that a disorder is a product of social circumstances does not make it less real (1995, 12). On the looping of human kinds, Hacking comments that "The concept of child abuse [implicated in MPD] may itself be so made and molded by attempts at knowledge and intervention, and social reaction to these studies, that there is no stable object, child abuse, to have knowledge about." This is a "no fact of the matter" response, and it [End Page 51] is based on the recognition of conceptual change. He later adds that child abuse "is a real evil, and it was so before the concept was constructed. It was nevertheless constructed. Neither reality nor construction should be in question" (1995, 61, 68). However, Hacking's conclusions about the reality of MPD express only a muted skepticism. Utilitarian skeptics approach this question by asking, "What is the most effective treatment?" Hacking writes that "in their hearts [such skeptics] suspect that the outcome of multiple therapy [therapy that condones or even encourages the development of multiples in the patient] is a type of false consciousness" (1995, 267). The skeptics about MPD are making a moral judgment, he believes; but on whether that moral judgment is correct, he is silent, although the suspicion must be that he agrees with it.How do these considerations apply to the case of MCI? Graham and Ritchie rightly note that classifying a subject as suffering from MCI, and informing them of the diagnosis, will affect them adversely—it will cause suffering not least because there is at present no cure. However, it must surely be conceded that any disease at all—physical or mental—is a social entity insofar as it involves behavioral ascriptions to the subject concerning their incapacity. The authors also note the vested interests—especially from the pharmaceutical industry—in developing a diagnostic category of MCI. These interests are present in the development of any significant diagnostic... (shrink)

Disability in Applied Ethics

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18

Descartes's Concept of Mind (review).Joanna Forstrom - 2005 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (1):115-116.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Concept of MindJoanna ForstromLilli Alanen. Descartes’s Concept of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. pp. xv + 355. Cloth, $65.00.Descartes's Concept of Mind takes as its task that of redressing "the distortions of Descartes's concept of human mind and thinking caused by the Cartesian myth that Ryle justly sought to correct, but that his gripping caricature has helped keep alive" (x). Offering a close reading of (...) the text in its philosophical and historical context and examining its place in contemporary literature, Alanen develops Descartes's philosophy of mind, broadly construed, with a focus on the embodiment of the human mind.Alanen sees Descartes's philosophy of mind as "the result of an ongoing struggle to adjust some basic views about human nature, thought and agency rooted in experience and tradition to the new picture of the universe" (8). Taking this perspective reveals a greater continuity in his fundamental views. Changes, she suggests, are a matter of emphasis, subject matter, and perspective. She grants Descartes's dualism and his view of the mind-body union and chooses to focus instead on the mind as embodied.In developing the analysis Alanen takes a somewhat chronological approach in her seven chapters. Chapter one is a prehistory of Descartes's philosophy of mind focusing on his unpublished, early writings. She looks at his early intellectual ambitions and interests beginning with mathematics and a science of nature and then expanding into metaphysics. The distinctive views of his later work are formed, according to Alanen, during this time. In chapter two, three different perspectives about the nature of man are distinguished: man as an object of mechanistic physics, man as mind or intellect and so an epistemic subject, and man as a real union between the mind and body. She focuses on the third, as it is the real union that has been overlooked or misconstrued by most. How this union is to [End Page 115] be conceived, and the epistemological implications of it are explored. By highlighting the consequences of Descartes's distinction between the mind and the body in terms of knowledge, Alanen directly confronts Ryle and his legacy. In short, because we cannot expect to have knowledge of the mind—body union, we cannot conceive it—there is no category mistake to be made. She elaborates much more in the chapter.Chapters three, four and five, are centered on the writings from 1637-44. Here Alanen focuses on Descartes's notion of thinking and modes of thoughts. The way that thinking is defined, its intentional and representative nature, and the status of sensations as mental phenomena are carefully explored in light of discussions of these issues in contemporary literature and in the literature of Descartes's time. The issues are complex, but the writing is clear and easy to follow. Her discussions of representation, sense perception, and material falsity are particularly good in these chapters.Chapters six and seven reflect the issues that Princess Elisabeth raised: emotions, will, and related moral issues. These two chapters are perhaps the most significant in the book. Chapter six centers on The Passions. The passions depend on the union of the mind and body and do not consist in thought alone. Alanen sees them as a subclass of thoughts. She examines carefully the intentionality of emotions, the distinction between action and passions, and the functions attributed to the body and the soul. She raises a number of questions, some of which chapter seven begins to answer, and others which are left to challenge the reader. Chapter seven is about free will and virtue. Alanen places Descartes's conception of the will and agency in the context of the debate between the voluntarists and the intellectualists. She considers the ancient and medieval antecedents, with a focus on the Stoics as she develops her analysis. She also includes a good discussion of Descartes's contemporaries, and their reactions to his work. Her inclusion of secondary literature is well done. One is left with a better understanding of the complexities of Descartes's understanding of human nature and free will.Overall, Alanen's book is an excellent contribution to... (shrink)

Freedom and Liberty in Social and Political Philosophy

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8428

Filozofia praw człowieka. Prawa człowieka w świetle ich międzynarodowej ochrony.Marek Piechowiak - 1999 - Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL.

PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS IN LIGHT OF THEIR INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION Summary The book consists of two main parts: in the first, on the basis of an analysis of international law, elements of the contemporary conception of human rights and its positive legal protection are identified; in the second - in light of the first part -a philosophical theory of law based on the tradition leading from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas is constructed. The conclusion contains an application (...) of the results of the analysis conducted in the second part. The first part comprises four chapters. The first aims at revealing characteristics of human rights on the basis of an analysis of historical conditioning of the inter-national law of human rights and its development. The historical context displays the practical, vindicative, and critical character of the positive legal protection of human rights. Moreover, the process of change of positive human rights law is distinguished from the process of change of human rights as such. In the second chapter the content of human rights - a topic which is only auxiliary to the conducted analysis - is discussed. Basic typology and catalogues of rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and protected in the International Covenants of Human Rights are presented. The review of the content of rights aims at a more precise limitation of the field of research. The examination shows a diversity of rights which poses a serious challenge to the coherence of every philosophical theory of human rights. In the third chapter, central in the first part, international law is analyzed with regard to the characteristics of rights and the foundations of them. The analysis of documents shows a number of solutions referring to the anthropological foundations of rights. The inherent dignity of the human person is the source of all human rights. Each human being is recognized as free, and endowed with both reason and conscience. In the propounded conception of man individuals are not rivals but create a community which is a condition for their development. International law characterizes the rights as universal, inherent, inalienable and inviolable. The reconstructed conception also comprises the following basic elements: on the level of the structure of rights, a recognition of their equality, interdependence, and comprehensiveness; in the grounding of these rights, a recognition of the anthropological foundations of law; in the conception of positive law, a recognition of the secondariness of the positive law of human rights to human rights themselves, and a recognition of human rights and justice as the basis for legal order; in the conception of state, a recognition of the well-being of the individual as the fundamental aim of actions undertaken by political institutions, and recogni¬tion of rights which form an impassable boundary to the power of the state, includ¬ing its legislative actions. The characterization of the international legal paradigm serving for the under¬standing of human rights is supplemented by analyses of the structure of their posi¬tive legal protection. Various meanings of the terms "right" and "freedom" are distinguished. Subjective right, as basic structure of the positive legal protection of human rights, is understood as a complex relation formed by various legal situations of the subject of a right which create a functional whole in respect of the subordi-nation of human person to its good. Subordinating person to a good proper for it, expressed usually in a proclamatory norm, is the central element of particular rights around which further elements aiming at the realization of this good are built. In the second part of the book a philosophical theory is developed which allows for the location of a coherent foundation for the presented characterization of human rights and their positive legal protection. This part consists of two chapters. The first includes a review of some - not entirely satisfactory - means of founding of human rights; the second presents philosophical conceptions of law and man which may form a basis for the constructed theory. The review of arguments contained in the first chapter does not aim at a detailed analysis of various specific ways of argumentation encountered in works on this subject but rather at a concise presentation of the main possible lines of argumentation. These analyses also serve to emphasize the positive solutions which are pro¬posed later and to underscore the explanatory power of the elaborated theory. This theory, retaining accurate intuitions contained in the presented types of argumenta¬tion, helps in avoiding their consequences which are difficult to reconcile with the reconstructed paradigm of human rights. Efforts to base human rights on the norms of international law rightly take into account the necessity of determining the content of the rights and their positive legal protection as a means for the realization of man's good. These attempts, how¬ever, do not properly take into account the inherent character of human rights, which are independent of positive law and provide grounds for applying specific legislative measures and not others. Founding human rights on freedom accurately points at the freedom of an indi¬vidual as a constitutive element of some rights; however, absolutization of freedom leads, to a loss of an important element of the contemporary paradigm of under¬standing human rights. This foundation undermines recognition of the fact that human rights may set limits to both the freedom of others and the freedom of the subject of rights itself. Additionally, attempts at the so-called axiological justification of human rights are discussed. This type of justification has a few variants depending on the as¬sumed conception of value. Subjectivistic conceptions have similar advantages and disadvantages to the conceptions basing human rights on freedom; objectivistic conceptions while providing for the universality of human rights place, the fundamental aim of human rights protection beyond the individual human being - in the idealistically existing world of values; finally, conceptions rooting values and human rights in culture, while accurately noting that human rights are learned through the medium of culture, place the source of human rights beyond a concrete individual - in culture and processes which take place in it - which leads to difficulties in finding a basis for the universality of rights. Furthermore, attempts to ground human rights in specific characteristics of the human being are presented. This type of approach points to an important problem of dependence of the content of rights on what man is. However, recognition of specific characteristics of a human being as an ontic foundation of the existence of rights poses a danger to their universality since one has to accept that it is not enough to be a man to be a subject of rights, but a man possessing specific charac¬teristics. The second chapter aims at outlining solutions worked out by Saint Thomas Aquinas. For a fuller understanding of his propositions selected elements of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy are presented. It was them who formulated the founda¬tions for reflection on law and justice in the ontological context. A qualification is made that Stoicism is not be analysed in depth. Although Thomas' concept of law was undoubtedly developed under the influence of the Stoic doctrine as well, it is not in this that one should look for the tools to understand the ontic foundations of human rights and law in general since the Stoic moral philosophy and philosophy of law were developed in the context of a theory of being which assumed monistic and pantheistic premises as foundations, leading to the recognition of a total subor¬dination of the human individual to a larger unity of which man is only a part. The analysis of Plato's and Aristotle's texts concentrates on problems of justice. Plato seems to be the first philosopher who reflected on the formula basic in the history of European thought: to render to each his due. It appears that justice as both a characteristic of man and his acts is understood in the perspective of that which is just, that which is a good for another man - the recipient of the act. The basis for determining what is just is the relation of correspondence between some¬one and something. While in the case of Plato this relation is based on something beyond its terms, namely on ideas, in the case of Aristotle the relation occurs on account of the elements of the relation itself. Something is just when it contributes to the develop¬ment of the recipient of an act realizing that which is just. At the same time, the realization of that which is just is a good for the agent. In the analysis of the just two types of relation are revealed: the relation of due-to-recipient occurring on account of the compatibility of that which is due, with the recipient of the act; and - a "superstructure" - a relation of obligation-of-subject occurring on account of the compatibility of the acting subject with the thing which should be done. The basis for being that which is due is formed by various potentialities of development of man - the recipient of agency; the basis of being that which is an obligation is the possibility of development of the subject of action. Aristotle distinguishes various types of freedom and points to the necessity of taking them into account in the discussion of justice. Among other things, as the core of man's freedom, he considers life for its own sake, which can be seen as his expression of the basic indices of the autotelic character of man - which is funda¬mental for later conceptions of dignity. The freedom which is described by him is not, however, inherent and inalienable; being free is conditioned by a factual possi¬bility of undertaking actions, which are not solely means to the realization of aims set by others. Thomas Aquinas takes over the Aristotelian research perspective both in his conception of man and of law. At the same time, however, he significantly enriches it. In anthropology he develops a conception of personal being. Drawing upon his distinction between existence ("that something is") and essence ("what something is"), he sees the basis for being a person in the dignity of personal being which is a certain way of existence of a rational being more perfect than that of non-personal beings. The person is a being which, by virtue of its act of existence, is individual¬ized in a specific way. It is an aim in itself. Expressing it in a negative way, one may say that it does not exist as a means for the realization of the aims of others and, in this sense, that it is free. As distinct from Aristotelian conclusions, being a person is not conditioned by the specific actions of a being. Dignity is inherent, based on that which is the foundation of the factual existence of every rational being. Although freedom requires that a being is rational, dignity still encompasses all being, all its properties and potentialities. Thus an act conforming with dignity has to take into account a whole human being. Among different types of that which is just, ius, the first place, from the point of view of understanding law, falls to "the just thing itself ("ipsa res justa"), which is right in the full meaning of the word. On the one hand, it is that which is due; on the other hand, it determines the way of acting in the utmost degree, since the course of every act is determined in the fullest extent by its aim. The content of ius may be determined both by elements independent of free decisions - ius naturale - and by free decisions taking into account the state of things - ius positivum. Recognition of the objective structure of being as the basis of law does not entail that it is possible or desirable to determine unequivocally "the only right" patterns of conduct. This concept is very well justified within the system proposed by Saint Thomas. Individualization of being is a significant element of the develop¬ment of a person as a person. It is attained by the realization of individual aims which are not unequivocally determined by circumstances and the nature common to all people. By virtue of free choices made in the sphere of that which is not by its nature unjust, the object of action becomes ius. Since in the realization of the person the individualization of human being is central, Aquinas clearly sees the need for the protection of the sphere of "dominion of will". This sphere itself constitutes ius naturale, something which is due to man independently of the acts of will. Therefore "law should forbid nothing which is not unjust" ("nihil debet lege prohiberi quod licite fieri potest", In 3 Sent., dist. 40, q. I, a. 1, 3). Besides the relation of due-to-recipient, ius also includes the relation of obligation-of-subject which is superimposed on the relation of due-to-recipient. As far as the ontic foundations of obligation are concerned, in explaining why man is subordinated to realization of the good of others, Aquinas generally follows Aristotle in accepting that this basis is the subordination to moral good - to actions conforming with the learned truth about reality. Aquinas' systemic solutions allow, however, to reach deeper and understand why moral development is also a development of the whole human being. This was difficult within Aristotle's system, since he was reluc¬tant to decide whether precedence should be given to intellectual or moral develop¬ment. The inclination to realise good of another appears to be a transcendental characteristic of being, based on its very existence. Morality understood as rational and free subordination to realize the good of another is a specifically personal way of the realization of this inclination. Thus just actions contribute to the actualization of being in the aspect of its existence and therefore to the actualization of being as a whole. Thomas' conception of natural law (lex naturalis) as participation in eternal law (lex aeterna), offers possibilities for grasping that which is just as something which is basically accessible cognition, independently of Revelation and independently of faith in God, and at the same time as something based in eternal law, understood as a design of God's wisdom. Eternal law, embracing all particular actions, is not, from the human perspective, accessible cognition directly. It is enacted in the struc-ture of the created being and - in case of human beings - in free choices taking this structure into account. In the concluding remarks, the results obtained earlier are applied directly to the contemporary conception of human rights. Human rights are understood in the first place as "just things" - concrete goods of man; as that which is due because of subordination, based on dignity, to the personal development of man. That which is just is understood as a relational - actual or potential - state of things, which exists by virtue of existing relations. Evaluations referring to that which is right are true when respective relations of due-to-recipient take place; norms of conduct are true when respective relations of obligation-of-subject take place. Examples of the application of the sketched theory outside the field of human rights are also presented. Procedural consequences of the developed theory are shown, such as the discrimination of two types of legislative procedures which differ significantly in the structure of argumentation: the first aims at recognition of that which is just independently of the will of the legislator, and the second, at making individual or collective "projects" of development compatible. Finally the possibilities of applying the theory to the increasingly important problems of the protection of the environment and the "rights" of animals are mentioned. The central issue is a philosophical conception of man and his freedom and a conception of law. It is also indispensable to turn to a general theory of being. The search for a comprehensive theory of human rights requires attention to the Abso¬lute Being - God - as well. This is important for at least two reasons. First, a conception of the Absolute Being is integral to philosophy of the systemic type -of which the present book is a piece. A conception of the Absolute Being is signifi¬cant for understanding all being, including, first of all, man as a personal being. Second, every theory of human rights which does not comprise the problem of the Absolute may be questioned as to whether solutions adopted in it do not lead, in consequence, to eliminating God from the perspective of the understanding of law. It is desirable that a philosophical theory should deal with this problem directly. A theory which eliminates God from the perspective of the understanding of rights will be unacceptable for all those who, for philosophical reasons or relying on faith, consider God as the author of inherent rights. Nevertheless, a theoretical approach to rights from the perspective of the Absolute Being should only be a possible extension of a philosophical approach which bases rights on something which is cognizable independently of the acceptance of the existence of God so that the theory is also acceptable for those who reject the existence of God or suspend their judgment on this subject. The pursued theory should therefore contain, on the one hand, reference to natural, faith-independent foundations of human rights, but on the other hand, point to a possible extension accounting for the Absolute Being. The analyses contained in this chapter have undoubtedly some historical value since they are based on source texts. Nevertheless, the use of these texts and not critical works was dictated, first of all, by a conviction that analyses embrace a given theory in the aspect selected by the interests of the researcher. Therefore to find out what past thinkers say on the subject characterized in the first part it is simpler to reach to the sources than to adopt the existing critical works. The pre¬sented reconstruction of Aquinas' views on philosophy of law incorporates proposi¬tions of supplementing and developing some of the ideas undertaken by him. Obligation to act in this and not an other way arises because human actions are subordinated to the conformity, on the one hand, of aims realized by these actions and, on the one hand, the order of being determining that which is favourable to man or destroys him. The content of the order of being is, on the one hand, determined by the structure of being independent from man's will and, on the other, by free decisions of man. (shrink)

International Law in Philosophy of Law

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87

Essays on Descartes.Paul Hoffman - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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 Will in Philosophy of Action

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388

A Cartesian critique of the artificial intelligence.Rajakishore Nath - 2010 - Philosophical Papers and Review 3 (2):27-33.

This paper deals with the philosophical problems concerned with research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular with problems arising out of claims that AI exhibits ‘consciousness’, ‘thinking’ and other ‘inner’ processes and that they simulate human intelligence and cognitive processes in general. The argument is to show how Cartesian mind is non-mechanical. Descartes’ concept of ‘I think’ presupposes subjective experience, because it is ‘I’ who experiences the world. Likewise, Descartes’ notion of ‘I’ negates the (...)

Philosophy, Misc

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97

Descartes' naturalism about the mental.Gary Hatfield - 2000 - In Stephen Gaukroger, John Andrew Schuster & John Sutton, Descartes' Natural Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 630–658.

The chapter advances two theses involving Descartes and the mind. The first concerns Descartes' conception of mental faculties, particularly the intellect. As I read the _Meditations_, a fundamental aim of that work is to make the reader aware of the deliverances of the pure intellect, perhaps for the first time. Descartes' project is to alter the reader's Aristotelian beliefs about the faculty of the intellect and its relation to the senses, while at the same time coaxing her to use the (...)

Dualism, Misc in Philosophy of Mind

Metaphysical Naturalism in Metaphysics

Hume and Other Philosophers in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

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254

Reid's Criticism of Hume's Theory of Personal Identity.Harry Lesser - 1978 - Hume Studies 4 (2):41-63.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:REID' S CRITICISM OF HUME'S THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY One of the most interesting philosophical controversies is that between Reid and Hume, considered as representatives of two different sorts of empiricism. Hume, for these purposes, represents 'radical' empiricism, and the attempt to base knowledge solely on experience and what can be validly inferred from it, regardless of how far this leads one from everyday notions and beliefs. Reid, in (...) contrast, represents 'common sense' empiricism, and the view that the. results of experience and deduction must conform to a number of 'first principles or intuitive judgments' (Essays on the intellectual powers of man, VI, 4), which aie unprovable, but which no one can avoid accepting. It is important to be clear about the status of Reid' s 'intuitive judgments', or 'principles of common sense'. They are not merely the general beliefs of a particular culture, which could be 'vulgar errors or preJUdICeS''. Nor are they merely beliefs generally held by people uncorrupted by philosophy. They are assumptions which have to be made if theoretical or practical activity is to be possible at all, principles which are always accepted in practice even by those who deny them in theory. For example, although the uniformity of nature is not a logically necessary truth, everybody always thinks and acts in ways that presuppose that it is true: 'Nature is governed by fixed laws, and if it were not so, there could be no such thing as prudence in human conduct.... the whole fabric of natural philosophy is built upon this principle.' (Essays, VI, 5) Again, everyone, even a theoretical determinist, makes moral judgments and deliberates what to do; and these activities presuppose a belief in human free will. (Essays, ibid.) Hume himself, as Reid was aware, accepted the validity of some principles of this sort, notably of the 42. uniformity of nature. But Reid was dissatisfied with Hume's account, partly because he thought Hume had rejected far too much, and partly because of the grounds Hume gives for accepting, for example, the validity of induction, and the existence of the external physical world. Hume regards these beliefs as non-rational, and deriving from our psychological make-up; it is nature and not reason which causes the belief in an ordered physical reality. In Hume's eyes this is a sufficient justification: if our nature compels us to believe something, this is as good a ground for believing it as any other. Reid, on the other hand, believed, first, that there were many more principles of this sort than Hume had acknowledged, and secondly, that the justification of them was rational, and not merely psychologically determined, since it was based on the impossibility of thinking and acting coherently without them. Hence, even though Hume builds up with one hand what he pulls 'down with the other, and destroys the rational basis for belief only to replace it by one based on human nature and psychology, Reid continues to treat him as the archsceptic. In constructing his list of first principles in Essays, VI, 5, Reid explicitly or implicitly attacks Hume's 'scepticism' on five points - the existence of the mind; the existence of the physical world and the reliability of our senses; the reliability of memory; the reliability of reason; and the uniformity of nature. Against this scepticism he deploys three types of argument. The first is the argument from the universal beliefs of mankind, particular!/ as displayed in the structural features supposedly common to all languages. The second is the argument that the position of the sceptic is, when its consequences are worked out, either self-contradictory or incoherent. And the third is the argument already mentioned, that this position is inconsistent with other beliefs which the sceptic inevitably holds, since he thinks and acts in ways which are 43. inconsistent with their falsity, and cannot avoid doing so. To assess the force of Reid' s attacks, we have to consider both the strength of arguments of this sort in general and whether they apply in all these five cases. In this article, I want to concentrate on the first issue of the five, that of personal identity. Apart from displaying Reid... (shrink)

Hume: Personal Identity in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Hume: Philosophy of Mind in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Personal Identity, Misc in Metaphysics

Thomas Reid in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

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153

Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, An Annotated Edition.H. G. Callaway - 2014 - Cambridge Scholars Press.

Arthur S. Eddington, FRS, (1882–1944) was one of the most prominent British scientists of his time. He made major contributions to astrophysics and to the broader understanding of the revolutionary theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. He is famed for his astronomical observations of 1919, confirming Einstein’s prediction of the curving of the paths of starlight, and he was the first major interpreter of Einstein’s physics to the English-speaking world. His 1928 book, The Nature of the Physical (...)

Astrophysics in Philosophy of Physical Science

History of Physics in Philosophy of Physical Science

History of Quantum Mechanics in Philosophy of Physical Science

Scientific Method, Miscellaneous in General Philosophy of Science

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24

İbn Haldûn’un Ahl'k Düşüncesi Bakımından Money-Hedonizm.Muhammet Caner Ilgaroğlu - 2019 - Cumhuriyet İlahiyat Dergisi 23 (3):1331-1347.

According to Ibn Khaldūn, man is a social entity deeply influenced by the geo-economics-politics of the environment in which he lives. The effect is seen as so strong that nearly all of these structures in their relationship to human beings are dominated by it. In this system, we see human beings as a creature who is both able to adapt himself to the environment and able to evolve in this harmony. From the perspective of Ibn Khaldūn, man cannot be evaluated (...) or defined separately from the environmental conditions, the technique and architecture he has developed. Ibn Khaldūn sees the primary source of this change to be the desire to make life both more prosperous and bearable. Therefore, the most natural motivations that affect man’s desire to alter the natural world are the environmental challenges that he encounters. The challenges that are imposed upon man in the natural world are those that have led to human progress. From badāwa (nomadic society) to ḥaḍāra (sedentary society) and so to the ceaseless drive of human progress that has served to make life more endurable, every effort in this sense leads to a physical and moral loosening as the incessant struggle to survive that defines human existence is made more bearable. Physical slack by breaking the resistance of man to resist the environmental conditions; and moral looseness by making man more vulnerable to the temptation of desires, pleasures and welfare that are the cause of moral dilemmas. Ibn Khaldūn’s moral thought with its social, political, and other fields of application are all contexts that enable an understanding of the devaluation of money-hedonist morality in all ways. This article aims to analyze the social, political and economic dilemmas and challenges that the capitalist, consumption-based money-hedonist morality (obesity, social media addiction, consumption, and moral devaluation in the face of financial, virtual and imagined valuations, etc.) from the perspective of Ibn Khaldūn. Summary: Man is endowed with both good and evil. Ibn Khaldūn notes that man tends to misuse these two orientations with a higher inclination towards evil, and that social conditions have an effect on this. He sees another characteristic of man, that they develop habits; accordingly, man is the child of his habits. Habits are second nature to man and affects all of his perceptions, particularly notions concerning truth. At the same time, human beings are under the constant influence of both habits, culture, and climate and geography; and all of these together affect our ethics, psychology and characteristics. Thus, man is a historical, social being that is changed, transformed and determined by adapting to these cultural, social, political and ecological conditions. The concept of Money-Hedonism is one that we have created by combining the terms monetarism, an economic concept, and hedonism, a concept in moral philosophy; the resulting term we seek to produce essentially translates as the adoration of Money. As is well known, hedonism refers to a philosophy of life that has its origins in the ancient Greek world which sees the purpose of life as one in which the pursuit of pleasure is the highest good. Whereas, Monetarism is an American-based economic view developed by Milton Friedman in 1970, linking all the balance in the economy to the supply and demand of money. According to this, the demand for money is operation, precaution and motives of speculation of individuals the amount of money they want to keep in cash on them. The power of an exchange tool increases with the amount and quality of what it is achievable in its utilization. In this respect, money has been an unprecedented source of power in modern society as a means by which change can be achieved. The increase in the power of money as an effective means as manifesting power has led to a socio-cultural and socio-economic superstructure around this power. In the life of an individual that is part of such a culture and is unable to isolate himself from the economy in which he lives, the values that can be expressed with money are consequently formed. In this structure, since the measure of life is money, money determines the quality of human life and human pleasure to a far greater degree than at any time in history. Thus, those living in this age have developed a new moral philosophy of value formed by the combination of these two concepts (monetarism and hedonism), which we have defined as Money-Hedonism. The money-hedonist individual is one that is in love with money, the joy of having it, the pleasure of using it, who desires it with immeasurable passion and ambition and is willing to use all legitimate and illegitimate methods of obtaining it. The most prominent characteristics of this type of individual is egoism, a desire to possess, hatred and mistrust. Ibn Khaldūn argues that the inhabitants of a city that live a settled life and who are living in the city have become economically prosperous and absorbed by consumption and pleasure, and, consequently morally degenerate as a result of the abuse of their evil nature. As can be understood from Ibn Khaldūn’s explanations, the basic element that determines the transition of people from the badāwi way of life to ḥaḍāri (settled) is the change in the livelihoods and related needs. He perceives this change as progressing from necessity to luxury, and, with this change, ethical concern in the nature of people being replaced by aesthetic care. In this way, since aesthetic concern reveals the dissatisfaction of the human self, man always pursues what is perceived to be better and more beautiful, and therefore he easily tends to any malignancy that may disrupt his religious and worldly peace. The ḥaḍāra community of Ibn Khaldūn versus the badāwa represent a modern society with a much more heterogeneous population, with a significant increase in lifestyle diversity along with urbanization. However, the determinative effect of the relationship with nature or the way in which society engage in economic activities have not changed. While modern people are urbanized, they are also heterogeneously shaped by psycho-social necessities demanded by urbanization. Man has created a new socio-psychological condition that not only affects the socio-economic but the way of forming a relationship through the accelerated development of new communication methods, facilitating access to information, and the opening of new methods of communication field between institutions. While man’s connection to nature has become disconnected, he no longer perceives himself as human being in nature but as a human within the city, the individual urban life and the law define this perception. The rupture from nature has created an inevitable result of alienation to nature as well as the estrangement of man with his own nature. The liberal policies adopted with capitalism have encouraged competition and free entrepreneurship. In the time that Ibn Khaldūn lived, man who created himself with his struggle in the nature brings himself / herself into the economic structure of competition in the modern period. Unlike in more traditional societies of the past, the modern way of life not only expresses itself in our new way of life and moral values, but also by statistical values. The exploitative and mathematical world, which forms the current economic science, shapes the socio-economic and socio-psychological structure of modern man. It is understood that the life brought by luxury renders the dynamic, subjective, disciplined sense of morality dysfunctional by destroying the moral values of man, particularly by reducing their feeling of shame. As a result, while the world of value of money-hedonism is solid, materialistic and cold; man in trying to exist in this world of value carries a flexible, spiritual and emotional nature. As such, human beings are pushed into social anomaly situations such as a constant conflict, dilemma, suicide, insecurity and solitude in this world of value. (shrink)

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Descartes' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie (review).Brandon Look - 2001 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (3):440-442.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 440-442 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Lauth. Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie. Stuttgart (Bad Cannstatt): Frommann-Holzboog, 1998. Pp. x + 227 pp. Cloth, DM 64.00. Reinhard Lauth's Descartes ' Konzeption des Systems der Philosophie is an interesting addition to the literature on Descartes. Written by a renowned scholar of German Idealism, it does not represent an attempt to respond (...) to scholars of Descartes, to take part in the debate regarding aspects of Descartes's philosophy, nor to explain the role of Descartes's thought in the tumultuous seventeenth century, but rather to explain to scholars of German Idealism why Descartes should be considered the first and one of the greatest transcendental philosophers. It is no accident that in the index we find close to 50 references each to Kant and Fichte, while Descartes's important "rationalist" comrades, Spinoza and Leibniz, receive half as much attention; nor is it an accident that the first and last philosopher mentioned in the book is Fichte.Lauth's book is in the tradition of Gueroult's monumental Descartes selon l ' ordre des raisons (Paris, 1968, 2nd edition) and, as the title indicates, the subject of the book is Descartes's philosophy as a system, not as a collection of independent theses about various philosophical problems. However, unlike Gueroult, who concentrated on an [End Page 440] analysis of the Meditations, Lauth draws extensively on the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on Method, Meditations, and Descartes's correspondence. That Descartes viewed philosophy as ideally constituting a system of human knowledge should not come as news to anyone who recalls Descartes's claim in the Preface to the Principles of Philosophy that all of philosophy is like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, trunk physics, and branches medicine, mechanics, and morals, or his claim in the Preface to the Meditations that there is a clear order of argumentation or reasons and that his goal is to lay bare the foundations of philosophy. How exactly Descartes's philosophy is to constitute a system is the trickier question that is Lauth's concern.According to Lauth, the order of reasons that one finds expressed in Descartes's first philosophy is not simply a series of biographical events, filling a psychological need in Descartes (cf. Alquié, La Découverte métaphysique de l ' homme chez Descartes [Paris, 1966]), but rather the "systematic path of the cogito itself" (X). And Lauth attempts to show that there is something inexorable in the way that conclusions about the world from the point of view of the thinking subject are made and follow from one another. This takes him along the well-known path of the Meditations: from the existence of the self, to the nature of the self, to the existence and nature of God, to the external world, and finally to the relation of mind and body. And here two interesting observations on Lauth's part should be singled out. First, Lauth does an admirable job in intimating the tension regarding the places of the thinking subject and God as the supreme principles in Descartes's system. On the one hand, it would seem that the thinking subject should be the highest principle in Descartes's philosophy insofar as its existence is the first thing known; but, according to Lauth, it cannot be the highest principle because it does not contain the principle of its own existence (76). On the other hand, if we claim that God is the highest principle then we must recognize that a system following from this principle must fail insofar as genuine knowledge of God surpasses the bounds of our finite, human knowledge (99-100). Second, in claiming that Descartes was a "transcendental philosopher," Lauth reminds us of the extent to which Descartes is concerned with the bounds of human knowledge as determinable from the thinking subject itself.While this work contains many useful insights—especially for those scholars of German Idealism who are looking for new ways of reflecting on their subject—it has... (shrink)

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Interpreting Descartes Algebraically.Jamie Anne Spiering - 2021 - International Philosophical Quarterly 61 (2):175-187.

Descartes’s description of his method for discovering truth provides a helpful tool for interpreting his writings. In this article I offer a sample of how to interpret Descartes by understanding his algebraic method. My test case is the Cartesian teaching on divine freedom, which is well known to be inconsistent and often considered unfounded. I reconstruct the equations that led to these doctrines, arguing that Descartes held that the divine act of creation was both necessary and arbitrary because (...)

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Friedrich Schelling in 19th Century Philosophy

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Schelling's Moral Argument for a Metaphysics of Contingency.Alistair Welchman - 2014 - In Emilio Corriero & Andrea Dezi, Nature and Realism in Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature. pp. 27-54.

Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination: they mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition; while they are not weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) takes as its topic (...) the moral problem of freedom, but spends much of its time telling a mystical-metaphysical story about the creation of the world that attempts to paint a picture of a kind of irreducible metaphysical contingency in nature. What is the relation between the moral and the metaphysical elements of the Freedom essay? It has never been obvious. But some recent Anglophone scholarship suggests an answer. In her Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (2006) Michelle Kosch presents a strong case for the view that Schelling’s Freedom essay is motivated by a critique of Kant’s conception of autonomy in ethics. The idea is that Kant’s problems start not if he fails to show that it is rational to be moral, but if he succeeds. For if he does, then it is irrational to be immoral, and hence it is impossible for a rational agent to act immorally: an act not in conformity with duty is evidence of irrationality (perhaps one’s rational agency has been thwarted by pathological inclinations). This is broadly the Socratic position: evil, as a knowing immoral act, is not possible. Officially Kant rejects the classical view, most explicitly in his 1793 Religion with the Bounds of Mere Reason, for a Christian position in which freedom is understood as the freedom to choose between good and evil without thereby abandoning one’s agency. But he has no obvious means for doing so. Kosch attempts to show that Schelling comes, by 1809, to identify his early work with something like this Kantian dilemma: we are as badly off when it comes to our freedom if we are pushed around by reasons as if we are pushed around by causes: the Hegelian ruse of reason is as inimical to our agency as phenomenal determinism. The Freedom essay is the result of Schelling’s attempt to defend a muscular, Christian conception of the possibility of evil. Nevertheless, for Kosch, Schelling’s move to the metaphysical level is still problematic: just where one would expect an account of norms that does not infer them from our rational autonomy, we get, puzzlingly, a cosmology. I will argue that Kosch’s matrix for interpreting Schelling in fact does give us a way of understanding Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency. In broad outline, Schelling’s argument is that our choice of metaphysical schema is constrained by a correct understanding of agency: the world cannot be causally determined because that is inconsistent with our understanding of ourselves as agents; but equally the world cannot be rationally determined, and for the same reason. Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency is an unpacking of the consequences of this inference, and not a botched attempt to ground values outside of rational autonomy. (shrink)

Kant: Ethics in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Kant: Philosophy of Religion, Misc in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

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Spinoza's Anti-Humanism.Yitzhak Y. Melamed - 2011 - In Smith Justin & Fraenkel Carlos, The Rationalists. Springer/Synthese. pp. 147--166.

A common perception of Spinoza casts him as one of the precursors, perhaps even founders, of modern humanism and Enlightenment thought. Given that in the twentieth century, humanism was commonly associated with the ideology of secularism and the politics of liberal democracies, and that Spinoza has been taken as voicing a “message of secularity” and as having provided “the psychology and ethics of a democratic soul” and “the decisive impulse to… modern republicanism which takes it bearings by the dignity of (...) every man,” it is easy to understand how this humanistic image developed. Spinoza’s deep interest in, and extensive discussion of, human nature may have contributed to the emergence of this image as well. In this paper, I will argue that this common perception of Spinoza is mistaken and that Spinoza was in fact the most radical anti-humanist among modern philosophers. Arguably, Spinoza rejects any notion of human dignity. He conceives of God’s - and not man’s - point of view as the only objective perspective through which one can know things adequately, and it is at least highly questionable whether he allows for any genuine notions of human autonomy or morality. The notions of ‘humanism’ and ‘anti-humanism’ have been discussed extensively -mainly among continental philosophers - since the end of World War II. Because these notions carry a variety of historical, ideological, and philosophical meanings, it is important to provide at the outset at least a rudimentary clarification of my use of these two terms. By ‘humanism’ I mean a view which (1) assigns a unique value to human beings among other things in nature, (2) stresses the primacy of the human perspective in understanding the nature of things, and (3) attempts to point out an essential property of humanity which justifies its elevated and unique status. This definition of philosophical humanism has only little in common with the historical notion of Renaissance humanism, and seems to match quite well the common understanding of philosophical humanism suggested by current philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias. This notion of humanism should be understood in contrast to two competing positions. On the one hand, in contrast to the theocentric position that considers humanity to be radically dependent upon God, humanism affirms at least some degree of human independence. On the other hand, in contrast to the naturalist position which endorses the scientific examination of human beings just like any other objects in nature, humanists affirm the existence of a metaphysical and moral gulf between humanity and nature. This gulf assigns a special value to humanity and does not allow us to treat human beings like any other things in nature. For many humanists the nature/humanity gulf does not allow the application of the methods of natural sciences to the disciplines of the humanities. Humanism does not begin with modernity. In order to see how far back we can trace this position, we may recall Protagoras’ saying: “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.” In modern philosophy, the humanistic position had regained dominant status since the Renaissance, and variants of this position were vigorously argued for by prominent thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and finally, Hegel. In this paper, I will argue that Spinoza was a foe, and not a friend, of this tradition. I suggest that, in contrast to these humanist philosophers, Spinoza considers man as a marginal and limited being in nature, a being whose claims and presumptions far exceed its abilities. “To what length will the folly of the multitude not carry them?.... [T]hey imagine Nature to be so limited that they believe man to be his chief part.” Arguably, Spinoza locates the origin of our most fundamental metaphysical and ethical errors in a human hubris which not only tries to secure humanity an exceptional place in nature but also attempts to cast both God and nature in its own human image. (shrink)

History: Autonomy in Social and Political Philosophy

Value in Value Theory, Miscellaneous

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Introduction.Mirco Sambrotta - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (1):1-4.

Obviously, science matters to philosophy. But is philosophy also constrained by science? Naturalism is roughly the view that answers positively. However, even among proponents of naturalism, how science constrains philosophy has always been (and still is) a subject of debate. There are two basic dimensions in which the debate takes place, which give rise to two different kinds of naturalism: ontological and methodological. The former concerns what there is, while the latter deals with the methods whereby we acquire knowledge and (...)

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20th Century Philosophy of Science, Misc in 20th Century Philosophy

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Stanisława Kamińskiego opcje metodologiczne.Andrzej Bronk & Monika Walczak - 2018 - Filozofia i Nauka 6:199-230.

Stanisław Kamiński (1919-1986) was a philosopher, philosopher of science and historian of science. He defended in 1949 at the Catholic University in Lublin (KUL) his PhD thesis on Frege's axiomatic system of the sentence logic in the light of the contemporary methodology of deductive science. Since 1957 he was the head of the Chair of Methodology (the first one in Poland, founded in 1952 by J. Iwanicki) at the KUL, since 1965 the associate and since 1970 the full professor of (...) KUL. He was for many years the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy KUL where he developed the methodological foundations of the »Lublin-school of philosophy«. The main interests of S. Kamiński (1919-1986) was history of science and logic, general and special methodology, methodology of philosophy and (medieval) semiotics. Himself he saw his main achievements in the domain of the theory of science and the methodology of classical philosophy, especially in the studies of the method and language of metaphysics; he gave a methodological description of general metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history and studies on religion (religiology); he investigated the beginnings of the mathematical induction in the Middle Ages and in modern times, modern history of the theory of definition (Th. Hobbes, B. Pascal, J. Locke, E. B. de Condillac, J. D. Gergonne), the theory of argumentation (reasoning), the structure and the evolution of scientific theory, the deductive method (B. Pascal, G. W. Leibniz, G. Frege), the achievements of logic and philosophy in Poland. A characteristic feature of S. Kamiński's philosophical and methodological approach was a specific historicism, consisting of referring to the heritage of the past and at the same time to the latest achievements in logic and philosophy of science. He looked to history for inspiration, for how to solve his own problems and for a partial confirmation of legitimacy of his answers. He also used history to better understand the context of the discussed problems. His methodological interests are characterized by a philosophical and historical approach. He had a broad concept of knowledge and was maximalist both in raising questions and in giving answers. He cultivated the ideal of rational knowledge. In accordance with classical philosophy he saw the substance of person as ens rationale, a being realizing himself in a disinterested search for a theoretical truth, whose highest expression is philosophy. He stressed the epistemological and methodological plurality of knowledge and distinguished (with Kant) a material and formal part of knowledge, assuming that the formal element manifests itself as the logical form in the formal procedures of the (scientific) cognitive processes, that is in the (scientific) method and the (scientific) language. Making many attempts at a methodological characterization of different types of cognition and knowledge he distinguished – besides commonsense knowledge that lies at the bottom of any other type of knowledge – the scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge. None of them can be reduced to other type of knowledge, because each of them has its own problems, goals and methods. At the top there is a kind of sapiential knowledge which is much more than a simple generalization of all particular kinds of knowledge. S. Kamiński indebted his understanding of science to contemporary philosophy and to the classical philosophy. The nature of science was determined by him from the point view of its subject matter, aims, methods, logical structure and genesis. The question of what science is concerned with, i.e. what is its subject matter, is a philosophical question, it presupposes an appropriate understanding of the nature of the world. S. Kamiński opted for a pluralistic approach to the world: the principal object of science is the objective world but so are subjective states of man and products of his mind and his language. The best diagnostic test of the scientific character of science is the scientific method. Also here – rejecting the scientism (i.e. the view, that the scientific method and knowledge is the pattern and the measure of each knowledge) – S. Kamiński takes a pluralistic attitude. Accepting that the scientific method is not simple, that there is not one uncomplicated ideal way of doing science, and that because of the multiplicity of questions and scientific aims it would be difficult to construct one universal scientific method as a uniform set of rules for every kind of science, S. Kamiński assumes that different subject matter and different goals of scientific cognition require different research strategies and types of cognitive procedures. One manifestation of S. Kamiński's methodological pluralism is his antinaturalistic position in the theory of the humanities where he supported the thesis of their methodological autonomy with regard to natural sciences. Closer to the philosophical cognition and knowledge, the humanities do not meet and can not meet the conditions imposed upon the natural sciences, as they differ from them in subject matter (the world of culture) and hence in method (understanding, interpretation) used. The publications of S. Kamiński include over 350 positions. During his life he published three books: Georgonne'a teoria definicji [Georgonne's Theory of Definition], Lublin 1958; Pojęcie nauki i klasyfikacja nauk [Concept of Science and Classification of Sciences], Lublin 1961, 19813; and [together with M. A. Krąpiec] Z teorii i metodologii metafizyki [On the Theory and Methodology of Metaphysics], Lublin 1962. After his death five volumes of Collected Papers have been published: vol. I: Jak filozofować? [How to Philosophize? Studies in Methodology of Classical Philosophy], edited by Tadeusz Szubka, Lublin 1989; vol. II: Filozofia i metoda. Studia z dziejów metod filozofowania [Philosophy and Method. Studies from the History of the Method of Philosophizing], edited by Józef Herbut, Lublin 1993; vol. III: Metoda i język. Studia z semiotyki i metodologii nauk [Method and Language. Studies in Semiotics and Philosophy of Science], edited by Urszula Żegleń, Lublin 1994; vol. IV: Nauka i metoda. Pojęcie nauki i klasyfikacja nauk [Science and Method. Concept of Science and Classification of Sciences], edited by Andrzej Bronk, Lublin 1992); vol. V: Światopogląd - Religia - Teologia [Worldview - Religion - Theology], edited by Monika Walczak and Andrzej Bronk, Lublin 1998. (shrink)

General Philosophy of Science, Misc in General Philosophy of Science

Philosophical Traditions, Miscellaneous

Polish Philosophy in European Philosophy

Sociology of Science in General Philosophy of Science

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Descartes' Naturalistic Rationalism.Matthew J. Kisner - 2003 - Dissertation, University of California, San Diego

How are we to understand Descartes' view on the power and scope of reason? According to a common view, Descartes traffics in what I call 'theocentric rationalism.' Theocentric rationalism holds that human reason resembles divine reason, according to which God created the world. A hallmark of this view is the notion that knowledge should be analyzed and evaluated according to the standards of cognition achievable by God. ;My dissertation argues that Descartes resisted treating human reason as resembling divine reason. (...)

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Apologii︠a︡ Sofistov: Reli︠a︡tivizm Kak Ontologicheskai︠a︡ Sistema.Igorʹ Nikolaevich Rassokha - 2009 - Kharʹkov: Kharkivsʹka Nat͡sionalʹna Akademii͡a Misʹkoho Hospodarstva.

Sophists’ apologia. -/- Sophists were the first paid teachers ever. These ancient Greek enlighteners taught wisdom. Protagoras, Antiphon, Prodicus, Hippias, Lykophron are most famous ones. Sophists views and concerns made a unified encyclopedic system aimed at teaching common wisdom, virtue, management and public speaking. Of the contemporary “enlighters”, Deil Carnegy’s educational work seems to be the most similar to sophism. Sophists were the first intellectuals – their trade was to sell knowledge. They introduced a new type of teacher-student relationship (...) – the mutually beneficial communication on equal terms. They taught pupils how to think independently and how to persuade others, which was inseparably connected with the rise of democracy in the most advanced Greek polices. Sophists were the first to proclaim that all people are naturally equal. They put forward the idea of natural rights and social contract, working out the fundamentals of the present-day law. In addition, they developed the basics of philology, psychology, logic, and gave a scientific explanation to the origins of religions. They embodied definite positive ideals of their epoch. Sophistry flourished in the second half of the Vth through he first third of the IVth centuries B. C. The period coincides with the heyday of the entire Greek history – the so called Greek Miracle epoch. Sophists expressed some present-day concepts of Ancient Greek ideology and mentality, characteristic of its Golden Age times. The Ancient Athens of the times of Periclus were similar to the Florence of Renaissance as to the type of social structure. That is why (?) the art of eloquence (public speaking) was highly respected in Florence. The two cities had a lot of features of the present-day capitalist society, which was due to their role as the main centres of industry of their “worlds-economies”. During the subsequent Hellenic period, the Old Order was restored, based on the feudal rent recipients’ rule. The degradation of society resulted in the decline of sophistry. Sophistry represents the highest point in the evolution of Greek philosophy. It is also the most prominent school as to the novelty of its ideas. That was owing to the common propensity for innovation typical of Periclus’ Golden Age, which in its turn resulted from the establishment of the individualistic and rationalistic thinking similar to present-day mentality. Among other aspects, close attention was paid to ethnic issues; some humanistic ideas such as Master and Servant ethics and Enlightment as the primary condition of man’s freedom, received scientific grounding. The genre of philosophical dialogue was developed, as well as the rationalistic scientific gnoceology, aimed at consistently opposing any religion. Dialectics, the most outstanding achievement of the Antiquity, was also worked out by the sophists. Zeno of Helleas was one of the sophists. Democrites’ ideas were, too, quite close to dialectics. Socrates’ contemporaries regarded him ironically, as shown, for example, in the Aristophanes’ comedy “Clouds”. Nevertheless, this scholar can still be referred to as a sophist, although of somewhat weird personality. Socrates’ popularity, which came later, should be attributed to the fact that he was the first philosopher ever to have been sentenced and executed by law, rather than to any valuable scientific contributions. Sophistry as such, rather than Socrates, marks the line between pre-Socratic and post- Socratic schools. Plato, with the exception of his latest works, is considered to belong to the same philosophical school. Specifically, there are valid reasons to believe that he was paid fees by his disciples. In Plato’s Dialogues, all points of view will be proven and then disproved, so that an integral philosophical system is hard to observe. Plato’s “Idealism” is but one of the many possible theories. His ideal philosophy is a high-minded argument of wise men. As late as towards the end of his life, Plato betrayed the ideals of sophistry, turning into the world’s first proponent of totalitarianism. Sophistry is Greek classical literature. Later on, philosophy, as well as the entire Greek civilization, started to fall into decline. Over 500 subsequent years, Hellenistic-Roman scholars never came up with anything novel. The entire process of antique philosophical evolution can be subdivided into the following six stages: Phoenician (IX–VIIth centuries B. C.), archaic (VIth – the first half of IVth century B. C., classic (the epoch of sophistry: the second half of the Vth through the first decades of the IIIrd centuries B. C.), late antique (middle of the IIIrd – first decades of the VI th centuries B.C.) The fact that early in the VIth century B. C. sophistry was rejected in Athens, has a lot to do with the consequences of their defeat in Peloponnesian war, a social catastrophe. Ever since, the prevalent part of the criticism of sophistry is a criticism of sophists’ immoral ways of life and personalities, rather than the essentials of their philosophy. For instance, Aristotle’s criticism primarily concerns their pragmatism and tendency to make a profit out of teaching. However, Aristotle himself taught his disciples along similar lines, showing them how to “be able to prove both opposites”. It was Aristotle who summed up sophists’ century-long elaborations. The traditional modern interpretation of sophists as shown in Plato’s dialogues appears to be groundless. The truth of the matter is that Plato regards sophists as more serious philosophers than Socrates was. It becomes especially clear in the dialogue titled “Protagoras”, which shows the latter as gaining an undoubted victory over Socrates. Generally speaking, Plato’s works never regard sophists as weak or worthless opponents. A common opinion as to the essence of sophists’, in particular, Protagoras’s philosophy, has hitherto not been worked out. Many researchers renounce the very existence of any specific philosophical position in sophistry. The term “relativism” itself now has a bad name. However, it should be borne in mind that Protagoras doctrine emerged as a result of an attempt to get out of the ontological dead-end to which the entire Greek natural philosophy had come. To this purpose, he employed Anaxagoras’s idea about everything comprising everything, whereupon he built his physical-ontological theory, and Zeno of Helleas’s concept that all objects are such and different at the same time in the same respect. According to Protagoras’s philosophy, every object does not only seem, but is different from every other object, including human beings. Therefore, every person is his or her own measure of all other entities. The objective reality is the Ego’s relations with the outer world. Every object’s essence is defined through its interaction with ourselves. Nothing remains stagnant – every existence already contains non-existence, and vice-versa. However, the relativity of being is not to be regarded as absolute. That means, that relatively stable and therefore relatively cognizable entities do exist, among them the words we say. Doubt is not considered absolute by relativists either, which differentiates them from skeptics and agnostics. They dare to believe. Uncertainty is Godly – here, Protagoras becomes very close to the concept of apathetic theology. Gorgius shared Protagoras’s views and tried to prove them applying the same method as Zeno applied when upholding Parmenidis’s philosophy. He argued that if one accepts the opposite point of view and agrees that nothing can exist and not exist at the same time, one is bound to come to an the absurd conclusion that nothing is cognizable and nothing exists. To prove that there is a universal contradiction within the Existence itself, Protagoras and his followers in their turn put forward a number of special logical arguments, called rules of contraries, or sophisms. The most well-known of them is the Euathle’s sophism, which proves that an object can be such and different at the same time in the same respect. Generally speaking, all relationships of any entity are extraneous. The idea that all entities, including concepts, exist and do not exist at the same time, was also accepted by Plato. It should be stressed, that Plato’s philosophy as a whole is relativists’ greatest achievement. In his dispute against relativism, Aristotle put forward the main concepts of his ontology: the existence falls into the existence in possibility and the existence in reality, or substance and accidence – the ever changing “sublunary” world and the stable world of divine heavenly bodies. This division made his system self-contradictory to the point of absurd. Aristotle quite realized, that the direct disproof of relativism is hardly possible, which fact makes his criticism a mere tautology. It is very indicative in this respect that materialists, idealists and even skeptical agnostics applied the same arguments do disprove relativism. That demonstrates that the inner contradiction between any forms of “absolutism” and relativism is the most fundamental philosophical problem. Relativist ideas were repeatedly renewed throughout history, provided the social conditions were favourable. In variations, the concepts were advanced by Tzuan Tsi and ancient Chinese sophists, apostle Paul, Nicolas of Cusa, Galileo, Rene Descartes, G. Berkley, D. Hume, Ch. S. Pierce, E. Mach, A. Bogdanov, F. de Saussure, N. Bore, P. Feuerabend, U. Quain and others. However, no consistent relativist ontological system was developed after Protagoras. Meanwhile, a valid relativist theory could provide a clue to a fuller and more adequate general physical concept of the world, and to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. -/- Relativism as an ontological system of beliefs. -/- The relativist principle of relativity of all that exists is fundamental for the entire system of philosophy. Absolutely everything exists, but, at the same time, no existence is absolute. Anything is possible, but those entities only exist for us with which we interact this way or another, i. e., reality is interaction, “I interact – hence, I exist”. However, an overly close relationship between entities leads to non-existence – in other words, there is a certain existential optimum. For all of us, information, or perceptible heterogeneities, is real. Each of us is the center of a definite system of interactions with the world. If God is an endless Possibility, then the World is but the man’s dialogue with God. However, the ties that bind us with the world are of some definite kind, which predetermines our reality. The principle of relativity constrains itself, as any relativity is relative. On the one hand, that calls forth the Evil – caused by our own weakness. On the other hand, it makes our world relatively stable and cognizable. Generally speaking, the world is what we are. Everybody has an own Universe, but since people are fairly similar, our universes can be regarded as one Universe with common laws and regulations. It is possible for us to change the degree of objects’ existence in relation to ourselves and one another. It is equally important, though, to remain ourselves (keep following our “warrior’s path”). Since everything exists and no existence is absolute, the process of cognition should involve a criticism of everything but never a complete rebuttal of anything. The criterion of verity for any theory then is in its capacity to build itself upon a bigger number of diverse statements than in any other theory. Theoretically, all philosophies should ideally be complementary. The question of what in fact happened is meaningless unless we specify the “we”, the “where” and the “when”. The past can only exist as part of the present. When we change, our past undergoes corresponding qualitative objective changes, all of which are irreversible. The contemporary physics regards all objects of the Universe as existing for one another, which results in absurd conclusions. In fact, only what we interact with, exists. The so called “speed of light in vacuum” c is the maximum speed of direct interaction and direct exchange of signals. Specifically, at the oncoming speed c with a significant blue parallax the gamma-quantum is unable to interact with the matter. When this speed is reached, the gravitational mass of objects in relation to one another becomes equal to zero (imaginary), whereas their inertial mass equals infinity. Further acceleration will bring us into an entirely different Universe. That means that the Universe is an open system, which fact destroys all present-day cosmological models. Anything is possible in this world. Our reality is magic. Every bit of space contains a potentially limitless number of bits of other, however virtual, universes, as well as an infinite number of particles, which are still virtual for us (as postulated by quantum mechanics). In other words, there exists an infinity of different realities. With all the above in mind, the different levels of entities’ existence, in particular, of Life and Reason, should be taken into consideration. For example, to which extent a live system exists in relation to the inanimate forms of being is very indefinite, as what life is has to be determined by living creatures. An even greater compass of levels of existence can be brought about through interaction – that is the core idea of Godel’s theorem. As a result, the range of forms of existence tends towards infinity – the evolution of matter through super-intelligence will bring us up to God’s heights. A more generalized mathematical model of the physical world, including a universal operator of the co-existence of objects, can be developed based on the above considerations. The bonds between objects become weaker owing to 1) a high speed, 2) acceleration, 3) rotation, 4) strong gravity, 5) strong fields of other kinds, 6) the difference of levels of existence , 7) phase shifts. Yet, there always is an existential optimum. Such mathematical model is to operate certain non-transitive algebras. Relativist ontology assumes that the notion of “temperature” is relative, thus making it possible to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In its turn, that will allow for phase shifts. A perpetual motion machine of the second type will become a reality. Rotation could presumably be used to increase inertial and decrease gravitational mass, slowing down the time. An experimental research could shed light on the mentioned effects. (shrink)

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Cartesian Theodicy: Descartes's Quest for Certitude (review).Richard A. Watson - 2003 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2):275-276.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 275-276 [Access article in PDF] Zbigniew Janowski. Cartesian Theodicy: Descartes' Quest for Certitude. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002. Pp. 181. Cloth, $30.00. Janowski begins this original and erudite work by saying that although "the Meditations have never [before] been interpreted as a theodicy... insofar as theodicy is concerned with examining the relationship between the existence of evil on the one hand and God's (...) omnipotence and benevolence on the other, Descartes's question 'How would the goodness of God not preclude the possibility that nature is deceptive?' is in perfect conformity with, and continues the long tradition of, Christian apologetics" (13). This is not to deny Descartes's primary role in replacing God's causal role in nature with mechanistic science, and his separating religious truth from that of reason. But Descartes also is profoundly concerned with problems of error, evil, God's role in our sins, and Absolute Truth. Janowski is concerned "to show how Descartes' philosophy is derived from the early-seventeenth-century debates over divine and human freedom" by concentrating on the "incongruity between the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent Creator and man's imperfect nature [and] the nature and scope of human freedom" (19). He presents "the problem of error... as the problem of evil; the problem of human will... as the problem of human freedom, and the quest for Certitude... as theodicy, that is, as the vindication of God's goodness and omnipotence" (19-20). His ground for this is his interpretation of Cartesianism as "a kind of epistemological Augustinianism" (20).The view of basic Christian theology is that God is omnipotent and benevolent, and that all his creations are good, so evil is merely the absence of good. According to Descartes, free will makes both error and evil possible. But Augustine says that after the Fall of Man, free will is corrupt and can incline only to evil. So the only good man can do is by way of God's grace, which man cannot resist, for man is not really free to choose between good and evil. But here, Descartes is in disagreement with Augustine. Again, theodicy concerns the problem of the apparent discrepancy between the power of the creator and the imperfections of creation. And the problem is that Descartes's God is an all-powerful being that is absolutely unlimited and creates everything including logical, moral, and legal principles. Descartes's God is not constrained by the principles of non-contradiction (as opposed to St. Thomas's God, who is so constrained). Descartes's argument is that only God is immutable, nothing created is immutable, so no principle created by God, not the Ten Commandments, not the principle of non-contradiction, is immutable.This doctrine of indifferently created eternal truths allies Descartes with the Molinists who argue that God is indifferent in the sense of all powerful, and that humans have a freedom of indifference in that even given grace, they can decide to do either good or evil. This is in opposition to Augustinians and Jansenists who believe that human will corrupted by the Fall of Man can choose only evil until God gives one grace, after which one can choose only good—which, in either case, rules out any notion of freedom of choice between good and evil by an indifferent free will. Descartes believes that we can choose evil even when God gives us grace to choose good. Descartes does follow Augustine in asserting that for God, knowing and willing are the same, in opposition to St. Thomas. But for humans, knowing and willing are separate, and so humans can both err and sin.Descartes's theodicy is that everything depends on God—physics, mathematics, morals, and law. Without God there would be only nihilism. A great difficulty with this doctrine of eternal truths, however, is that it "makes the nature of God completely incomprehensible to man" (102). This is the doctrine of the Hidden God. But in a backhanded way, it saves Descartes's position. He argues that... (shrink)

Theories of Modality, Misc in Metaphysics

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Naturalización de la Metafísica Modal.Carlos Romero - 2021 - Dissertation, National Autonomous University of Mexico

⦿ In my dissertation I introduce, motivate and take the first steps in the implementation of, the project of naturalising modal metaphysics: the transformation of the field into a chapter of the philosophy of science rather than speculative, autonomous metaphysics. -/- ⦿ In the introduction, I explain the concept of naturalisation that I apply throughout the dissertation, which I argue to be an improvement on Ladyman and Ross' proposal for naturalised metaphysics. I also object to Williamson's proposal that modal metaphysics (...) --- or some view in the area --- is already a quasi-scientific discipline. -/- ⦿ Recently, some philosophers have argued that the notion of metaphysical modality is as ill defined as to be of little theoretical utility. In the second chapter I intend to contribute to such skepticism. First, I observe that each of the proposed marks of the concept, except for factivity, is highly controversial; thus, its logical structure is deeply obscure. With the failure of the "first principles" approach, I examine the paradigmatic intended applications of the concept, and argue that each makes it a device for a very specific and controversial project: a device, therefore, for which a naturalist will find no use for. I conclude that there is no well-defined or theoretically useful notion of objective necessity other than logical or physical necessity, and I suggest that naturalising modal metaphysics can provide more stable methodological foundations. -/- ⦿ In the third chapter I answer a possible objection against the in-principle viability of the project: that the concept of metaphysical modality cannot be understood through the philosophical analysis of any scientific theory, since metaphysical necessity "transcends'' natural necessity, and science only deals with the latter. I argue that the most important arguments for this transcendence thesis fail or face problems that, as of today, remain unsolved. -/- ⦿ Call the idea that science doesn't need modality, "demodalism''. Demodalism is a first step in a naturalistic argument for modal antirealism. In the fourth chapter I examine six versions of demodalism to explain why a family of formalisms, that I call "spaces of possibility'', are (i) used in a quasi-ubiquitous way in mathematised sciences (I provide examples from theoretical computer science to microeconomics), (ii) scientifically interpreted in modal terms, and (iii) used for at least six important tasks: (1) defining laws and theories; (2) defining important concepts from different sciences (I give several examples); (3) making essential classifications; (4) providing different types of explanations; (5) providing the connection between theory and statistics, and (6) understanding the transition between a theory and its successor (as is the case with quantisation). -/- ⦿ In fifth chapter I propose and defend a naturalised modal ontology. This is a realism about modal structure: my realism about constraints. The modal structure of a system are the relationships between its possible states and between its possible states and those of other systems. It is given by the plurality of restrictions to which said system is subject. A constraint is a factor that explains the impossibility of a class of states; I explain this concept further. First, I defend my point of view by rejecting some of its main rivals: constructive empiricism, Humean conventionalism, and wave function realism, as they fail to make sense of quantum chaos. This is because the field requires the notion of objective modal structure, and the mentioned views have trouble explaining the modal facts of quantum dynamics. Then, I argue that constraint realism supersedes these views in the context of Bohm's standard theory and mechanics, and underpins the study of quantum chaos. Finally, I consider and reject two possible problems for my point of view. -/- ⦿ A central concern of modal metaphysicians has been to understand the logical system that best characterises necessity. In the sixth chapter I intend to recover the logical project applied to my naturalistic modal metaphysics. Scientists and philosophers of science accept different degrees of physical necessity, ranging from purely mathematically necessary facts that restrict physical behaviour, to kinetic principles, to particular dynamical constraints. I argue that this motivates a multimodal approach to modal logic, and that the time dependence of dynamics motivates a logic of historical necessity. I propose multimodal propositional (classical) logics for Bohmian mechanics and the Everettian theory of many divergent worlds, and I close with a criticism of Williamson's approach to the logic of state spaces of dynamic systems. (shrink)

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Descartes on the Eucharistic Presence.Dániel Schmal - 2023 - In Gyula Klima, The Metaphysics and Theology of the Eucharist: A Historical-Analytical Survey of the Problems of the Sacrament. Springer Verlag. pp. 393-415.

Descartes divides his treatment of the theology of the Eucharist into two closely related questions: the problem of real accidents and the problem of real presence. Scholarly work has tended to focus on the first question. Its overrepresentation in the secondary literature is understandable in light of Descartes’s preoccupation with real accidents and his reluctance to take a position on the Eucharistic presence. Despite this imbalance, I take a closer look at Descartes’s views on the second question by collecting some (...)

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$130.00 new $139.99 from Amazon (collection) View on Amazon.com

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René Descartes: Regulae ad directionem ingenii.Gregor Sebba - 1968 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (1):82-83.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:82 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY phy) than the aspects considered in the earlier chapters. The attempts of these men to formulate theories of the cosmos and of natural phenomena, to take the place of Aristotle's natural philosophy, are described as honest and original speculative endeavors, with a few features which can be construed as anticipations of seventeenth-century scientific philosophy, but basically lacking the soundness of method and evidence (...) that could make them adequate substitutes for the Aristotelian system. "The Aristotelian tradition of natural philosophy," as Kristeller states, "was not overthrown by the outside attacks of the humanists or Platonists, nor by the suggestive theories of the natural philosophers. It yielded only in and after the seven~ teenth century, when the new science of Galileo and his successors was able to deal with its subject matter on the basis of a firmly established and superior method" (p. 96). All of the essays in this book are distinguished by their concern for historical truth and objectivity, by their attempt to present the thought of the eight authors in the context of the times and in terms of the interests and purposes of the writers themselves, and by the rich and enlightened perspectives of historical understanding brought to bear on the subjects discussed. But what is most attractive, and indeed striking, in this work of Kristeller, as in the other books and essays he has written on Renaissance thought, is his own conviction that the cultural and philosophical ideals which characterized the Italian Renaissance are of intrinsic and enduring value in their own right.Unlike many other expositers and partisans of Renaissance thought, who extol it because it anticipated modem science, or because it was secularist,or anti-scholastic, or "this-worldly"rather than "other-worldly", Kristeller admires it for just what it was. And to those who define philosophy as logical analysis, or as existentialism,or as pragmatism or neo=seholasticism, and on that basis claim that the Italian Renaissance made no contribution to philosophy, Kristeliermakes no apologies. There is no necessary repugnance between scholarship and philosophy, or between original thought and an understanding and appreciation of the classics,nor is cultural barbarism a necessary prerequisite of the pursuit of truth. The values which Kristellerdefends in our time are very much those which Erasmus defended in the sixteenth century. "There is such a thing as the autonomy of culture," Kristeller remarks (p. 94), "and it has always been the task and duty of scholars to defend this territory against the deeper inroads of religious and politicalinfluences." The inroads in our time have been made by differentfanaticisms than those of the sixteenth century, but the defense of the integrity of scholarship and of liberal culture has been a task and duty to which Paul Kristeller has been faithful throughout his long and fruitfulcareer. ER~S~ A. MooDY University of California, Los Angeles Ren$ Descartes: Regulae ad direct~onem ingenii. Texte critique ~tabli par Giovanni Crapulli, avec la version hollandaise du XVH ~m~ si~ele. (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. -" Archives Intemationales d'histeire des iddes, t. 12. Pp. xxxiii + 80 + 80* + 40. Guilders 38.75.) This edition of the Regulae is important because for the first time since the great AdamTannery edition of 1896--1913 a major work of Descartes has been independently re-edited from the sources according to the most advanced editorial principles. The historian of philosophy -the user--will ask four questions: (1) Why a new edition? (2) What does it offer? (3) How does it affect the AT text? (4) What edition should be used and cited? Here briefly, are the answers as one user sees them. 1. The Regulae were posthumously published in 1701. Besides this edito princeps (A) there exists the so-called Hanover manuscript (H) with emendations by Leibniz (L). These were kdam's sources. But the Regulae became known first through the Dutch translation of Glazemaker, published in 1684 (N) which Adam knew but did not use. This led Dr. Crapulli to a review of the whole editorial problem. He concluded that A, H and N were prepared from BOOK REVIEWS 83 three different manuscripts, none of them Descartes's original (which is lost... (shrink)