Machine generated contents note: 1 The Cartesian legacy -- The dominant paradigm -- Cartesian dualism -- The secret life of the body -- The Cartesian theatre -- The domain of reason -- The causal relevance of the mind -- Conclusion -- Further reading --2 Reductionism and the road to functionalism -- Causation, scientific realism, and physicalism -- Reductionism and central state materialism -- Problems with central state materialism -- Modified ontological physicalism: supervenience -- Modified explanatory physicalism: (...) the disunity of -- science picture -- Supervenient causation -- Functionalism -- Further reading --3 Computational models of mind -- Intentionality -- Rationality: the calculative account -- The computational model of mind -- Objections to the language of thought (1) -- Objections to the language of thought (2) -- Conclusion -- Further reading --4 The content of thought -- The internalist picture -- Externalism -- Singular thoughts -- Dual component theories -- Naturalistic externalism -- Teleological theories -- Conclusion -- Further reading --5 Anti-reductionist alternatives -- Interpretationalism -- Real patterns -- Direct interpretationalism -- Psychological causalism -- Modified psychological causalism -- Third-personalism and perspectivity -- The world from the point of view of the subject -- Context and culture -- Conclusion -- Further reading --6 The content of experience -- Consciousness -- The knowledge argument -- Absent qualia and inverted spectra -- Functionalist responses -- Internal monitoring -- Intentionalism -- Form and content -- The private language argument -- Further reading -- 7 Subjects of experience -- Subjectivity -- The subjective viewpoint -- Intersubjectivity -- Simulation theory -- Normativity and normality -- Expression -- Self-knowledge -- Conclusion -- Further reading --8 The embodied subject -- Mentality -- Desire -- Beyond the Cartesian body -- Metaphysical questions: multiple narratives -- Further reading -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

In the recent debate concerning the boundary of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT), which states that our mind and cognition are extended into the environment, is influential as an antithesis to the internalist view, according to which mind and cognition are in the head. However, EMT has some serious difficulties. On the contrary to its proponents’ claim, EMT contributes neither to demystifying the mind, nor to promoting our understanding of cognition. Moreover, it leads to (...) an extreme kind of individualism by regarding environmental resources as constituents of individual human minds. After showing this, I explore an alternative anti-Cartesian picture of mind through citing Dewey’s view of the locus of mind. Although the proponents of EMT often invoke Dewey as a pioneer of their view, his view is in fact the one that should be called the ‘unbounded mind’ rather than the ‘extended mind’. Furthermore, I show that Dewey’s view indicates a root to overcome the individualistic dogma that is shared by internalists and the EMT theorists. (shrink)

A growing body of literature in the field of embodied situated cognition is drawing attention to the hostile ways in which our environments can be constructed, with detrimental effects on people’s ability to flourish as environmentally situated beings. This paper contributes to this body of research, focusing on a specific area of concern. Specifically, I argue that a very particular problematic quasi-Cartesian picture of the human body, the human mind, what it means for these to function well, (...) and the role of technology in promoting such functioning, animate our Western sociotechnical imagination. This picture, I show, shapes the sociotechnical niches we inhabit in an _ableist_ manner, perniciously legislating which body-minds have access to a rich world of affordances and are seen as agential and valuable. Because the ableist quasi-Cartesian commitments animating our Western sociotechnical imagination are problematic and pervasive, I argue that exposing and reimagining these commitments should be a prime focal point of those working at the intersection of science, technology, and human values. I present insights from enactive 4E cognition and critical disability studies as fruitful resources for such much-needed reimagining. I also make the case, more provocatively but also more tentatively, that the ableist view of bodily and minded well- functioning animating our Cartesian Western sociotechnical imagination is not only damaging to embodied minds who deviate from the presumed norm, creating inaccessible worlds for some of us; it is in fact a threat to human and planetary flourishing at large. (shrink)

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)

The idea that science explains or ought to explain every phenomenon finds Cartesian dualism of mind and body to be an unsatisfactory thesis. Consequently we have a variety of materialist theories regarding mind and consciousness. In recent times, we come across many philosophers who are committed to the scientific world picture, trying to locate mind within a world that is essentially physical.The central problems these philosophers have to tackle consist of consciousness and mental causation. In (...) what follows we discuss how Husserlian phenomenology responds to this debate. (shrink)

How are we to account for the authority granted to first-person reports of mental states? What accounts for the immediacy of these self-ascriptions; the fact that they can be ascribed without appeal to evidence and without the need for justification? A traditional, Cartesian conception of the mind, which says that our thoughts are presented to us directly, completely, and without distortion upon mere internal inspection, would account for these facts, but there is good reason to doubt the cogency (...) of the Cartesian view. Wittgenstein, in his later writings, offered some of the most potent considerations against the traditional view, and contemporary philosophy of mind is practically unanimous in rejecting some of the metaphysical aspects of Cartesianism. But anyone who repudiates Cartesianism shoulders the burden of finding another way to accommodate its apparent epistemological strengths. (shrink)

McDowell and Merleau-Ponty share a critical attitude towards a certain Cartesian picture of the mind. According to the picture in question nothing which properly belongs to subjectivity can be hidden to the subject herself. Nevertheless there is a striking asymmetry in how the two philosophers portray the problematic consequences of such a picture. They can seem to offer exact opposite views of these consequences, which, given the almost identical characterization of the transparency claim, is puzzling. (...) I argue that a closer look at the prima facie puzzling asymmetry dissolves the apparent disagreement and reveals a deeper agreement concerning both the nature and the origin of the problems haunting the Cartesian picture in question. Both McDowell and Merleau-Ponty argue that on the picture of the relation of between mind and world in question, we lose our grip on the very idea of a perceptual appearance. Furthermore, the two authors regard a certain conception of nature as conceived in the image of science, as one of the crucial elements in making the picture of the mind in question look attractive. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous proposons d’examiner certains des usages qui sont faits de Descartes en sciences cognitives. Il s’agit plus précisément de s’attacher à la façon dont se trouve pensé l’héritage du cartésianisme dans la science cognitive orthodoxe, souvent conçue comme « cartésienne ». Comment en vient-on à former cette idée de science cognitive cartésienne? Nous répondons en nous appuyant sur deux analyses, celles de Timothy van Gelder et de Michael Wheeler, avec pour objectif de mettre au jour les aspects (...) de la philosophie de Descartes qui sont ici mobilisés, ainsi que les opérations intellectuelles et pratiques qui permettent à ces auteurs d’extraire le cartésianisme de son milieu originel pour le placer sur le terrain de la science cognitive contemporaine. (shrink)

McDowell motivates a disjunctive conception of experience in the context of other-minds skepticism, but his conception of other minds has been less frequently discussed. In this paper, I focus on McDowell’s perceptual account of others that emphasizes the primitivity of others’ bodily expressivity and his defense of a common-sense understanding of others. And I suggest that Husserl’s subtle analysis of bodily expressivity not only bears fundamental similarities with McDowell’s but also helps to demonstrate the sense in which McDowell’s emphasis on (...) bodily expressivity can remove some of the grounds for other minds skepticism. I argue that the other’s behavioral manifestation is first and foremost perceived in a salient Gestalt and social perception is inherently infused with a constitutive propensity with which we normally take the other as human person in the first place. In this light, I show that Husserl’s account can better elucidate human expressivity and its intrinsic features, thereby helping to remove some of the props of other-minds skepticism. As a result, I believe it proves fruitful to juxtapose McDowell’s and Husserl’s account of bodily expressivity, so as to alternate the Cartesian picture of other-minds that engenders skeptic anxiety and to secure a common-sense understanding of other people. (shrink)

: This paper focuses on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical views as exhibited in her early correspondence with René Descartes. Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction are examined in detail. The aim here is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker and to dispel the myth that she is simply a Cartesian muse.

In this paper my aim is to consider the picture of God's immediate knowledge of the mind as this appears in Wittgenstein's work, where its soundness seems to be brought into question. My argument is that the response to this denial should take the form, not of an investigation of a theological position concerning God's knowledge ("can God look into the human mind?"), but of a negotiation of the difficulties affecting our use of this picture. A (...) great part of the latter can be seen as difficulties in mastering the communicative relation between God and man which lies at the heart of the religious form of life, and which arises from the dislocation which familiar language-games undergo within it. (shrink)

Descartes's notion of subjectivity changed the way characters would be written, performed by actors, and received by audiences. His coordinate system reshaped how theatrical space would be conceived and built. His theory of the passions revolutionized our understanding of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectators. Yet theater scholars have not seen Descartes's transformational impact on theater history. Nor have philosophers looked to this history to understand his reception and impact. After Descartes, playwrights put Cartesian characters on the stage (...) and thematized their rational workings. Actors adapted their performances to account for new models of subjectivity and physiology. Critics theorized the theater's emotional and ethical benefits in Cartesian terms. Architects fostered these benefits by altering their designs. _The Mind-Body Stage_ provides a dazzlingly original picture of one of the most consequential and confusing periods in the histories of modern theater and philosophy. Interdisciplinary and comparatist in scope, it uses methodological techniques from literary study, philosophy, theater history, and performance studies and draws on scores of documents from several countries. (shrink)

My purpose in this essay is to provide a critical survey of arguments within recent analytic philosophy regarding the so-called “mind-body problem” with a particular view toward the relationship between these arguments and the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead (and Charles Hartshorne’s closely related views).1In course, I shall argue that Whitehead’s panexperientialist physicalism avoids paradoxes and difficulties of both materialist-physicalism and Cartesian dualismas advocated by a variety of analytic philosophers. However, and I believe that this point is not often (...) sufficiently recognized, analytic philosophy of mind is no monolith, and there are those who have found some form of panexperientialism to be attractive enough to merit serious consideration or even full-fledgedacceptance (David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Ralph Pred, William Seager, and Galen Strawson among them). A critical discussion of such thinkers should beincluded in any adequate survey of the relation between process panexperientialism and the analytic tradition. Moreover, the revisionary strain of the analyticaltradition which looks to natural science for its construction of worldviews (Broad, Russell, Bunge, Carnap, Quine, etc.) would move us in the direction of examining arguments concerning Whitehead’s view and contemporary empirical scientific considerations. (For a discussion of the basic nature of analytic philosophy and the descriptive and revisionary approaches contained within it, see my Process and Analysis, 5-9, 12-13, 57; and McHenry.) Here I shall argue that Whiteheadian panexperientialism very naturally accommodates important aspects of quantum theory, including the top-down causation involved in neuroplastic phenomena under a quantum mechanical interpretation of brain processes and in so-called Quantum Zeno Effect. The overall picture which emerges is that Whitehead’s position is (at the very least) a strongly plausible alternative in philosophy of mind.While I must confess that this essay can only represent the merest sketch—indeed an adequate treatment of the richly complex interpretive, comparative, and substantive philosophical issues here requires at the very least a monograph—I nonetheless hope to present a coherent and useful précis of major arguments and comparative conceptual relationships, especially for the reader who may not be readily familiar with this terrain. I thus hope that this essay will serve as a short expository and critical introduction to the interface between process and analytic philosophy of mind, and a presentation of the several theoretical advantages gained by listening to Whitehead’s theory as it connects with concerns of analytic philosophers.I shall proceed by first working though the main outlines of John Searle’s important and widely reaching “The Recent History of Materialism,” an essay which exposes critical flaws in a variety of materialist theories in ways which Whiteheadians should find especially fitting and congenial. I shall then examine defenses of dualism and the relation of Whitehead to such defenses, followed by a separate section on Chalmers, Nagel, and Pred. I will then consider a number ofimportant objections to process panexperientialism, including objections arising from the work of Jaegwon Kim and John Searle. I close with a discussion of thementioned empirical scientific arguments. (shrink)

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

This work makes the revisionist claim that "the theory of mind in the Critique [of Pure Reason] is much more traditional and rationalistic than it at first appears, but that it is also more defensible than is generally recognized". Specifically, Ameriks aims to show that "Kant can be seen as wanting, above all else, to put... into a respectable form" the "core of the rationalist commitment" "to the idea that we have a special kind of identity that can withstand (...) all the kinds of change that ordinarily spell the end of ordinary objects". But, first, Ameriks's account of the "core of the rationalist commitment" is maddeningly vague and unstable--indeed, Ameriks's conception of rationalism is so ill-defined that at one point skepticism about the external world is treated as a part of rationalism rather than as the very much undesired consequence of certain Cartesian premises which Kant thought it to be!--and the discussion is damagingly ahistorical. Ameriks does emphasize the developmental dimension within Kant's own work, ranging over the whole of Kant's published corpus and mining the various lecture courses on metaphysics which have now been gathered together as volume 28 of the Berlin edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften. But his picture of rationalism itself and its characteristic arguments is undifferentiated and undocumented, and this leads to the misconception that Kant thought that some theoretical defense of rationalist theses could still be maintained while what are merely some possible arguments in their behalf were criticized; but some review of Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Meier would surely have shown that Kant was criticizing all of the chief arguments for the rationalist conception of the soul known to him, and attention to Kant's own claim for the completeness of his presentation of these natural and inevitable illusions of human reason could have suggested only that Kant himself thought that these were all the theoretical arguments for a rationalist philosophy of mind there could be. Second, it is questionable whether Ameriks's view really revises our standard reading of Kant's conclusions at all. The gist of Ameriks's argument is that in spite of Kant's specific criticism of the paralogistic arguments of pure psychology, Kant retained a favorable attitude toward the theoretical and not just practical postulation of such properties as immateriality and transcendental freedom at the noumenal level--but this turns out to mean little more than that Kant accepted his own transcendental idealism. This is hardly revolutionary, and the interest of the point is far from strengthened by Ameriks's own conclusion that transcendental idealism cannot be fully proved. (shrink)

Descartes's works are often treated as a unified, unchanging whole. But in Descartes's Changing Mind, Peter Machamer and J. E. McGuire argue that the philosopher's views, particularly in natural philosophy, actually change radically between his early and later works--and that any interpretation of Descartes must take account of these changes. The first comprehensive study of the most significant of these shifts, this book also provides a new picture of the development of Cartesian science, epistemology, and metaphysics. No (...) changes in Descartes's thought are more significant than those that occur between the major works The World and Principles of Philosophy. Often seen as two versions of the same natural philosophy, these works are in fact profoundly different, containing distinct conceptions of causality and epistemology. Machamer and McGuire trace the implications of these changes and others that follow from them, including Descartes's rejection of the method of abstraction as a means of acquiring knowledge, his insistence on the infinitude of God's power, and his claim that human knowledge is limited to that which enables us to grasp the workings of the world and develop scientific theories. (shrink)

This paper examines the dispute between Burge and McDowell over methodology in the philosophy of perception. Burge (2005, 2011) has argued that the disjunctivism posited by naive perceptual realists is incompatible with the results of current perceptual science, while McDowell (2010, 2013) defends his disjunctivism by claiming an autonomous field of enquiry for perceptual epistemology, one that does not employ the classificatory schemes of the science. Here it is argued that the crucial point at issue in the dispute is Burge’s (...) acceptance, and McDowell’s rejection, of the ‘Cartesian idealization’ of mind as a self-contained system. Burge’s case against disjunctivism rests on the assumption of a clearly demarcated boundary between mind and world, a picture of the mind that McDowell’s philosophy reacts against. This boundary is required for scientific, causal explanations of perceptual processing because it is a simplifying assumption that helps present scientists with a clearly demarcated object of investigation. Concurring with McDowell, I conclude that philosophers need not carve up their objects of investigation in the same way. (shrink)

The Illusion of Doubt confronts one of the most important questions in philosophy and beyond: what can we know? The radical sceptic's answer is 'not very much' if we cannot prove that we are not subject to deception. For centuries philosophers have been impressed by the radical sceptic's move, but this book shows that the radical sceptical problem turns out to be an illusion created by a mistaken picture of our evidential situation. This means that we don't need to (...) answer the radical sceptical problem 'head on', but rather to undermine the philosophical assumptions that it depends on. For without these assumptions, radical scepticism collapses all by itself. This result is highly significant, as it manages to dissolve one of the most intractable philosophical problems that has bedevilled some of the greatest minds until the present day. (shrink)

Recent developments in the domain of communication Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology have raised questions about the ability for communication BCIs to read minds. How those questions are answered depends on how we theorize the mind and mindreading in the first place. Thus, in this paper, I ask (1) what does it mean to read minds? (2) can a communication BCI do this? (3) what does this mean for potential users of this technology? and (4) what is at stake morally (...) in light of this? I show that current answers to these questions are conceptually unclear and committed to a Cartesian picture of the mind and its relation to the brain, questionably informing how debates about BCIs as mindreading devices are framed. I offer an alternative perspective on these questions by turning to an enactive perspective on mindedness. I argue that this perspective can offer conceptual as well as ethical clarification about what is at stake in the domain of communication BCIs. From this perspective, the concerns raised about BCIs as mindreading machines are demystified. Instead, concerns are raised about BCIs as enabling users to flourish as authentic communicators. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous proposons d’examiner certains des usages qui sont faits de Descartes en sciences cognitives. Il s’agit plus précisément de s’attacher à la façon dont se trouve pensé l’héritage du cartésianisme dans la science cognitive orthodoxe, souvent conçue comme « cartésienne ». Comment en vient-on à former cette idée de science cognitive cartésienne? Nous répondons en nous appuyant sur deux analyses, celles de Timothy van Gelder et de Michael Wheeler, avec pour objectif de mettre au jour les aspects (...) de la philosophie de Descartes qui sont ici mobilisés, ainsi que les opérations intellectuelles et pratiques qui permettent à ces auteurs d’extraire le cartésianisme de son milieu originel pour le placer sur le terrain de la science cognitive contemporaine. (shrink)

This paper is an effort to present the mind-body problem from a Buddhist point of view. Firstly, I show that the Buddhist distinction between mind and body is not absolute, but instead merely employed as a communicative tool to aid the understanding of human beings in a holistic light. Since Buddhism acknowledges a mind-body distinction only on a conventional level, it would not be fair to claim that the tradition necessarily advocates mind-body dualism. Secondly, I briefly (...) discuss a response to Cartesian dualism from a Buddhist perspective and suggest that in this particular regard, the Buddhist approach may be likened to the ‘category mistake’ argument formulated by Gilbert Ryle. The fact that the Buddhist view does not accord with Cartesian dualism, however, does not imply that a monistic approach to the mind-body problem such as behaviourism, physicalism or biological naturalism is necessarily assumed. The Buddhist position could perhaps be best described as a middle way approach of ‘neither-duality-nor-identity’. Thirdly, I remain sceptical about the reductionist approach of accounting for mind merely on the level of brain or behaviour. In overlooking crucial ethical and axiological implications of mind, I argue that such an approach necessarily fails to impart a complete picture of mind. The Buddhist soteriological approach furthermore reveals certain law-like connections between mental attitudes and suffering which are for the most part overlooked in mainstream metaphysical explorations into the relation between mind and body. I thus endeavour to show why exploration into the link between mental phenomena, spiritual cultivation and the accumulation of karma is imperative to any comprehensive inquiry into the human mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Breakdown of C i M phy " artes an eta sacs RICHARD A. WATSON WITHIN CARTESIANISMthere arose many problems deriving from conflicts between Cartesian principles. Inadequate attempts to solve these problems were crucial reasons for the breakdown of Cartesian metaphysics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The major difficulties derived from the acceptance of a dualism of substances seated in a system which included (...) epistemological and causal likeness principles plus an ontological framework in which the categories of substance and modification were exhaustive. The major solutions involved either denying the likeness principles or altering the ontological framework. The first led to unintelligibility ; the second, culminating in Hume, opened the way to non-Cartesian metaphysics. The first section of this study contains a characterization of late seventeenth -century Cartesian metaphysics. The second is an exposition of Foucher 's four major criticisms of this system. In the third section, monistic solutions suggested in Descartes and by Spinoza, Foucher, Leibniz, and Locke are considered; in the fourth, the dualistic solutions of the orthodox Cartesians Rohault, R~gis, Desgabets, La Forge, Le Grand, and Arnauld; and in the fifth, the occasionalist solution of Malebranche. The sixth section is an analysis of these orthodox and occasionalist solutions, showing how each ultimately fails because of dependence upon the ontology of substance and modification. The seventh section is a consideration of Berkeley and Hume in the Cartesian context. A consideration of their systems as offering solutions to Cartesian problems illuminates in new light both the systems and the problems. In broad terms, this study moves from a consideration of problems arising from an ontology of two substances, to a consideration of problems arising from the ontological pattern of substance and modification. The Cartesians were concerned with relationships between two substances, but they saw no difficulties connected with the relationship between a substance and its modifications (or properties). Berkeley's treatment (deriving from Male- [177] 178 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY branche) of the relationships between mind and idea, and between mind and notion, is illuminated by a consideration of the extent to which he took these relationships for granted in the Cartesian way, and of the extent to which he saw difficulties in the relationship between substance and modification. The Berkeleian solution to Cartesian problems, like that of Malebranche before him, was not successful; Malebranche belittled, and Berkeley denied the dualism of substances, but neither philosopher could break entirely with the ontological pattern of substance and modification. The final breakdown of Cartesian metaphysics came with Hume, who, in providing the culmination of a most important trend in modern philosophy, opened the way to new metaphysics and became the father of contemporary philosophy. I A model late seventeenth-century Cartesian metaphysical system. The last grand expositor of the Cartesian philosophy was Antoine Le Grand who in 1694 published An Entire Body of Philosophy. The characterization of the late seventeenth-century Cartesian system given below follows Le Grand's exposition more closely than others, but it also incorporates elements from those of Rohault, R6gis, Desgabets, La Forge, Malebranche, and Arnauld.1 None of these philosophers professed a system of exactly the sort this characterization pictures, nor is it implied here that they do. The guide and rationale for drawing from them such a model Cartesianism is the polemical writing of Simon Foucher. Foucher's series of attacks upon Cartesianism (of which the second is his criticism of Malebranche of 1675, Critique de la Rdcherche de la veritd) give clearly the most important objections against Cartesian metaphysics.2The system outlined below, while more com1Le Grand, Antoine, An Entire Body of Philosophy According to the Principles of the Famous Renate des Cartes (London, 1694); Rohault, Jacques, Traitd de physique (Paris, 1671); R6gis, Pierre-Sylvain, Syst~me de philosophie, contenant la logique, la mdtaphysique, la physique et la morale (Lyon, 1690); Desgabets, Robert, Critique de la Critique de la Recherche de la veritd, oCt l'on decouvre le chemin qui conduit aux connoissances solides. Pour servir de rdsponse gtla Lettre d'un academicien (Paris, 1675); La Forge, Louis de, Traitd de l'dme humaine, de ses facultds et fonctions et de son union avec le corps, d'apr~s les principes de... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Non-Cartesian Psychotherapeutic Framework: Radical Pragmatism as an AlternativeLouis S. Berger (bio)AbstractPostmodern criticism has identified important impoverishments that necessarily follow from the use of Cartesian frameworks. This criticism is reviewed and its implications for psychotherapy are explored in a psychoanalytic context. The ubiquitous presence of Cartesianism (equivalently, representationism) in psychoanalytic frameworks—even in some that are considered postmodern—is demonstrated and criticized. The postmodern convergence on praxis as (...) a desirable alternative to Cartesianism is reported, and its relevance for psychoanalysis is considered. The severe conceptual difficulties entailed in formulating such an alternative are discussed, as are those difficulties that would be encountered were psychoanalysis to attempt the shift from explanatory mental science to praxis. The principal psychoanalytic problematics explored are: the paradoxical relationships between theory and therapeutic technique; the therapeutic action; and validation of clinical practices. Initial, nontraditional suggestions for addressing these problems are offered.Keywordspsychoanalysis, therapeutic action, representation, state space, praxis, hermeneutics, Descartes, Heidegger, Wittgenstein“But the inability to bring one’s subject under conceptual control, fixing it propositionally, is not the end of thinking; on the contrary, it were better to say that the breakdown of concepts and the failure of words is an opening that takes us out of the realm where representation and calculation are all that matter to thinking.... [T]his is what happens in the Socratic dialogue where the negativity in which one ends up at a loss for words is at the same time that which sets thinking free.”Bruns 1989, 9“To evolve theory as though our methods and processes of study were essentially the same, or could be the same, as those of other sciences, or could be disregarded when it comes to theory, implies a view of reality that is no longer tenable, least of all in that ambiguous area which we call psychic reality. Nevertheless, all of us are still more or less captives of an erroneous understanding of objectivity and objective reality....”Loewald 1970, 45 [End Page 169]CartesianismCartesianism still underlies and dominates much of today’s thought. It is the label for a network of interrelated ideas and themes:the ontological duality of mind and body; the subjective individualism implicit in the ultimate appeal to direct personal verification; the method of universal doubt which was supposed to lead us to indubitable truths; the doctrine that language and signs are an external disguise for thought; the doctrine that vagueness is unreal and that the philosophic endeavor is one of knowing clearly and distinctly a completely determinate reality; and most fundamentally, the doctrine that we can break out of the miasma of our language or system of signs and have direct intuitive knowledge of objects. (Bernstein 1971, 5–6)[The Cartesian assumptions] constitute a picture of science and the world somewhat as follows: there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in propositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately.(Hesse 1980, vii)Hesse goes on to say that “almost every assumption underlying this account has been subjected to damaging criticism,” a view echoed by others: “Most contemporary philosophers have been in revolt against the Cartesian framework” (Bernstein 1971, 5); “A rejection of the Cartesian view is a central theme for both of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, Heidegger and Wittgenstein” (Sass 1992, 444n 77); and “The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks has been a commonplace of our culture since Hegel” (Rorty 1982, 3).These criticisms arise... (shrink)

To say that mental phenomena are self-intimating means, roughly, that there is no more to them than what meets the "inner" eye. Gilbert Ryle was the first to emphasize this as one of the central features of the classical Cartesian picture of mind. He wrote.

Descartes developed a compelling characterization of mental and physical phenomena which has remained more or less canonical for Western philosophy ever since. The greatest testament to the power of Cartesian thinking is its ubiquity. Even philosophers who are critical of post-Cartesian anthropology (philosophers,for instance, who are self-professed exponents of one or another form of hylomorphism) nevertheless tacitly endorse Cartesian assumptions. Part of what leads to this strange inconsistency is that by and large philosophers no longer know what (...) a non-Cartesian anthropology looks like. I discuss some commitments characteristic of post-Cartesian philosophy of mind, and present an alternative conception of psychological phenomena more consistent with a hylomorphic framework. (shrink)

So-called identity theories that postulate the identity of mental phenomena with brain states are usually associated with materialistic ontology. However, the historical picture of the actual attempts at spelling out the mind–brain identities is more complex. In the eighteenth century such identities were most enthusiastically proposed by dualists, whereas non-reductionistic materialists such as Diderot tried to get along without them. In the nineteenth century physiologists such as Broca, Charcot and Wernicke, who postulated discrete and localizable neural correlates for (...) ideas and mental images, ended up, despite their professed materialism, defending theories that resembled Cartesian schemes and the theories of their eighteenth-century dualistic predecessors. Some problems resulting from the use of these theoretical models postulating local and discrete traces, images or representations in the brain in the context of materialist ontology are obviously related to their dualistic origins and to the fact that they are necessarily bound up with dualistic presuppositions. In the context of the criticism of the nineteenth-century memory trace paradigm it is, however, important to bear in mind that functional localization as such is not dependent on the notion of localizable representations. Nor are materialist theories of the mind necessarily dependent on postulating specific type–type identities between the mental and the physiological. (shrink)

I speak to some of Frederick Stoutland’s thinking over the years. In his last published paper, Stoutland brought together Davidson’s accounts of action and of perception, taking both to belong in a picture “of how we are related to the world” which “has its roots in the Cartesian revolution.” I suggest that Stoutland’s early criticisms of Davidson’s account of action expose the faults in such a picture. And I try to point up the attractions of a different (...) picture in which Davidson’s account of perception fits no better than his account of action. (shrink)

This paper examines Descartes's third primary notion and the distinction between different kinds of knowledge based on different and mutually irreducible primary notions. It discusses the application of the notions of clearness and distinctness to the domain of knowledge based on that of mind-body union. It argues that the consequences of the distinctions Descartes is making with regard to our knowledge of the human mind and nature are rather different from those that have been attributed to Descartes due (...) to the influential Rylean picture of Cartesian mind-body dualism. (shrink)

Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky both ridicule a hypostasizing and fetishizing picture of interiority: viewing sensations and intentions like discrete material objects. The symbols for this misleading view in their respective works are a beetle and a sachet containing thousand five hundred roubles. The beetle in the box passage in the Philosophical Investigations discredits a Cartesian picture of pain as akin to a thing-like entity. The sachet in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov represents Dmitry’s intention to be honourable. Dostoevsky achieves (...) a perspicuous view of entangled webs of intentions, as opposed to labelling them like object-like entities. I show that Wittgenstein’ account of first-personal thought, including intentions, is not based on the Cartesian dualism of the inner and the outer, the mind and the body. To underscore my argumentation, I refer to The Brothers Karamazov, one of Wittgenstein’s favourite novels. I especially focus on Dmitry’s sachet, which inspired Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box example. I show parallels both in content and in form of Wittgenstein’s and Dostoevsky’s approach to intention as a species of first-personal thought. (shrink)

Behind Berkeley looms the figure of Descartes. For though Descartes did not directly influence Berkeley as much as did Locke, Malebranche, and Bayle, the points at which these three most affected Berkeley’s thinking were often just those at which they were themselves reacting to Descartes’ doctrines. This is most apparent in the question of the existence of the material world, for it was Descartes who had made that a central topic of discussion in the seventeenth century. When Malebranche sought to (...) show that we cannot be certain matter exists, it was Descartes’ proof he had to combat. When Bayle used Zeno’s paradoxes to try to prove that extension cannot exist, it was Descartes’ concept of matter he was chiefly aiming at. When Locke argued for a degree of cognition “going beyond bare probability, and yet not reaching perfectly to either [intuitive or demonstrative] certainty,” it was because, while he agreed with Malebranche that Descartes did not and could not demonstrate the existence of bodies, he hoped for better evidence of it than just the high probability proffered by Malebranche. The origin and growth of Berkeley’s immaterialism owed enough to these reactions to the Cartesian proof of the material world that I think it safe to say that, without Descartes, the philosophy of Berkeley, had there been such, would be very unlike the one we know. But I have elsewhere examined the relation of Cartesianism to the denial of material substance and am not going to say more of it here. Instead, I want to look at the relation between Descartes’ and Berkeley’s concepts of mental substance, for there their agreement is almost as complete as is their disagreement about material substance. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein are two of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, yet their work is generally regarded as standing in contrast to one another. However, as this outstanding collection demonstrates they both reject a Cartesian picture of the mind and sought to offer an alternative that does justice to the role played by bodily action, language, and our membership within a community that shares a way of life. This is the first collection (...) to compare and contrast the work of these two major philosophers. Fundamental topics and problems discussed include the role of community in their philosophies; Merleau-Ponty on description and depiction and Wittgenstein on saying and doing; the role of language; their treatment of expression; their relation to the philosophy of the Vienna Circle; solipsism; and rule-following. It is essential reading for anyone studying the work of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, as well as those interested in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. (shrink)

So-called identity theories that postulate the identity of mental phenomena with brain states are usually associated with materialistic ontology. However, the historical picture of the actual attempts at spelling out the mind–brain identities is more complex. In the eighteenth century such identities were most enthusiastically proposed by dualists , whereas non-reductionistic materialists such as Diderot tried to get along without them. In the nineteenth century physiologists such as Broca, Charcot and Wernicke, who postulated discrete and localizable neural correlates (...) for ideas and mental images, ended up, despite their professed materialism, defending theories that resembled Cartesian schemes and the theories of their eighteenth-century dualistic predecessors. Some problems resulting from the use of these theoretical models postulating local and discrete traces, images or representations in the brain in the context of materialist ontology are obviously related to their dualistic origins and to the fact that they are necessarily bound up with dualistic presuppositions. In the context of the criticism of the nineteenth-century memory trace paradigm it is, however, important to bear in mind that functional localization as such is not dependent on the notion of localizable representations. Nor are materialist theories of the mind necessarily dependent on postulating specific type–type identities between the mental and the physiological. (shrink)

On a Cartesian conception of the mind, I could be a solitary being and still have the same mental states as I currently have. This paper asks how the lives of other people fit into this conception. I investigate the second-person perspective—thinking of others as ‘you’ while engaging in reciprocal communicative interactions with them—and argue that it is neither epistemically nor metaphysically distinctive. I also argue that the Cartesian picture explains why other people are special: because (...) they matter not just for the effect that they have on us. (shrink)

Both mainstream cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind remain wedded to the Cartesian picture of the mind as an isolated, self-sufficient, and constitutively individual phenomenon. However, recently approaches to the mind (e.g. extended mind thesis, enactivism) that depart from the standard view have emerged. Aunifying thread that runs through these approaches can be summed up in the slogan: “to understand mental phenomena one cannot do away with the environment”. Differences between these related views (...) pertain to the strength of the modal operator “cannot”. On the strongest reading the slogan implies that the mind is constituted by the environment. While this interpretation is akin to Marx view on the constitution of consciousness, this link is overlooked in the literature. In this paper, I will argue that Marxists philosophical thinking about the mind, as exemplified by the activity approach, offers a sound philosophical basis for the further development of post-Cartesian views in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Furthermore, I will argue that the materialistic method proposed by these thinkers is the most promising approach to the problem of naturalizing the mind. (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Elizabeth Anscombe, long known as a student, friend and translator of Wittgenstein, was herself one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. No Morality, No Self examines her two best-known papers, in which she advanced her most amazing theses. In 'Modern Moral Philosophy', she claimed that the term moral, understood as picking out a special, sui generis category, is literally senseless and should therefore be abandoned. In 'The First Person', she maintained that (...) the word 'I' is not a referring expression: in other words, its function in the language is not to pick out the speaker, or 'the self' - or any entity whatsoever. Both papers are considered influential, and are frequently cited; but their main claims, and many of their arguments, have been widely misunderstood. In this book James Doyle shows that once various errors of interpretation have been cleared away, the claims can be seen to be far more plausible, and the arguments far more compelling, than even her defenders have realized. Philosophers often seek attention by making startling claims which are subsequently revealed as little more than commonplaces wrapped in hyperbole. Doyle's book makes it clear that here, in her greatest papers, Anscombe achieves something vanishingly rare in philosophy: a persuasive case for genuinely unsettling and profound conclusions. The two lines of argument, seemingly so disparate, are also shown to be connected by Anscombe's deep opposition to the Cartesian picture of the mind.--. (shrink)

We view a human being as a mental and spiritual entity and also as having a physical nature. The essence of a person is revealed in our thinking about personal identity, quality of life, and personal responsibility. These conceptions do not fare well in a Cartesian or dualist picture of the person as there are deep problems with the idea that the mind is an inner realm. I argue that it is only as we see the thoughts, (...) actions, and interactions of persons as necessarily involving physical entities in the world whose nature is not completely captured in scientific descriptions that we can understand our existence as mental and spiritual beings. (shrink)

Imagination has always been recognised as an important faculty of the human soul. As mediator between the senses and reason, it is rooted in philosophical and psychological-medical theories of human sensation and cognition. Linked to these theories was the use of the imagination in rhetoric and the arts: images had not only an epistemological role in transmitting information from the outside world to the mind's inner eye, but could also be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience. In (...) this tradition, with Cicero and Quintilian as its auctoritates, images were used to arouse and manipulate the emotions. Both traditions had to be revalued in the seventeenth century with the advent of a mechanist, Cartesian picture of human cognition and the physical world. In spite of their usual suspicion of imagination, which was commonly associated with illusions, dreams and fiction, seventeenth-century philosophers realised that the imagination also had its place in mathematical, scientific and philosophical thinking. This volume, number XII in the series Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, offers the papers presented at a workshop on imagination, organised by the editors in September 2002. It covers both the philosophical-psychological as well as the humanist-rhetorical traditions, discussing key figures such as Kilwardby, Lorenzo Valla, Leon Battista Alberti, Agricola, Gianfrancesco Pico, Erasmus, Paracelsus, Kepler, Bacon, Suarez, Descartes and Spinoza, but also treating hitherto neglected texts and writers such as Nicholas of Amsterdam and Jean Lemaire de Belges. By focusing on the ever-shifting ideas of the imagination as a philosophical and rhetorical tool, this volume not only deepens our understanding of its central theme but also sheds new light on the thought and writings of these and other authors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 55-57 [Access article in PDF] Unconscious Reasons Eric Matthews Keywords reason-explanation, consciousness, purpose It is argued that Church's puzzlement over the idea that we can have reasons that we do not know about is itself puzzling. In daily life, we find no difficulty in understanding this idea. The problems arise only when we try to give a theoretically satisfactory account of the notion (...) of "the unconscious" in the context of a Cartesian picture of the "mind" as synonymous with "consciousness." We need to see the difference between the rational/non-rational distinction and that between the conscious and the unconscious. We (and other animals) act for reasons, not because we have something called "consciousness," but because we have purposes: we are animals, not machines.Jennifer Church finds "something deeply puzzling" about the idea that we can have reasons that we do not know about. I find this puzzlement very surprising, as, I think, would many others. Most of our reasons for doing what we do are not, and could not be, consciously entertained, and we did not need to wait for Freud before we were aware that some of our reasons for acting are so deeply hidden that we need help from others to uncover them. Freud himself is supposed to have said about the unconscious (I'm afraid I can't give the reference for this quotation, which was dredged up from memory), "Das haben die Dichter immer gekannt"—that was always known by the poets.Because human beings are not machines, whose movements can be given a complete causal explanation in terms of the laws of physics, a reason-explanation for most of the ways they behave is called for. That is, they have reasons for doing what they do. If they had to "consciously think through," in Church's words, all of their reasons for acting, they would never get down to doing anything: before they did anything, they would have to think through their reasons for doing it; and, because thinking through is also an action for which they have reasons, they would have to think through their reasons for thinking through, and so on ad infinitum. I owe this point to Gilbert Ryle, and may as well give one of his typical examples (slightly adapted) to illustrate it. The good tennis player acts intelligently: she has reasons for the movements she makes, but of necessity she does not think through these reasons, otherwise the game of tennis would never get started, let alone finished. Indeed, she may well be unable to explain in words, even afterward, why she moves her racket this way or that.As for the "Freudian" sorts of examples, we are all familiar, both from literature and from life, with the phenomena of self-deception, or of simple lack of self-knowledge. Someone, for instance, believes himself to be motivated by the highest moral principle when he gives money to the beggar in the shop doorway: but perhaps his real reason is a desire to cultivate a certain image of himself, or to be seen by others to be doing the right thing, or a fear that the beggar might embarrass [End Page 55] him in some way if he does not give him something substantial. I am not suggesting that people always deceive themselves in this way, only that the situation described is perfectly intelligible to everyone and so not at all puzzling. Nor is it in the slightest degree unintelligible that people should sometimes act without being able to say why: "I did it on impulse," they say, or "I acted instinctively"—which is just another way of saying "I just don't know why I acted as I did."Church herself accepts that our explanations of behavior are "now replete with appeals to unconscious beliefs and desires": but why only "now"—haven't they always been? And if we resort to such appeals so commonly, if indeed, as Searle says, their explanatory power is so great, then that seems to imply that we understand perfectly well what... (shrink)

In this chapter I discuss Taylor’s claim that strong evaluation is inevitable for human agency: without a framework of strong evaluations human agents would be in a crisis which Taylor calls, perhaps misleadingly, “an identity crisis”. With a broad brush I introduce some of the essential background in first three sections, and scrutinize the inevitability of strong evaluation more closely in the last three sections. I introduce first the distinction between the engaged perspective, which in Taylor’s view provides the correct (...) approach to humans and values, and two kinds of disengaged perspectives (objectivist and subjectivist ones) (2.1). Taylor’s ideal typical distinction (engaged and disengaged) resembles Sellars’s (1963) distinction between manifest and scientific image, but Taylor takes the scientific worldview to be only one objectivist variant of disengaged views: the Cartesian view of mind is detached from the lifeworldly reality, and is a variant of a subjectivist disengaged view. There are many aspects to Taylor’s philosophical anthropology, based on such an engaged perspective. He defends many “human constants” related to humans as social, self-interpreting, embodied language animals. Although here the focus is merely on one of the human constants, namely on the claim that humans are essentially strong evaluators, I give a sketchy account of the essentials of the broader picture in section 2.2. Taylor uses transcendental argumentation in trying to show the inescapability of strong evaluation in human life. I will, following Nicholas Smith’s reconstruction, discuss Taylor’s reasons for adopting such argumentative strategy in relation to this issue, as opposed to socalled ordinary language philosophy, phenomenological description, hermeneutical interpretation, or strict Hegelian dialectics (2.3). The central point is that although we may want to stress the hermeneutical or interpretive nature of being-in-the-world, and the constitutive nature of human self-interpretations, the few human constants are true whether explicitly taken to be true or not: humans are self-interpreting animals, or strong evaluators, even though they may hold opposing theories in their self-interpretations (cf. Abbey 2000, 4). In a sense, Taylor’s label for his claim, which he terms a “transcendental argument”, may seem to make heavy weather of a simple point: without strong evaluation those aspects of life and experience which presuppose strong evaluation would not be possible. These aspects of life include more or less everything that is peculiarly human. The arguments try to bring into focus these dependencies: strong evaluations are inescapable for our lives as humans or as persons, as opposed to “mere” animals. To be fully outside the scope of strong evaluation is to be in a pathological state. Various disengaged theories of humans neglect this. These are theories of human agency, subjectivity, personhood or identity which have ignored this dimension of human life, or have not taken it to be essential. Taylor’s arguments are directed against such views. In this chapter I will clarify the nature of Taylor’s argument by distinguishing different concepts (human agency, personhood, subjectivity, selfhood, and identity) and asking what it is exactly that strong evaluation is necessary for (2.4). The notions of personhood and identity will be discussed in more detail in the next two chapters. The crucial point in Taylor’s argumentation is made by the claim that for someone capable of strong evaluation, the lack of a framework of strong evaluations involves them in a terrible, frightening crisis, an identity-crisis. I will distinguish several meanings of this claim and discuss their validity in 2.5. I suggest that some “identity-crises” are not at all what Taylor has in mind. But the point itself is valid: without a framework of strong evaluations, human agents would be in a state of crisis. In the last section, I defend Taylor’s view against possible counterexamples, posed by Owen Flanagan and Paul Johnston. (shrink)

In 'A Puzzle about Belief' Saul Kripke appeals to a principle of disquotation that allows us to infer a person's beliefs from the sentences to which she assents (in certain conditions). Kripke relies on this principle in constructing some famous puzzle cases, which he uses to defend the Millian view that the sole semantic function of a proper name is to refer to its bearer. The examples are meant to undermine the anti-Millian objection, grounded in traditional Frege-cases, that truth-value is (...) not always maintained when co-referential names are intersubstituted in belief reports. I argue here that our disquotational practice is sensitive to certain shifts in conversational context, and it is only if we overlook these shifts - if we 'misdisquote' - that we can draw the conclusions Kripke wants to draw from his examples. In the wake of this conclusion, I provide a 'contextualist' treatment of Kripke's puzzle cases. I show how this treatment is motivated by certain norms of rationality, and I defend these norms against an intriguing 'anti-Cartesian' theory of mind. Throughout the paper, I develop the larger implications that my treatment of Kripke's argument has for the semantic theory of names and belief reports, and, more generally, for our picture of the relation between linguistic behaviour and our states of mind. (shrink)

According to the logical positivists, signs (words and pictures) of imaginary beings have no referent (Goodman). The semiotic theory behind this assumption is dualistic and Cartesian: signs vs. nonsigns as well as the mental vs. the material world are in fundamental opposition. Peirce’s semiotics is based on the premise of the sign as a mediator between such opposites: signs do not refer to referents, they represent objects to a mind, but the object of a sign can be existent (...) or nonexistent, a feeling or an idea, something merely imaginary or even something false. The paper examines the nature of imaginary, nonexistent, and nonfigurative objects, such as unicorns, phoenixes, or nonrepresentative paintings, and shows why verbal or visual representations of imaginary beings and even nonfigurative paintings, which seem to represent nothing, are fully developed signs with a variety of objects determining their representation. (shrink)

(1993). Putnam, Davidson and the seventeenth‐century picture of mind and world. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 193-230.

This slight volume contains three short essays by the author: “The Idea of Nature In Contemporary Physics”, “Atomic Physics and Causal Law”, and “Classical Education”. Much more than half of the book is given over to a selection of brief readings from Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Huygens, D’Alembert, De la Mettrie, Ostwald, Hertz, and a short historical review by de Broglie of the evolution of quantum mechanics. These readings are meant to illustrate the author’s overall theme which appears to be this: (...) the development of modern science has been marked by a progressive change in the concept of nature. The mediaevals regarded Nature as God’s handiwork: “it would have been thought senseless to ask questions about the material world without reference to God”, Between Galileo and Newton a quite new outlook arose which encouraged the belief that an accurate and exhaustive account of Nature could be made in mathematical terms which made reference only to matter and motion. This was the mechanist view of Nature, which led logically to materialism. But modern physics has shown the inadequacy of this view. “The object of research is no longer nature itself, but man’s investigation of nature”. “Nature itself cannot be known”, only “man’s relationship with nature”. The uncertainty principle proves that an “objective” picture of Nature is impossible. The observer and the observed system cannot be clearly separated, and thus we must give up the “Cartesian” distinction between a world of “objective processes in space and time and a mind in which these processes are mirrored”. Thus, we no longer regard “nature” as God’s handiwork nor as an objective space-time-matter manifold but either as the “footprint of man” upon an unknowable substratum, or else as “the transparent clarity of a mathematics that no longer describes the behaviour of elementary particles but only our knowledge of this behaviour”. There is no “philosophy of nature” properly speaking; our knowledge of “nature”, such as it is, is derived from a philosophical consideration of science. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As (...) a mode considered as a general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Somaesthetics and Racism:Toward an Embodied Pedagogy of DifferenceDavid A. Granger (bio)IntroductionThe philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that "The human body is the best picture of the human soul."1 There is a basic truth in this assertion that we recognize (I want to say) intuitively: the notion that human beings are parts both mental and physical, that these facets are ultimately interdependent, and that they are in some measure (...) correlated was a commonplace in the intellectual culture of ancient Athens, especially among Socratic thinkers. It can also be found as a central part of the basic ontology and ideals of self-cultivation espoused in much East Asian philosophy. In the West, however, this deep appreciation for the relationship between mind and body appears somewhat sporadically after the Socratics, only to be fervently reasserted as a main plank in the lived philosophy of the early American pragmatists, as when Henry David Thoreau proclaimed that "We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins to refine a mean's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them."2I use the word "sporadically" above because it is likewise a basic truism that canonical Western philosophy has a long and storied history of rejecting, ignoring, or degrading the human body—that most formative part of our being and connection to the world and to others. The position of the later, more metaphysical Plato is iconic in this regard, and it effectively set the tone for much Christian theology and the Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. For Plato and his adherents, the longing to escape our embodiedness, conceived as a necessary means to human (or perhaps superhuman) perfection [End Page 69] by achieving a godlike existence, requires effectively divorcing ourselves from the irrational brutes of terra firma. The body is conceived as a static constraint to human flourishing rather than a dynamic enabler. It is more or less an adversary, something that we must endeavor to be freed from or subdue.3 Its base senses and unruly passions deceive us epistemologically, while its inexorable power to situate us in space and time limits our objectivity. In its inevitable pains and infirmities, the body is also a constant reminder of the aging process and of our ultimate mortality. Deeming the body as at best a mere servant of the mind, philosophers typically have portrayed it as a veritable prison of deception, temptation, and suffering. Moreover, it is well-established that such thinking has been particularly pernicious in light of the historical identification of women and other marginalized groups with their variously enfeebled, depraved, or uncivilized bodies.4Against this disquieting backdrop, it is only relatively recently that the human body, and the significance of our existence as embodied beings, has received sustained positive attention by leading lights in Western philosophy and criticism. These luminaries include, among others, "feminist" thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and, of late, Susan Bordo and Judith Butler (with a nod to Michel Foucault, Pierre Bordeau, and others); pragmatists William James and John Dewey (with a nod to Emerson and Thoreau); phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (with a nod to Jean-Paul Sartre); analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (with a nod to James); and postmodernist Michel Foucault (with a nod to Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bataille, and the ancient Asian ars erotica tradition5). While these thinkers do not universally praise the body and its active, conscious cultivation for human flourishing (about which more later), they nonetheless acknowledge its necessity for all perception, action, and even thought.6 In short, they all seek to recognize and elucidate the significance—cognitive and affective, discursive and nondiscursive—of our full embodied intelligence.Looking specifically at the architectonics of the body espoused by the trio of Dewey, Foucault, and Wittgenstein, this article uses what philosopher Richard Shusterman terms "analytic somaesthetics" to examine some of the primary embodied dimensions of feeling, perception, action, and thought, particularly through the functioning of habit.7 In doing so, it seeks to expose the way various ideologies of domination (for example, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, etc.) are covertly (and at times overtly) materialized... (shrink)

(1) Content properties are nonrelational, that is, having a content property does not entail the existence of any contingent object not identical with the thinker or a part of the thinker.2 (2) We have noninferential knowledge of our conscious thoughts, that is, for any of our..

In recent years, various attempts have been made to advance a project sometimes characterized as "discursive psychology". Grounded in what its proponents term "social constructionism", the discursive approach to the elucidation of 'mental' phenomena is here contrasted to an ethnomethodological position informed by the later work of Wittgenstein. In particular, it is argued that discursive psychology still contains Cartesian residua, notwithstanding its professed objective of expurgating Cartesian thought from the behavioral sciences. One principal issue has been the confusion (...) of "conceptual analysis" with the empirical study of speech practices. If these distinct enterprises are conflated, the critical achievements of conceptual analysis are obscured or even misconstrued. A different picture of how best to analyze human conduct and mentality emerges if the lessons of Wittgensteinian grammatical analysis are preserved and extended, one more compatible with several themes in ethnomethodology. (shrink)

Tematyka pracy sytuuje się na pograniczu teorii psychologii i teorii języka. Celem jej jest pokazanie niespójności i niewspółmierności dwóch stylów myślenia o człowieku - kartezjańskiego i postfreudowskiego. Świadomość, tożsamość indywidualna, wolna wola, odpowiedzialność, intencjonalność, myśl - tworzą jeden zespół pojęć powiązanych ze sobą, a charakteryzujący kartezjanizm. Natomiast nieświadomość, automatyzm, determinizm, rekurencyjność - stanowią pojęciowy oręż freudyzmu. Nieświadomość jest w tej konwencji stanem pośredniczącym między mną a drugim. Autor twierdzi, że teksty Z. Freuda są dla współczesnych takimi samymi „narzędziami" inspiracji, jakim (...) niegdyś dla nowożytnych były teksty R. Descartes'a. Książka ma charakter rekonstrukcyjny, a działanie jej autora to w znacznej mierze praca detektywa, polega bowiem na wyśledzeniu i odkryciu inspiracji oraz korekt lub uściśleń, jakie współcześni myśliciele próbują odkryciu Freuda narzucić. Książka ma na celu wskazanie problemów filozoficznych w ramach empirystycznie zorientowanej dziś psychologii. Po pierwsze, autor stara się wykazać, że psychologia wraz ze swym klasycznym problemem ciała i umysłu jest produktem nowożytnym, tj. rodzi się wraz z tekstami Kartezjusza. Po drugie, autor krytycznie odnosi się do dwóch istotnych rozwinięć kartezjanizmu, tj. introspekcjonizmu i fenomenologii. Te¬mu pierwszemu zarzuca sprzeczność pomiędzy założeniami ontologicznymi (dyrektywa paralelizmu psychofizycznego) a praktyką badawczą (naturalizm epistemologiczny i fenomenalizm), fenomenologii zaś niekonsekwencję w ujęciu problemu świadomości. Łącząc te dwie krytyki autor stara się zburzyć zaufanie do równania: „psychiczne = świadome". Świadomość, że psychologia powinna odszukać inny od świadomości przedmiot badań, stanowi przesłankę główną poszukiwań intelektualnych zawartych w książce. Autor zwraca się w kierunku myślenia antykartezjańskiego, tj. psychoanalizy i kognitywistyki. Z tekstów S. Freuda autor stara się wyłuskać spójną teorię aparatu psychicznego. Tu jednak natrafia na pęknięcie, na pewną dwuznaczność; ów aparat można bowiem interpretować dwojako: albo jako system reprezentacji, albo jako maszynę. (shrink)

This review essay of two edited volumes sketches how STS scholars have analyzed scientific representation and visualization in recent work. Several key foci have emerged, among them attending closely to materiality, engaging the digital through embodied action, turning to ontology, as well as benefitting from artistic practice and critique. In diverse ways these choices are informed by a discontentment with the Cartesian split of mind and body as well as the picture theory of language. Yet, naturalism endures (...) as a template, an expectation, and sometimes a specter with and against which much representational work in science is done. What STS scholars have learnt about representation in laboratory and expert settings still awaits being employed more comprehensively for making sense of practices beyond the lab, especially in contested political, social and ecological environments. In setting out to do so, they ought to reflect on the kinds of logic that their practices of representing representation enact. (shrink)