◆ Writing is per se already violence: the rupture there is in each fragment, the break, the splitting, the tearing of the shred—acute singularity, steely point. And yet this combat is, for patience, debate. The name wears away [s'use], the fragment fragments, erodes.There is much talk today but little speech, or rather, little speech that could be received and responded to absent the vows of the unavowable community of its speakers. There is combat but debate is foreclosed by the absence (...) of asignifying absence. To avow that a community is unavowable—when the name wears away—is not to say that it has been disavowed, subjected, though in many cases this is so, for often the name names sovereignly.... (shrink)

This study traces the development of the metaphysics of the material world in early modern thought. It starts with the scholastic innovator Suárez, proceeds to a consideration of Suárez's connections to Descartes, and ends with an examination of Spinoza's fundamental re-conceptualization of the Cartesian material world.

Tad Brennan explains how to live the Stoic life--and why we might want to. Stoicism has been one of the main currents of thought in Western civilization for two thousand years: Brennan offers a fascinating guide through the ethical ideas of the original Stoic philosophers, and shows how valuable these ideas remain today, both intellectually and in practice. He writes in a lively informal style which will bring Stoicism to life for readers who are new to ancient philosophy. The Stoic (...) Life will also be of great interest to philosophers and classicists seeking a full understanding of the intellectual legacy of the Stoics. (shrink)

in a january 1642 letter, rené descartes advises his correspondent—his then-follower, the Utrecht medical professor Henricus Regius—to consistently endorse the view that the human mind is related to its body by means of a "substantial union": Whenever the occasion arises, as much privately as publicly, you ought to profess that you believe a human to be a true ens per se and not per accidens and the mind to be really and substantially united to the body not through position or (...) disposition [situm aut dispositionem], as you say in your last written text, but through a true mode of union [verum modum unionis], as everyone... (shrink)

Raymond Lemieux | Résumé : Entre le discours du maître et le discours magistériel, la proximité est évidente. Pourtant le magis formant leur élément commun peut aussi bien s’avérer un facteur d’abrutissement, un producteur d’esclave, qu’un porteur d’émancipation. Comment le discours magistériel, qui se veut émancipateur, peut-il gérer cette ambiguïté ? Comment le maître peut-il être un maître de liberté ? L’article interroge tour à tour les pratiques éducatives et les pratiques psychanalytiques qui affrontent le même type d’aporie. Il (...) met de l’avant l’importance de l’interdiction faite à l’éducateur tant qu’à l’analyste de jouir de l’élève ou de l’analysant, c’est-à-dire de faire de leur apparente position de sujet assujetti un profit personnel. Qu’est-ce qu’éduquer à la liberté ? Qu’en est-il du magistère, dont le discours se veut émancipateur ? |: The semantic closeness between the discourse of the master and the magisterial teaching of the Church is obvious. However, the common root magis may be displayed as an enslavement process as well as a liberating one. How can this ambiguousness be removed from the teaching of the Church ? How can this one be an education to liberty ? In order to find some practical way of answering this question, the paper briefly examines contemporary educational and psychoanalytic challenges which confront such a logical and practical deadlock. It stresses the importance of the interdiction, for the educator as well as the psychoanalyst, of taking any personal advantage, pleasure or profit from the apparent position of subject which is that of the other. What does mean to educate with the purpose of liberty ? How the magisterial discourse of the Church can be an emancipatory one ? (shrink)

There is a general sense that the philosophy of Descartes was a dominant force in early modern thought. Since the work in the nineteenth century of French historians of Cartesian philosophy, however, there has been no fully contextualized comparative examination of the various receptions of Descartes in different portions of early modern Europe. This study addresses the need for a more current understanding of these receptions by considering the different constructions of Descartes's thought that emerged in the Calvinist United Provinces (...) and Catholic France, the two main centers for early modern Cartesianism, during the period dating from the last decades of his life to the century or so following his death in 1650. It turns out that we must speak not of a single early modern Cartesianism rigidly defined in terms of Descartes's own authorial intentions, but rather of a loose collection of early modern Cartesianisms that involve a range of different positions on various sets of issues. Though more or less rooted in Descartes's somewhat open-ended views, these Cartesianisms evolved in different ways over time in response to different intellectual and social pressures. Chapters of this study are devoted to: the early modern Catholic and Calvinist condemnations of Descartes and the incompatible Cartesian responses to these; conflicting attitudes among early modern Cartesians toward ancient thought and modernity; competing early modern attempts to combine Descartes's views with those of Augustine; the different occasionalist accounts of causation within early modern Cartesianism; and the impact of various forms of early modern Cartesianism on both Dutch medicine and French physics. (shrink)

This book is a systematic study of Descartes' theory of causation and its relation to the medieval and early modern scholastic philosophy that provides its proper historical context. The argument presented here is that even though Descartes offered a dualistic ontology that differs radically from what we find in scholasticism, his views on causation were profoundly influenced by scholastic thought on this issue. This influence is evident not only in his affirmation in the Meditations of the abstract scholastic axioms that (...) a cause must contain the reality of its effects and that conservation does not differ in reality from creation, but also in the details of the accounts of body-body interaction in his physics, of mind-body interaction in his psychology, and of the causation that he took to be involved in free human action. In contrast to those who have read Descartes as endorsing the "occasionalist" conclusion that God is the only real cause, a central thesis of this study is that he accepted what in the context of scholastic debates regarding causation is the antipode of occasionalism, namely, the view that creatures rather than God are the causal source of natural change. What emerges from the defense of this interpretation of Descartes is a new understanding of his contribution to modern thought on causation. (shrink)

This is a book-length study of two of Descartes's most innovative successors, Robert Desgabets and Pierre-Sylvain Regis, and of their highly original contributions to Cartesianism. The focus of the book is an analysis of radical doctrines in the work of these thinkers that derive from arguments in Descartes: on the creation of eternal truths, on the intentionality of ideas, and on the soul-body union. As well as relating their work to that of fellow Cartesians such as Malebranche and Arnauld, the (...) book also establishes the important though neglected role played by Desgabets and Regis in the theologically and politically charged reception of Descartes in early modern France. This is a major contribution to the history of Cartesianism that will be of special interest to historians of early modern philosophy and historians of ideas. (shrink)

Two approaches to the study of diagnostic thinking are compared, one mainly propositional, namely that of Patel and Groen (1986), the other mainly semantic, that of Lemieux and Bordage (1986). Patel and Groen analyzed the linear dimension of cardiologists' discourses while solving a case of acute bacterial endocarditis, that is, the before and after propositional rules. A secondary analysis of two of their pothophysiological protocols is done using structural semantic techniques from Lemieux and Bordage where the vertical dimension (...) of the discourses is analyzed, that is, the levels of meaning or semantic axes. Contrary to Patel and Groen's position, making an accurate diagnosis is not explained in terms of pure forward reasoning through networks of causal rules, but by means of networks of semantic qualities abstracted from the symptoms and signs. The semantic qualities operate in the clinician's mind in terms of binary oppositions (e.g., sudden-gradual, unilateral-bilateral) whereby each pair of properties constitutes a semantic axis (e.g., sudden-gradual). The successful diagnosticians are those who use the most diversified and pertinent set of semantic axes and, therefore, have a deeper representation of the problem. (shrink)

In this article I explore Leibniz's claim in the Theodicy that on the essential points Malebranche's theodicy "reduces to" his own view. This judgment may seem to be warranted given that both thinkers emphasize that evils are justified by the fact that they follow from the simple and uniform laws that govern that world which is worthy of divine creation. However, I argue that Leibniz's theodicy differs in several crucial respects from Malebranche's. I begin with a qualified endorsement of Charles (...) Larmore's recent claim that remarks in Malebranche's correspondence with Leibniz indicate that their theodicies rely on incompatible conceptions of the moral rationality of divine action. I also attempt to go beyond Larmore's discussion in highlighting further differences concerning the sort of freedom involved in the divine act of creation. My conclusion is that these differing conceptions of divine morality and divine freedom reveal that in contrast to the case of Leibniz, Malebranche's theodicy not only does not require that God create anything at all, but also is compatible with the result that the world he decides to create is not uniquely the best possible. (shrink)

This book offers a provocative interpretation of the theory of the soul in the writings of the French Cartesian, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). Though recent work on Malebranche's philosophy of mind has tended to emphasize his account of ideas, Schmaltz focuses rather on his rejection of Descartes' doctrine that the mind is better known than the body. In particular, he considers and defends Malebranche's argument that this rejection has a Cartesian basis. Schmaltz reveals that this argument not only provides a fresh (...) perspective on Cartesianism but also is relevant to current debates in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

: This essay is a collection of my experiences of and reflections on being pregnant and choosing to place the child for open adoption. The piece was started late in the term of my pregnancy and completed about a week before the birth.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Has Cartesianism To Do with Jansenism?Tad M. SchmaltzMy title is modeled on the famous query of the third-century theologian, Tertullian: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian’s question asks what pagan Greek learning has to do with the theology of the early Church. By comparison my question asks what philosophical Cartesianism has to do with theological Jansenism, and more specifically what these movements had to do with (...) each other in the France of Louis XIV. To anticipate, the answer is: not much and plenty. I say not much, in the sense that there are profound differences in the approaches and interests of the namesakes of these two movements: in the case of Cartesianism, the French critic of scholastic natural philosophy, René Descartes, and in the case of Jansenism, the Louvain critic of Jesuit theology, Cornelius Jansen (Jansenius). Yet I also say plenty, in the sense that there was in the second half of the seventeenth century a fairly widespread belief in France of an intimate link between the two movements that the work of Descartes and Jansen inspired. What we need here is a story that shows how despite the differences between these two thinkers, their French followers were commonly associated with each other.In order to tell such a story I need to consider some basic difficulties in pinning down the nature of the movements themselves. There are of course familiar problems with the appeal to generic “isms” in the history of ideas, but I also want to consider special concerns pertaining to the definition of French Jansenism and French Cartesianism. In the course of this consideration I suggest that since both movements are to some extent constructs that emerged from intellectual battles in late-seventeenth-century France, they must be understood in light of the political, theological, and philosophical goals of the polemicists involved in these battles.Perhaps the most obvious reason for the connection between the Jansenist and Cartesian movements is that one of the most prominent of the Jansenist theologians, the Port-Royalist Antoine Arnauld, was also an enthusiastic defender [End Page 37] of Descartes’s metaphysical system. But while Arnauld undoubtedly played an important role in the emergence of this link, I think that the full story of its emergence must include a consideration of the different role played by a somewhat neglected figure in the history of early modern Cartesianism, namely, the Lorraine Benedictine Robert Desgabets (1610–78). Desgabets was more deeply involved than Arnauld in the 1671 “Eucharist affair,” which was important for the polemical linkage of Jansenism to Cartesianism in France. Whereas Arnauld attempted to separate Jansenist theology from Cartesian philosophy, Desgabets tried to provide Cartesian foundations for a theology with strong Jansenist overtones. It was Desgabets more than Arnauld, then, who was concerned to apply Cartesian principles to issues of importance for the Jansenist theologian.What Has Descartes To Do with Jansen?A primary trigger for the bitter “Jansenist controversies” in France during the seventeenth century was the posthumous publication in 1640 of the Augustinus of Jansen, the late Bishop of Ypres in the Spanish Netherlands. This technical three-volume work attempts to draw from Augustine responses to Pelagian and semi-Pelagian views concerning the prelapsarian state of innocence, the fall from this state, and the grace required to overcome that fall. Jansen’s emphasis is on the pervasive corruption of original sin and on the impossibility of meritorious action that does not derive from God’s grace to the elect. The Jesuits in Louvain saw the work as a throwback to the theses of Michel du Bay (Baius) that Pope Paul V had condemned in 1567 due to pressure exerted by their order, and they made an unsuccessful attempt to stop the publication of the book. 1 After its publication this text drew the suspicion of Cardinal Richelieu, who (correctly) believed Jansen to be the author of Mars Gallicus, an anonymous pamphlet protesting Richelieu’s anti-Habsburg policies. Richelieu chose a theologian of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, Isaac Habert, to launch an attack against the Augustinus. In a series of sermons starting in 1642 Habert criticized Jansen’s assertion of the necessity of contrition... (shrink)

Originally published by Duckworth in 2002.

Sous le thème de la « méthode », l’auteur se propose de formuler une éthique de la lecture à partir de Gilles Deleuze. L’analyse est fondée sur un dédoublement de la lecture : d’abord la lecture qu’a fait De-leuze de David Hume tel qu’exprimé dans Empirisme et subjectivité (1953) et celle de Henri Bergson dans Le bergsonisme (1966), ensuite par la lecture que l’auteur fait de ces deux livres de Deleuze. Par l’entremise de l’empirisme (Hume) et de l’intuition (Bergson), l’auteur (...) conclut que la lecture que Deleuze a faite est performative en ce sens qu’elle fait ce qu’elle énonce. Une éthique de la lecture correspondante se voudra donc, de même, performative : elle dépassera le donné à tra-vers le délire, s’ouvrira à l’inhumain et au surhumain à travers le vir-tuel. (shrink)

Laziness is a borderline phenomenon. It may cause the withdrawal from any commitment or allow the human being a space and a time for reflexing the conditions of his actions. If it is undoubtedly a capital sin when source of mindless, could not it be also a tool for the self-construction of life and identity? Then how could it play such a role? The paper intends to clarify the possible misunderstanding hidden under this dilemma. For this purpose, it proposes a (...) survey of the heroic conditions of modern life in which social ideals are more and more demanding and, consequently, force to choose between enactment and truth, conformist or genuine achievements. It stresses then the question of authenticity as a stake for desire. (shrink)

Résumé Au point de départ, l’acte théologique se constitue par la lecture des Écritures. Mais cette lecture, par laquelle se produit un sujet théologien, ne peut elle-même se résoudre que dans une écriture par laquelle ce sujet fait trace, à son tour, de son expérience. Le présent article investigue ces rapports complexes de la théologie aux Écritures et à l’écriture pour tenter d’en définir l’acte théologique comme traversée des textes et production d’un sens. La théologie, argumente-t-il, suppose que le lecteur-écrivain (...) se situe dans l’axe de l’Autre, c’est-à-dire dans un rapport au texte et à l’ordre symbolique du monde qui consiste à ne pas se laisser arrêter par leurs valeurs acquises, à continuer sans relâche à interroger ce qu’ils laissent à désirer. Cet acte, dès lors, ne peut se réaliser que dans le lieu de son impossibilité même : donner figure à l’Autre en sachant que cet Autre lui échappe.The theological work starts by reading Scriptures. This reading, which produces the theological subject, yet needs a writing by which this subject traces his own experience. The present paper investigates the complex relations that the theologian must keep up with reading and writing in order to define the specific locus of his work. Theology, it argues, supposes that the reader-writer places himself in the axis of the Other, that means, in such a relation with texts and symbolic order of the word as he will not be stopped by actual value systems and he will keep inquiring what is left open to desire by them. This act, therefore, can take place only in the context of its own impossibility : it gives a representation of the Other while knowing that the Other cannot be represented. (shrink)

There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienation in a modern capitalist world. However, social scientific interest in alienation had become parochial and balkanized by the 1970s. To reconstruct a unifying theory of alienation that addresses general features of capitalism, such as compulsory growth and commodification, and particular phases like financialized capitalism, we begin with the notion of futurelessness. Futurelessness refers to a deficient relationship to the future in which people’s senses of possibility (...) ossify, narrow, or dissipate. It may result from inclusion in and exclusion from capitalist mechanisms or processes. Moreover, processes of inclusion and exclusion may appear more voluntary or involuntary. With these general terms, we identify four manifestations of futurelessness in financial capitalism: commercial exhaustion, imaginative marginalization, therapeutic nowism, and pragmatic denialism. The conclusion addresses future-sustenance in an alienating world and the prospects of a more systemic and synthetic approach to alienation. (shrink)

Spinoza's Mediate Infinite Mode TAD M. SCHMALTZ IN PART I of the Ethics, Spinoza argued that a modification is infinite just in case it either "follows from the absolute nature of any attribute of God" or "follows from some attribute of God, as it is modified by such a modification" that is infinite. 1 The main purpose of this argument is to bolster the claim later in this text that a finite modification can follow from a divine attribute only insofar (...) as that attribute is modified by another finite modification. 2 Thus it is understandable that in the section that contains the argument Spinoza did not actually affirm the existence of the two kinds of infinite modifications he mentioned, which following standard practice I call "immediate infinite modes" and "mediate infinite modes," respectively.3 Yet in this section he did 'E IP21,D-22,D, G II 65-66/Curley 429-3 o. In the text and notes of this paper I use the following abbreviations pertaining to Spinoza's writings: E: Ethics ; Ep.: Letters ; RDPP: Descartes' Principles of Philosophy ; CM: Appendix containing Metaphysical Thoughts ; KV: Short Treatise ; TdlE: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect ; G: C. Gebhardt, ed., Spinoza Opera, 4 vols. , cited by volume and page; Curley: E. Curley, trans, and ed., The Collected Works of.. (shrink)

Social scientists have severed social problems from the study of framing work in social movements. This article proposes to rejoin problems and framing work via attention to the phenomenological structure of social problems. By describing basic 1) temporal, 2) spatial, and 3) experiential features of social problems, we facilitate comparisons of different kinds of movements across distinct historical periods and regions. The approach is demonstrated via the example of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011)—suffering that develops gradually across time and extends across (...) space as well as disproportionately afflicts disempowered people. A comparison of two very different historical cases—environmental justice advocacy in the wake of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India and consumer activism in early twentieth-century America—illustrates how slow violence presents parallel issues with respect to representing the problem and identifying the culprits. On this basis, the argument demonstrates parallels among disparate social movements by including the analysis of the phenomenological structure of social problems into comparative studies of framing work in movements. As such, this article presents analytical possibilities for incorporating experiences of social problems into the study of framing work and social movements. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider the relation of history of philosophy to the history of science. I argue that though these two disciplines are naturally linked, they also have special commitments that distinguish each from the other. I begin with the history of the history of science, a discipline that was once allied with philosophy of science but that has increasingly evolved toward social history. Then I consider the debate over whether the history of philosophy is essential for, or rather (...) largely irrelevant to, contemporary “analytic” philosophy. My conclusion is that the relation of history of philosophy to philosophy is best conceived in terms of the relation of history of science to history. Finally, I consider a particular case study of the relation of history of science to history of philosophy that concerns contextualist scholarship on early modern philosophy and science. (shrink)

There is considerable debate among scholars over whether Descartes allowed for genuine body–body interaction. I begin by considering Michael Della Rocca’s recent claim that Descartes accepted such interaction, and that his doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths indicates how this interaction could be acceptable to him. Though I agree that Descartes was inclined to accept real bodily causes of motion, I differ from Della Rocca in emphasizing that his ontology ultimately does not allow for them. This is not (...) the end of the story, however, since two of Descartes’s successors offered incompatible ways of developing his conflicted account of motion. I contrast the occasionalist view of Nicolas Malebranche that changes in motion derive directly from divine volitions with the non-occasionalist claim of Pierre-Sylvain Regis that such changes derive from a nature distinct from God. In light of Della Rocca’s interpretation, it is noteworthy that the issue of eternal truths is relevant to both alternative accounts. Indeed, Regis took the doctrine that such truths are created to provide crucial support for his alternative to an occasionalist account of body–body interaction. What does not help Della Rocca, however, is that Regis’s view of motion requires a fundamental revision of Descartes’s ontology. Author Keywords: Descartes; Malebranche; Regis; Causation; Motion; Eternal Truths. (shrink)

In this article, I consider Descartes’ enigmatic claim that we must assert that the material world is indefinite rather than infinite. The focus here is on the discussion of this claim in Descartes’ late correspondence with More. One puzzle that emerges from this correspondence is that Descartes insists to More that we are not in a position to deny the indefinite universe has limits, while at the same time indicating that we conceive a contradiction in the notion that the universe (...) has a limit. I reject one attempt to resolve this apparent conflict which appeals to Descartes’ admission to More that divine omnipotence requires that God can create a vacuum in nature, and focus instead on his response to More’s claim that this omnipotence requires the possibility of a completion of the division of matter that results in atoms. Finally, I distinguish Descartes’ indefinite from two other kinds of infinity with which it might well be confused. The first is an essentially incomplete ‘potential infinity’ that Descartes discusses in the Third Meditation, and the second is the sort of quantitative infinity that Leibniz – contrary to Descartes – denies can constitute a completed whole. (shrink)

I argue that Pyrrho was an epistemological skeptic, rather than the possessor of a positive metaphysical view.

This paper explores the consequences of the oft ignored fact that public health insurance must actually be supplied by the state. Depending how the state is modeled, different health insurance outcomes are expected. The benevolent model of the state does not account for many actual features of public health insurance systems. One alternative is to use a standard public choice model, where state action is determined by interaction between self-interested actors. Another alternative—related to a strand in public choice theory—is to (...) model the state as Leviathan. Interestingly, some proponents of public health insurance use an implicit Leviathan model, but not consistently. The Leviathan model of the state explains many features of public health insurance: its uncontrolled growth, its tendency toward monopoly, its capacity to buy trust and loyalty from the common people, its surveillance ability, its controlling nature, and even the persistence of its inefficiencies and waiting lines. (shrink)

This paper compares the development of the notion of continuous quantity in the work of Francisco Suárez and René Descartes. The discussion begins with a consideration of Suárez’s rejection of the view – common to ‘realists’ such as Thomas Aquinas and ‘nominalists’ such as William of Ockham – that quantity is inseparable from the extension of material integral parts. Crucial here is Suárez’s view that quantified extension exhibits a kind of impenetrability that distinguishes it from other kinds of extension. This (...) view sheds considerable light on initially obscure remarks on impenetrability in Descartes’ late correspondence with Henry More. Though Descartes differs from Suárez and other major scholastic figures in his understanding of the relation of quantity to material substance, he nonetheless requires in the end some version of the Suárezian distinction between quantified and unquantified extension. (shrink)

It is well known that the French Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was both an occasionalist in metaphysics and a mechanist in physics. He consistently argued that God is the only true caus...