Online research in philosophy

Transcript and English translation of La naissance de la paix -- Analysis of La naissance de la paix -- Did Descartes write La naissance de la paix? -- Descartes's doctrine of the will -- The power of the will -- Controlling bodily desires -- Willing the good -- The sources of willing -- Did Descartes read Corneille? -- Descartes's political philosophy -- Evidence and methods of construction -- The sovereign state -- Descartes's life and politics -- Discours de la methode -- Constitution of a Swedish Academy -- Arts and sciences -- Les passions de l'âme.

1.Puzzle According to a standard view in contemporary metaphysics, there are no necessary connections between distinct properties. But according to a standard view in philosophy of mind there are necessary connections between distinct properties. In short, we have a puzzle: standard metaphysics inconsistent with standard philosophy of mind. By ‘a standard view in contemporary metaphysics’ I mean, of course, Hume’s dictum that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. I don’t mean the historical Hume; whether the historical Hume held Hume’s dictum I am sure is a controversial issue, and will not concern us. What will concern us rather is the idea that contemporary metaphysicians such as David Lewis and David Armstrong discuss and attribute to Hume (see, e.g., Lewis 1986 and Armstrong 1997). Of course Hume’s dictum does not say anything explicitly about properties; it talks of existences rather than properties. But ‘existences’ I take it, means ‘things that exist’ and, if we set nominalism aside—as I will do here—properties are things that exist. Hence the Humean dictum entails as a special case that there are no necessary connections between distinct properties.

In Meditation I, Descartes dismisses the possibility that he might be insane as a ground for doubting that the senses are a source of knowledge of the external world. In this paper, I argue that Descartes was justified in so doing, and draw some general epistemological conclusions from this result.

Descartes’ work on optics spanned his entire career and represents a fascinating area of inquiry from both the perspectives of the history of science and his systematic natural philosophy. The first of these entries offers a brief account of Descartes' seminal work in optics, the Dioptrique, often translated as the Optics or, more literally, as the Dioptrics. The second entry overview of Descartes’ understanding of light, his derivations of the two central laws of geometrical optics, and a sampling of the optical phenomena he sought to explain.

Many have thought that there is a problem with causal commerce between immaterial souls and material bodies. In Physicalism or Something Near Enough, Jaegwon Kim attempts to spell out that problem. Rather than merely posing a question or raising a mystery for defenders of substance dualism to answer or address, he offers a compelling argument for the conclusion that immaterial souls cannot causally interact with material bodies. We offer a reconstruction of that argument that hinges on two premises: Kim’s Dictum and the Nowhere Man principle. Kim’s Dictum says that causation requires a spatial relation. Nowhere Man says that souls can’t be in space. By our lights, both premises can be called into question. We’ll begin our evaluation of the argument by pointing out some consequences of Kim’s Dictum. For some, these will be costs. We will then present two defeaters for Kim’s Dictum and a critical analysis of Kim’s case for Nowhere Man. The upshot is that Kim’s argument against substance dualism fails.

Consider the claim that if there were macrophysical objects, they would cause things. Trenton Merricks takes this to be an obviously true claim, and he puts it to work in his argument for eliminating some (alleged) macrophysical objects. In this short paper, I argue that the claim in question—Merricks’s Dictum—is not obviously true, and may even be false.

Descartes and the last Scholastics: objections and replies -- Descartes and the Scotists -- Ideas, before and after Descartes -- The Cartesian destiny of form and matter -- Descartes, Basso, and Toletus: three kinds of Corpuscularians -- Scholastics and the new astronomy on the substance of the heavens -- Descartes and the Jesuits of La Fleche: the Eucharist -- Condemnations of Cartesianism: the extension and unity of the universe -- Cartesians, Gassendists, and censorship -- The cogito in the seventeenth century.

Hume's Dictum (HD) says, roughly and typically, that there are no metaphysically necessary connections between distinct, intrinsically typed, entities. HD plays an influential role in metaphysical debate, both in constructing theories and in assessing them. One should ask of such an influential thesis: why believe it? Proponents do not accept Hume's arguments for his dictum, nor do they provide their own; however, some have suggested either that HD is analytic or that it is synthetic a priori (that is: motivated by intuitions we have no good reason to question). Here I explore whether belief in HD is directly justified on either grounds. I motivate and present more formal characterizations of HD; I show that there are good prima facie cases to be made for HD's being analytic and for its being synthetic a priori; I argue that each of the prima facie cases fails, some things considered. I close by offering two suggestions for how belief in HD might be indirectly justified on argumentative grounds.

Descartes’s Cogito, “I am thinking, therefore I exist,” is perhaps the most famous assertion in the history of philosophy. Thirteen hundred years earlier, St. Augustine formulated a similar claim, arguing “if I am mistaken, I am.” Did St. Augustine anticipate Descartes? We show that Descartes’s dictum is a novel insight and less vulnerable to criticism than the claim of St. Augustine. Whereas Descartes searched for one true proposition on which he could base scientificknowledge, St. Augustine sought to refute the skeptics who had denied the possibility of knowledge. By a twist of irony, the skeptics and St. Augustine reached contradictory (ethical) conclusions based, however, on similar reasoning.

Various formally valid counterexamples have been adduced against the Humean dictum that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” There are formal rebuttals—some very sophisticated now (e.g., Charles R. Pigden’s and Gerhard Schurz’s)—to such counterexamples. But what follows is an intuitive and informal argument against them. I maintain that it is better than these sophisticated formal defenses of the Humean dictum and that it also helps us see why it implausible to think that we can be as decisive about the truth or falsity of the dictum as both the formal counterexamples or formal barriers to them purport to be.