HOME . ABOUT US . CONTACT US HELP . PUBLISH WITH US . LIBRARIANS Search in or Explore Browse Publications A-Z Browse Subjects A-Z Advanced Search University of Cambridge SIGN IN Register | Why Register? | Sign Out | Got a Voucher? prev abstract next Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes A Devout Catholic? Knowledge of The Mental Thought and Language Descartes as A Natural Philosopher Substance Dualism Notes Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes Author: Desmond M. (...) class='Hi'>Clarke DOI: 10.1080/09608780902986680 Publication Frequency: 5 issues per year Published in: British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 17, Issue 3 June 2009 , pages 601 - 616 John Cottingham: Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes's Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 40.00 (hb.). ISBN 978-0-19-922697-9 John Cottingham, in a new collection of essays, asks the question: 'what exactly did Descartes himself chiefly take himself to be doing?' (254). 1 While the question is relatively clear, and while it acknowledges implicitly that Descartes was probably doing a range of different things, the answer that is apparently proposed here emerges only on reading the whole collection. Cottingham distinguishes in Chapter 1 - which is a new, synoptic overview of what is discussed in the other chapters, all of which were previously published - between two approaches to reading Descartes. One is to see him as 'a dummy on which to drape various suspect doctrines (such as “Cartesian dualism”)' (3), which contemporary analytic philosophers have shown to be radically mistaken. Another approach is adopted by historians of ideas 'who make it their life's work to pay meticulous scholarly attention to the philosophical works of past ages' (3). Cottingham does not explicitly criticize either of these approaches, but he hints at situating his own as some kind of Aristotelian middle course between the two. Since the two reference points are dangerously close to straw men or what Cottingham calls 'extreme positions', the proposed middle way may simply combine elements of two approaches, each of which is entirely legitimate. I return to this question at the conclusion. In fact, many of these essays were intended to show (rightly!) that Descartes never held the philosophical positions that are often attributed to him. The interpretation of Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, provides a good example of how mistaken one can be: The Cogito ergo sum radically changed the way of doing philosophy … After Descartes, philosophy became a science of pure thought: all that is being- the created world, and even the Creator, is situated within the ambit of the Cogito, as contents of human consciousness. Philosophy is concerned with beings as contained in consciousness, and not as existing independently of it. (257) The only way to address such a caricature is to refer back to what Descartes actually wrote. Cottingham does precisely that, often quoting the original Latin or French texts. However, having shown successfully, by a close reading of the texts, that Descartes did not hold many of the views that are attributed to him, it still remains to say what Descartes did hold or teach about various philosophical problems that retain their perennial interest for us. This is how the question arises, intermittently, about what Descartes thought he was 'chiefly' doing, or what was his primary objective, in the course of an intellectual career that spanned three decades. However, the apparently legitimate desire to bring Descartes' intellectual endeavours into sharp focus may be frustrated by the evidence. His life and work manifestly lack the coherence or unity of purpose that one finds, for example, among many of his French or Dutch contemporaries. It is comparatively easy to 'read' the life of Gisbertus Voetius as that of an unwavering Calvinist theologian, to see Antoine Arnauld as a staunch and consistent theological defender of Port Royal, and even to interpret the obviously fragmentary contents of Pascal's unpublished notebooks (subsequently, the Penses) as an extended search for authentic religious faith, in opposition to what he perceived as the corruption of ecclesial structures. In contrast, Descartes' life reveals features that are difficult to integrate into a coherent pattern. He lived and published during a critical juncture in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Although baptized into the Catholic Church soon after his birth in the Loire district of France, he chose to live most of his life in the aggressively Calvinist United Provinces, in which other religious practices were officially (though often ineffectively) banned. Descartes may have adopted the motto from Ovid, at least early in his career: 'bene vixit qui bene latuit' (he lives well who conceals himself well), and he seems genuinely to have wished to avoid theological controversies. However, he engaged in very public controversies with so many of his contemporaries - including Hobbes, Gassendi, the French Jesuits (collectively) and Father Dinet (in particular), Voetius and the University of Utrecht, Regius, Fermat, Roberval, Revius and other theologians at Leiden - that one might conclude that his claimed preference for a quiet life was a disingenuous mask. 2 Descartes published four books during his lifetime, and wrote at least one other that he had intended to publish. The latter was his first major composition, Le Monde, which he suppressed when he heard about Galileo's condemnation by Rome in 1633. This was followed, in 1637, by Descartes' first book (also written in French), which he tried to publish anonymously by withholding his name from the title page: the Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verit dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique, les meteors, et la geometrie, qui sont des essais de cete methode. Four years later Descartes published the first edition (in Latin) of Meditationes de prima philosophia, in quibus Dei existentia et animae immortalitas demonstrator, which also included six sets of objections and replies. The Principia philosophiae appeared (in Latin) in Amsterdam in 1644, and was followed five years later by Les Passions de l'Ame (in French). 3 In parallel with these publications, Descartes carried on a very extensive correspondence over a thirty-year period (in both Latin and French), and preserved copies or drafts of his letters with a view to future publication. Given the range and variety of his interests, and the sheer volume of writings, published or otherwise, that have survived from his pen, one may be tempted to engage in a comparative evaluation, as Cottingham does, by selecting one of Descartes' books as his primary contribution to philosophy. Cottingham claims that the Meditations was Descartes''masterpiece' (44), 'the definitive statement of Descartes's philosophy' (45) and the 'definitive statement of his metaphysics' (68). He also describes the Meditations more narrowly as 'his metaphysical masterpiece' (259, 303) and, more broadly, as 'his philosophical masterpiece' (289), and he lists it with the Discours as one of Descartes' two 'masterworks' (280). The Principia offers some competition in this comparative judgement when it is described as 'the canonical presentation of his metaphysical views' (114), while 'the construction of a moral system … was the crowning aim of his philosophy' (231). Having pitched repeatedly for the Meditations as Descartes' primary text, Cottingham claims that its author was 'a devout Catholic' (215), that he was 'a devoutly religious philosopher' (256), and that he could not free himself 'from the influence of the long years of theological study he had dutifully completed at La Flche' (62). Accordingly, the Meditations should be read as 'in essence a work of theodicy' (220); 'what has pride of place in the construction of his philosophical system is … an appeal to God … the nature and existence of the Deity is something that lies at the very heart of his entire philosophical system' (255). Without quite saying so, there are hints here that Descartes was a devout Christian whose primary intellectual contribution was to write a work of metaphysics, in which God is central and in the course of which the author alternates between proving God's existence and contemplating God - the latter a seventeenth-century version of Bonaventure's Journey of the Soul to God. 'Descartes's attraction to a contemplative mode of philosophizing' (305) is reflected, in the Meditations, in 'the language of the soul's coming to rest in adoring contemplation of the light' (306). Cottingham also accepts the overwhelming evidence from Descartes' correspondence that he 'devoted most of his career not to metaphysics but to science' (108), although he quibbles elsewhere with those who adopt the shorthand term 'science' to describe part of what was called 'natural philosophy' in the seventeenth century (282). He also refers to the '(notoriously lame) argument for the essential incorporeality of the thinking self' in one of Descartes' masterworks (60), and he describes the 'strange, seemingly isolated world of his metaphysical meditations' (139), with its 'creaking ontology' (147), when read in isolation from the rest of his work as a natural philosopher. How should we read him, then, in the twenty-first century? A Devout Catholic? That Descartes was a devout Catholic is possible, unlikely and undecidable. He seems not to have studied theology at all while at school at La Flche, although he completed the pre-theology college cycle in the company of Jesuit students who then continued their studies in theology. Descartes consistently attempted to avoid public entanglement with religious and theological controversies, and said so frequently. 4 Given the alignments that prevailed at the time, both in France. (shrink)

The seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary invention, discovery and revolutions in scientific, social and political orders. It was a time of expansive automation, biological discovery, rapid advances in medical knowledge, of animal trials and a questioning of the boundaries between species, human and non-human, between social classes, and of the assumed naturalness of political inequality. This book gives a tour through those objects, ordinary and extraordinary, which captivated the philosophical imagination of the single most important French philosopher of (...) this period, Rene Descartes. Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore document Descartes' attempt to make sense of the complex, composite objects of human and divine invention, consistent with the fundamental tenets of his metaphysical system. Their central argument is that, far from reducing all the categories of ordinary experience to the two basic categories of substance, mind and body, Descartes' philosophy recognises irreducible composites that resist reduction, and require their own distinctive modes of explanation. (shrink)

Descartes is often accused of having fragmented the human being into two independent substances, mind and body, with no clear strategy for explaining the apparent unity of human experience. Deborah Brown argues that, contrary to this view, Descartes did in fact have a conception of a single, integrated human being, and that in his view this conception is crucial to the success of human beings as rational and moral agents and as practitioners of science. The passions are pivotal in (...) this, and in a rich and wide-ranging discussion she examines Descartes' place in the tradition of thought about the passions, the metaphysics of actions and passions, sensory representation, and Descartes' account of self-mastery and virtue. Her study is an important and original reading not only of Descartes' account of mind-body unity but also of his theory of mind. (shrink)

Absence of evidence arguments are indispensable to comparative neurobiology. The absence in a given species of a homologous neural architecture strongly correlated with a type of conscious experience in humans should be able to be taken as a prima facie reason for concluding that the species in question does not have the capacity for that conscious experience. Absence of evidence reasoning is, however, widely disparaged for being both logically illicit and unscientific. This paper argues that these concerns are unwarranted. There (...) is no logical barrier to formulating cogent absence of evidence arguments; indeed, accepting such arguments is part of what it is to be committed to falsifiability as a critical aspect of the scientific method. Absence of evidence arguments can always be blocked, however, by assuming that psychological properties are ‘multiply realizable’. While we take multiple realizability to be highly likely at some level of analysis, we argue that it is question-begging to assume that it exists at every level of analysis, and thus it should not automatically be thought to undermine absence of evidence reasoning in the animal consciousness debate. Using the example of pain and focusing on homologies at the level of information processing tasks, we show how, in the science of consciousness, an absence of evidence might well serve as evidence of absence. (shrink)

Despite eschewing the utility of ends or purposes in natural philosophy, Descartes frequently engages in functional explanation, which many have assumed is an essentially teleological form of explanation. This article considers the consistency of Descartes's appeal to natural functions, advancing the idea that he is utilizing a non-normative, non-teleological form of functional explanation. It will be argued that Cartesian functional analysis resembles modern causal functional analysis, and yet, by emphasizing the interdependency of parts of biological systems, is able to avoid (...) many of the problems attendant upon modern causal theories. It is for this reason, if no other, that the study of Descartes's natural philosophy should be of interest to contemporary theorists of functional analysis. (shrink)

There is a tension within Ockham's theory of mental language between its claim to being a semantics for conventional languages and its claim to being a model of concept acquisition and thought. In particular, the commitment to a redundancy-free mental language which serves to explain important semantic relations such as synonymy and ambiguity conflicts, _prima facie, with the possibility of opaque belief contexts. I argue that it is preferable to treat the theory of mental language as an idealized theory of (...) cognitive competence than to forfeit, as Jerry Fodor does, the commitment to conceptual parsimony. (shrink)

RésuméL'énigme de Hume au sujet de la connaissance de soi repose sur l'idée qu'il n'y a pour l'esprit que deux modes d'accès épistémique à soi-même: le contact direct ou non inférentiel avec le soi, d'une part, et la connaissance indirecte, à base d'inférence, d'autre part. Hume rejette le premier de ces modes enpartant de ceci que nous n'avons dans l'introspection qu'une connaissance des expériences et jamais de la substance mentale, et il rejette le second comme incapable de contrer le scepticisme, (...) sa conclusion étant que ce nous appelons un soi n'est rien d'autre que l'amas des expériences que nous rencontrons. Il y a, cependant, en plus de ces deux modes d'accès, une troisième possibilité, que Hume ne semble jamais prendre en considération, mais qui était caractéristique de l'approche de Thomas d'Aquin à la connaissance de soi, comme de celle de Descartes. Pour ces auteurs, le mode d'accès que l 'esprit a à lui-même est une connaissance indirecte non inférentielle. Le présent article propose ainsi de repenser la façon dont ces philosophes ont conçu la connaissance qu'un individu a de lui-même. En particulier, l'un des aspects de la doctrine de Thomas d'Aquin qui est souvent négligé concerne le rôle que joue dans la connaissance du soi individuel la prise de conscience de l'implication de la volonté dans la pensée. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: L'énigme de Hume au sujet de la connaissance de soi repose sur l'idée qu'il n'y a pour l'esprit que deux modes d'accès épistémique à soi-même: le contact direct ou non inférentiel avec le soi, d'une part, et la connaissance indirecte, à base d'inférence, d'autre part. Hume rejette le premier de ces modes en partant de ceci que nous n'avons dans l'introspection qu'une connaissance des expériences et jamais de la substance mentale, et il rejette le second comme incapable de contrer (...) le scepticisme, sa conclusion étant que ce nous appelons un soi n'est rien d'autre que l'amas des expériences que nous rencontrons. Il y a, cependant, en plus de ces deux modes d'accès, une troisième possibilité, que Hume ne semble jamais prendre en considération, mais qui était caractéristique de l'approche de Thomas d'Aquin à la connaissance de soi, comme de celle de Descartes. Pour ces auteurs, le mode d'accès que l'esprit a à lui même est une connaissance indirecte non inférentielle. Le présent article propose ainsi de repenser la façon dont ces philosophes ont conçu la connaissance qu'un individu a de lui-même. En particulier, l'un des aspects de la doctrine de Thomas d'Aquin qui est souvent négligé concerne le rôle que joue dans la connaissance du soi individuel la prise de conscience de l'implication de la volonté dans la pensée. (shrink)

Rehabilitating some of Bakhtin's neglected ideas and reframing him as a philosopher of aesthetics, Bakhtin Reframed will be essential reading for the huge community of Bakhtin scholars as well as students and practitioners of visual culture ...

I was dreaming about Delores when the phone interrupted us. It was the Chief, or ‘Stress,’ as we liked to call him, telling me to get part of my anatomy down to Shakey’s Funeral Parlor. My head ached. I thought I must be the only sucker who gets a hangover from being drunk on life. I got up, put two eggs, a spoonful of wheatgerm, the remains of the scotch, and the phonebill into the blender and fed the whole lot (...) to the cat. It helped, but not as much as Delores would have. I should have married her even if she was a Hubot. At least she could play chess. I was still Rumanating over Delores as I hit the curb outside Shakey’s.I had the notion that Shakey’s was once a pizza joint but I could have been wrong. I found Stress, disheveled as usual, in the lobby.‘You’re late,’ he said. I wasn’t, but he’s thatkinda guy. He says ‘Jump!’ and you say ‘With or without my legs?’ We got our free Cokes from Shakey himself, who led us down the hall. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Objective Reality in the Cartesian Framework Material Falsity and Its Problems Reading 1: Descartes Abandons Material Falsity Reading 2: Reconciling Material Falsity and Objective Reality Response to the Dilemma of Uncaused Ideas The Identity of Ideas References and Further Reading.

I was dreaming about Delores when the phone interrupted us. It was the Chief, or ‘Stress,’ as we liked to call him, telling me to get part of my anatomy down to Shakey’s Funeral Parlor. My head ached. I thought I must be the only sucker who gets a hangover from being drunk on life. I got up, put two eggs, a spoonful of wheatgerm, the remains of the scotch, and the phonebill into the blender and fed the whole lot (...) to the cat. It helped, but not as much as Delores would have. I should have married her even if she was a Hubot. At least she could play chess. I was still Rumanating over Delores as I hit the curb outside Shakey’s.I had the notion that Shakey’s was once a pizza joint but I could have been wrong. I found Stress, disheveled as usual, in the lobby.‘You’re late,’ he said. I wasn’t, but he’s thatkinda guy. He says ‘Jump!’ and you say ‘With or without my legs?’ We got our free Cokes from Shakey himself, who led us down the hall. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Parenting and Moral Development provides a collection of state-of-the-art theories and research on the role that parents play in moral development. Contributors who are leaders in their fields take a comprehensive, yet nuanced approach to considering the complex links between parenting and moral development.

Modern military organizations are paternalistic organizations. They typically recognize a duty of care toward military personnel and are willing to ignore or violate the consent of military personnel in order to uphold that duty of care. In this paper, we consider the case for paternalism in the military and distinguish it from the case for paternalism in medicine. We argue that one can consistently reject paternalism in medicine but uphold paternalism in the military. We consider two well-known arguments for the (...) conclusion that military organizations should not be entitled to use experimental drugs on troops without first obtaining the informed consent of those troops. We argue that both of these are unsuccessful, in the absence of an argument for the rejection of paternalism in the military altogether. The case for military paternalism is widely accepted. However, we consider three ways in which it could be challenged. (shrink)

Although every cell in a human body contains the same DNA, every cell uses its DNA differently, in unique interaction with its environment. Human bodies live and thrive because their cells and tissues are sustained in a whole whose life emerges from, but cannot be reduced to, its parts. Living creatures are organized systems of processes that maintain their identity not despite change but because of it. These biological observations resonate with the foundational New Testament metaphor of the Body of (...) Christ and with process-theological descriptions of creatures as open-ended processes interacting within a creation itself sustained within the boundless loving creativity of the Creator. I will map contemporary biological understanding of bodies as emergent and processual onto the theological metaphor of the Body of Christ and explore the ideas that emerge in terms of relationships between scripture, communities, and the life of the church. (shrink)

Suppose that one of us were to think as if he was suddenly created and complete but with his view obscured so that he could not see outside. And suppose that he had been so created as if he were moved in the air or the void in such a way that he was not touched by the thickness of the air that he would be able to sense it and as if his limbs were separated so that they did (...) not touch either him or each other. Thence he should see if he would affirm being of his essence. He will not hesitate to affirm himself to exist. He will not however affirm things exterior to his members nor the hidden things of his interiors nor his soul nor his brain nor anything else extrinsic. He will affirm himself to exist though he will not affirm the length or the width or the thickness of himself. If however in that period of time it is possible for him to imagine a hand or another member, that would not be imagined to be part of him nor necessary to his essence. (shrink)

Leishmania major infection of inbred mice leads to a major dichotomous response—death or survival—that depends on the strain of mice. This finding has motivated efforts to locate genetic determinants of disease susceptibility. Genotyping studies have confirmed a complex multilocus trait, but studies directed at the biology of the response suggest identifiable components of susceptibility that may direct the genetic investigations. A confluence of parasite variables—residence in macrophages, class II-dependent immunity, and avoidance of early IL-12 induction—with host factors—a prominent helper T-cell (...) precursor frequency to a dominant parasite epitope and a bias in IL-4 gene activation—conspires to drive an aberrant immune response in animals that suffer fatal disease. These insights may lead to an understanding of factors that focus responses on dominant antigens and that mold the naive T-cell repertoire. Collectively, such factors might contribute to the pathogenesis of other infectious and autoimmune diseases. BioEssays 21:510–518, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Bakhtin and the Visual Arts is the first book to assess the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory, philosophy, theology, biology, and psychology. In his four early aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he began to focus on linguistic and literary categories, (...) Bakhtin worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth study of his aesthetics, especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and unfinalisability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the moral dimensions of creative activity. (shrink)

Several recent studies devote themselves to Mary Astell's feminist theory of virtue—her ‘serious proposal to the ladies’ to help women obtain wisdom, equality, and happiness, despite the prejudices of seventeenth-century custom. But there has been little scholarship on Astell's conception of heroic virtues, those exceptional character traits that raise their bearers above the ordinary course of nature. Astell's appropriation of heroic virtue poses a number of philosophical difficulties for her feminist ethics—heroic virtues are characteristically masculine, exceptional, and individualistic, ill-suited to (...) a community-oriented feminism aimed at ordinary women. In this paper, we seek to investigate—and then dispel—these key difficulties. Our intention is to generate a new understanding of Astell's theory of virtue as a unique and sophisticated theory that equalizes and naturalizes heroic virtue for women. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Blue Pearl: The Efficacy of Teaching Mindfulness Practices to College StudentsDeborah J. Haynes, Katie Irvine, and Mindy BridgesBetween fall 2003 and spring 2011 I integrated contemplative practices into ten courses with a total of 877 students. Nine of these courses carried credit for the core undergraduate curriculum, either in literature and arts or ideals and values, and students elected my courses from a menu of options. Individual courses (...) ranged from 12 to 409 students. During two of these years, I conducted detailed human subject research using a number of surveys, gathering both quantitative and qualitative data with first-year undergraduates on their experiences with contemplative pedagogy. These courses dealt specifically with art and religion, focusing on traditions where the visual arts are intricately connected to religious practice. I gathered more subjective data in all of the other courses, including large lecture courses on world art from 1500 to the present. In general, my students were not majors in art or religious studies, but came from many disciplines within the arts, social sciences, and sciences, including business and engineering. This essay describes the process and results of the research I conducted with two undergraduate assistants, Katie Irvine and Mindy Bridges. Besides summarizing the findings, I also describe student responses to teaching a specific mindfulness practice—the bow—within a large lecture course with undergraduates. It is notable how little actual data exists about student experiences, and this prompted me to undertake the research that forms the basis for this essay.1I begin with a few comments on my understanding of contemplative or mindfulness practice and my role as researcher. There is no single way to describe or engage in contemplative practice. The Latin contemplari means to observe, consider, or gaze attentively. This definition gives clues about the varied forms of contemplative practice, which include sitting, standing, walking, and lying down; using attitudes of not doing; deep listening, pondering, and radical questioning; guided imagery and active imagination; exercises with the body; focusing techniques such as those developed by Eugene Gendlin; concentrated language experiments with freewriting, poetry, and journals; beholding; and creation of visual images to represent such experiences.2 The [End Page 63] word mindfulness is often used to describe contemplative practice. In its most basic form, it means moment-by-moment present awareness, which is available to everyone, regardless of religious or spiritual orientation.Broadly understood as methods to develop concentration, to deepen understanding and insight, and to cultivate awareness and compassion, these practices can have a profound impact on a student’s experience both in college and beyond. Specifically, teaching students techniques of awareness, concentration, and means of disciplining their attention is absolutely essential in our era of fragmentation, ever-increasing speed, multitasking, and continuously interrupted attention. While contemplative practices are rooted in the world’s religious traditions, I often tell parents and students that the application of these practices in a secular educational context can enhance the educational experience in unique ways. Students develop new techniques of awareness, they learn to refine their perceptual and observational skills, and they are encouraged to take chances and to foster attitudes such as curiosity and wonder rather than cynicism about the world in which we live.Contemplative PedagogyIntroducing contemplative practices into the classroom results in new educational practices and pedagogies. For example, in a course titled The Dialogue of Art and Religion my students learn about Russian Orthodox icons, Himalayan Buddhist thangkas, and Navajo sand paintings through studying cultural and social history, religion, formal visual analysis, and creative processes. I define this interdisciplinary teaching as a form of comparative visual studies. I normally teach this class to eighteen or twenty first-year college students. Students also learn about the practices of prayer and meditation that are central to Christian, Buddhist, and Native American traditions through sustained reading and discussion. They read accessible books about contemplative practice such as Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness.3 In each class, we practice simple techniques such as bowing, sitting in silence, breath awareness, and daily writing exercises.Over the past decade my students have talked about how these mindfulness exercises help to foster an atmosphere of respect, noting... (shrink)