The continued global economic success of authoritarian China seems to underscore the need to review the reasons why democracy occurs in different societies. For decades, many believed that a growin...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rising rates of suicide were widely held to be indicative of a pervasive crisis of meaning. This article examines the response to the problem of...

“It is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most,” writes Henry Dav...

Nietzsche’s ambiguous and allusive style of writing creates special problems for the principle of charity, the idea that we should work to understand philosophic statements in the way that will yie...

Hobbes is often portrayed as a thinker who anticipated modern constructivist ideas of fiction and representation according to which reality is simply a social construction. This article questions t...

This short book by Lorraine Daston is a classic essay: she identifies an intellectual conundrum—why do humans across cultures and history look to nature for models for cultural norms and orders?—an...

The aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse led to a revival of interest in earlier crises. Although the major focus of attention was on the 1929 bank failures that ultimately led to the Great Dep...

Descartes’ physics is dependent on his metaphysics, which is to say, on knowledge of the nature of God and of the human soul. This is clear throughout Descartes’ work, but it is especially so in th...

My main concern in this article is to arrive at a clear view of the nature, extent, and value of Descartes’ universal doubt, not to determine whether Hume’s critique of Cartesian doubt is compellin...

This re-examination of the cogito is prompted by a substantive question which has not previously been identified: the distinguishability of the I or self. Consequently, its force has not been addre...

ABSTRACT E. M. Curley has said that Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum “is as obscure on examination as it is compelling at first glance.” Why should that be? Maybe because the cogito raises so many textual and interpretive questions. Is it an argument or an intuition? If it is an argument, does it require an additional premise? Is it best interpreted as a “performance?” Is it best seen as the discovery that any reason proposed for doubting its success entails the meditator’s (...) existence? And so on. But all these questions typically arise in the wake of worries about the cogency of the cogito when it is treated as an argument and worded in its canonical form, “I think, therefore I exist.” In this essay, I focus on what I take to be the most fundamental reason for questioning the cogito’s cogency when it is so treated—namely that the “I” in its premise is question-begging. I distinguish that reason from other reasons that are sometimes conflated with it, and I argue that it is not a good reason. I then comment on some of the questions mentioned above in light of my defense of the cogito seen in that traditional way. (shrink)

This article shows that Descartes’ ontological argument in Meditation V is needed to ground essential distinctions, particularly the mind/body distinction. It does this by tracing out Descartes’ di...

This article explores the vocabulary of knowing in Descartes’ Meditations. It offers a detailed and in part sequential examination of his use of cognitio and scien...

In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes intends to prove that material things exist. His proof, which centers on the origin of the ideas of material things, has frequently been judged weak. But there is...

I offer a reading of the role of freedom in Descartes’ Meditations and other writings that sees freedom’s role in “assenting to ideas” as a matter of psychological possibility, and its role in acti...

Although Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy seems to be an especially theoretical work, this essay argues that reading the Meditations as a work of pure theory conceals an important dimensi...

This Special Issue of The European Legacy focuses on Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, first published in Latin as Meditationes de Prima Philosophia in Paris, in 1641. The ten articles ap...

My article focuses on Descartes’ Third Meditation, in which he seeks to gain a knowledge of God as his creator. While Descartes offers two proofs of God’s existence in this meditation—the first to...