An exploration of topics of everyday importance in the Socratic tradition.

Puts Schelling in conversation with twentieth-century continental philosophy.

Between Two Worlds is an authoritative commentary on--and powerful reinterpretation of--the founding work of modern philosophy, Descartes's Meditations. Philosophers have tended to read Descartes's seminal work in an occasional way, examining its treatment of individual topics while ignoring other parts of the text. In contrast, John Carriero provides a sustained, systematic reading of the whole text, giving a detailed account of the positions against which Descartes was reacting, and revealing anew the unity, meaning, and originality of the Meditations. (...) Carriero finds in the Meditations a nearly continuous argument against Thomistic Aristotelian ways of thinking about cognition, and shows more clearly than ever before how Descartes bridged the old world of scholasticism and the new one of mechanistic naturalism. Rather than casting Descartes's project primarily in terms of skepticism, knowledge, and certainty, Carriero focuses on fundamental disagreements between Descartes and the scholastics over the nature of understanding, the relation between the senses and the intellect, the nature of the human being, and how and to what extent God is cognized by human beings. Against this background, Carriero shows, Descartes developed his own conceptions of mind, body, and the relation between them, creating a coherent, philosophically rich project in the Meditations and setting the agenda for a century of rationalist metaphysics. (shrink)

Atheists are frequently demonized as arrogant intellectuals, antagonistic to religion, devoid of moral sentiments, advocates of an "anything goes" lifestyle. Now, in this revealing volume, nineteen leading philosophers open a window on the inner life of atheism, shattering these common stereotypes as they reveal how they came to turn away from religious belief. These highly engaging personal essays capture the marvelous diversity to be found among atheists, providing a portrait that will surprise most readers. Many of the authors, for example, (...) express great affection for particular religious traditions, even as they explain why they cannot, in good conscience, embrace them. None of the contributors dismiss religious belief as stupid or primitive, and several even express regret that they cannot, or can no longer, believe. Perhaps more important, in these reflective pieces, they offer fresh insight into some of the oldest and most difficult problems facing the human mind and spirit. For instance, if God is dead, is everything permitted? Philosophers without Gods demonstrates convincingly, with arguments that date back to Plato, that morality is independent of the existence of God. Indeed, every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong. Moreover, they contend that secular life can provide rewards as great and as rich as religious life. A naturalistic understanding of the human condition presents a set of challenges--to pursue our goals without illusions, to act morally without hope of reward--challenges that can impart a lasting value to finite and fragile human lives. Collectively, these essays highlight the richness of atheistic belief--not only as a valid alternative to religion, but as a profoundly fulfilling and moral way of life. "This Atheists R Us compilation differs markedly in tone from Hitchens and Dawkins. Excellent fare for Christian small groups whose members are genuinely interested in the arguments raised by atheists." --Christianity Today "Readable, personal, and provocative.... Contrary to the popular image, atheism isn't all rebellious trumpets and defiant drums.... Here we have all the varieties of unreligious experience, a full symphony of unbelief." --Free Inquiry "Compelling and sophisticated arguments that religious people ought to confront." --Tikkun. (shrink)

This paper proposes a third meditation-category—automatic self-transcending— to extend the dichotomy of focused attention and open monitoring proposed by Lutz. Automaticself-transcending includes techniques designed to transcend their own activity. This contrasts with focused attention, which keeps attention focused on an object; and open monitoring, which keeps attention involved in the monitoring process. Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG. Focused attention, characterized by beta/gamma (...) activity, included meditations from Tibetan Buddhist, Buddhist, and Chinese traditions. Open monitoring, characterized by theta activity, included meditations from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions. Automaticself-transcending, characterized by alpha1 activity, included meditations from Vedic and Chinese traditions. Between categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation, and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects. (shrink)

Two works from the father of modern philosophy.

Few concepts are more central to ethics than love, but none is more subject to false consolation. This 1999 book explores several theological, philosophical and literary accounts of love, focusing on how it relates to matters such as self-interest and self-sacrifice, and invulnerability and immortality. Timothy Jackson first considers key aspects of what the Bible says about love, then he further examines the meaning of love and sacrifice through a close reading of novels by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Lastly, he evaluates (...) how love constrains, and is constrained by, other traditional moral concepts. Throughout, Jackson defends the moral priority of what the Christian tradition calls 'agape'. He argues that a proper understanding of agapic love rejects both moral relativism and the comfort of believing that good people cannot be harmed, or that God causally necessitates every historical action and event. When love is thus disconsoled, it neither fears death nor despises life. (shrink)

Husserl has enjoyed a revival of interest in recent years and the Cartesian Meditations is perhaps his most widely read text. The book is an introduction to Husserl's phenomenology and is based on Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy . Husserl attempts to show how Descartes discovered the "transcendental" perspective which is essential to any genuine philosophy. Until now there has never been a secondary text on this important and influential work on philosophy. This book, in conjunction with the (...) text itself, will serve as a proper introduction to Husserlian phenomenology. A.D. Smith introduces and assesses the key concepts that arise in the book in clear and engaging ways. His style is highly accessible and suitable for anyone coming to the Cartesian Meditations for the first time. (shrink)

What is the history of philosophy? What exactly is this the history of and how is that history to be understood in relationship to philosophy itself? Can philosophy's history, on any of a number of diverse descriptions, ever be said in its own right to constitute a unique and genuine source of philosophical wisdom or insight? George Lucas sweeps aside the constraints of traditional methodological and cultural boundaries to reflect broadly on a variety of answers to these questions, as posed (...) by many of the major philosophical figures of the past century. Inviting a re-consideration of the work of scholars as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Danto, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, Keith Lehrer and Jerome Schneewind, Lucas ranges widely over the history of philosophy itself in search of original, probing answers to these profound and perennial issues. (shrink)

Drawing on new empirical data, a group of experimental philosophers have argued that one of the most popular and influential forms of skepticism is much less interesting and much less worrisome than philosophers have thought. Contrary to this claim, I argue that this brand of skepticism remains as threatening as ever. My argument also reveals an important limitation of experimental philosophy and sheds light on the way professional philosophers should go about the business of doing philosophy.

The author argues that according to Sextus Empiricus, (a) the "sensual" nature of the phenomenon is a metaphorical notion, since it is indistinguishably extended both to sensuality and thinking; (b) the phenomenon manifest itself with irresistible force of impact, through a wide range of passive states of mind; (c) the impact of phenomena is always mediated by our ego, because all skeptic expressions are strongly correlated with the first person singular. The article proves that Descartes could not refute the “excess” (...) of skeptical doubt and make an immanent critique of skepticism without borrowing the aforementioned statements of Sextus. Such borrowing (1) has created a common ground for discussion between Descartes and skeptics; (2) made it possible for the meditator to give persuasiveness to careful observation of his own internal experience. Descartes' search for certainty in "Meditations" is entirely based on [а] evidence of "phenomena", "states of mind", "passions"; [b] refusal to agree with the "non-evident" proclaimed by Sextus Empiricus. (shrink)

Rene Descartes credited his success in philosophy, mathematics, and physics to the discovery of a universal method of inquiry, but he provided no systematic description of his method. _Descartes and Method_ carefully examines Descartes' scattered remarks on his application and puts forward a systematic account of his method with particular attention to the role it plays in the _Meditations_. Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen boldly and convincingly argue against the orthodox conception that Descartes had no method. Through a (...) rigorous and thorough examination, Flage and Bonnen unearth and explain the role of the method of analysis in the _ Meditations_. _Descartes and Method_ is a ground-breaking book that is sure to make a considerable impact on the philosophy community. Anyone wishing to gain a new understanding of Descartes's _Meditations_ should read this book. (shrink)

The paper aims to prove the hypothesis that Sextus Empiricus’ Neo-Pyrrhonism is significantly influenced by the Cartesian meditation as a genre of philosophizing. It refutes theses about (1) the non-predicativity of Sextus’ language and about (2) Sextus’ epochê as an automatic result of the action of opposite things or statements, and it argues that both Sextus and Descartes distinguish between (a) internal (forced) agreement with clarity and (b) the personal acceptance of this agreement which depends on a volitional decision. Sextus’ (...) recognition of the clarity of appearance as appearance gives Descartes the only chance to refute the skepticism of Sextus, which is invulnerable to external criticism. Therefore, Descartes developed meditation as a special model of purely immanent criticism (the very word “skepticism” is never mentioned in the Meditations), focused on dealing with states of clarity and evidence. The author’s hypothesis is that the key elements to which this model appeals are the “history of a skeptic” set out in Outlines of Pyrrhonism and the conception of skeptical expressions. This hypothesis can be tested further by proving or disproving the thesis that the discourse of I, II, and at least partially of III Meditations is based on the pattern of skeptical expressions, focused on the internal states of the speaker, and not on clarifying the “objective” state of affairs (i.e. not on dogmatic inferences). (shrink)

This paper addresses the multiple readings that Foucault offers of Descartes’ Meditations during the whole span of his intellectual career. It thus rejects the (almost) exclusive focus of the literature on the few pages of the History of Madness dedicated to the Meditations and on the so-called Foucault/Derrida debate. First, it reconstructs Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy in a series of unpublished manuscripts written between 1966 and 1968, when Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. It then (...) addresses the important shifts that took place in Foucault’s thought at the beginning of the 1970s, which led him to elaborate a new approach to the Meditations in terms of ‘discursive events’. Finally, it argues that those shifts opened up to Foucault the possibility of developing an original reading of Descartes’ philosophy, surprisingly close to his own interest in ancient askē sis and the techniques of the self. (shrink)

_Material Falsity and Error in Descartes’s Meditations _approaches Descartes’s Meditations as an intellectual journey, wherein Descartes’s views develop and change as he makes new discoveries about self, God and matter. The first book to focus closely on Descartes’s notion of material falsity, it shows how Descartes’s account of material falsity – and correspondingly his account of crucial notions such as truth, falsehood and error – evolves according to the epistemic advances in the Meditations. It also offers important (...) new insights on the crucial role of Descartes’s Third Meditation discussion of material falsity in advancing many subsequent arguments in the Meditations. This book is essential reading for those working on Descartes and early modern philosophy. It presents an independent reading on issues of perennial interest, such as Descartes’s views on error, truth and falsehood. It also makes important contributions to topics that have been the focus of much recent scholarship, such as Descartes’s ethics and his theodicy. Those working on the interface between medieval and modern philosophy will find the discussions on Descartes’s debt to predecessors like Suárez and Augustine invaluable. (shrink)

Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111 c.e .) is well known, among other things, for his account, in al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (Deliverance from error), of a struggle with philosophical skepticism that bears a striking resemblance to that described by Descartes in the Meditations . This essay aims to give a close comparative analysis of these respective accounts, and will concentrate solely on the processes of invoking or entertaining doubt that al-Ghazālī and Descartes describe, respectively. In the process some subtle differences between (...) them in this regard will be brought to light that are relevant to the comparative issue of the respective solutions at which they arrive. The latter issue will not be touched upon here, although the present discussion is intended as a prelude to a future treatment of that topic. (shrink)

Rene Descartes credited his success in philosophy, mathematics, and physics to the discovery of a universal method of inquiry, but he provided no systematic description of his method. _Descartes and Method_ carefully examines Descartes' scattered remarks on his application and puts forward a systematic account of his method with particular attention to the role it plays in the _Meditations_. Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen boldly and convincingly argue against the orthodox conception that Descartes had no method. Through a (...) rigorous and thorough examination, Flage and Bonnen unearth and explain the role of the method of analysis in the _ Meditations_. _Descartes and Method_ is a ground-breaking book that is sure to make a considerable impact on the philosophy community. Anyone wishing to gain a new understanding of Descartes's _Meditations_ should read this book. (shrink)

_Material Falsity and Error in Descartes’s Meditations _approaches Descartes’s Meditations as an intellectual journey, wherein Descartes’s views develop and change as he makes new discoveries about self, God and matter. The first book to focus closely on Descartes’s notion of material falsity, it shows how Descartes’s account of material falsity – and correspondingly his account of crucial notions such as truth, falsehood and error – evolves according to the epistemic advances in the Meditations. It also offers important (...) new insights on the crucial role of Descartes’s Third Meditation discussion of material falsity in advancing many subsequent arguments in the Meditations. This book is essential reading for those working on Descartes and early modern philosophy. It presents an independent reading on issues of perennial interest, such as Descartes’s views on error, truth and falsehood. It also makes important contributions to topics that have been the focus of much recent scholarship, such as Descartes’s ethics and his theodicy. Those working on the interface between medieval and modern philosophy will find the discussions on Descartes’s debt to predecessors like Suárez and Augustine invaluable. (shrink)

Kaplan simulates the response to a long visit to the new Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., which, crucially for Kaplan, is sited in direct view of the Jefferson and Lincoln monuments, powerful symbols of humanist democracy.

No one will deny that we live in a world where evil exists. But how are we to come to grips with human atrocity and its diabolical intensity? Martin Beck Matuštík considers evil to be even more radically evil than previously thought and to have become all too familiar in everyday life. While we can name various moral wrongs and specific cruelties, Matuštík maintains that radical evil understood as a religious phenomenon requires a religious response where the language of hope, (...) forgiveness, redemption, and love can take us beyond unspeakable harm and irreparable violence. Drawing upon the work of Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, this work is written as a series of meditations. Matuštík presents a bold new way of dealing with one of humanity's most intractable problems. (shrink)

The announced project of the Meditations, it is usually supposed, is to get rid of all error by rejecting everything that might be false, thus retaining only what is certainly true; the next step is to acquire further certainly true beliefs by valid inference from that foundation.

Philosophers have long and skeptically viewed religion as a source of overeasy answers, with a singular, totalizing "God" and the comfort of an immortal soul being the greatest among them. But religious thought has always been more interesting--indeed, a rich source of endlessly unfolding questions. With questions from the 1885 Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church as the starting point for each chapter, Karmen MacKendrick offers postmodern reflections on many of the central doctrines of the Church: the oneness of God, (...) original sin, forgiveness, love and its connection to mortality, reverence for the relics of saints, and the doctrine of bodily resurrection. She maintains that we begin and end in questions and not in answers, in fragments and not in totalities--more precisely, in a fragmentation paradoxically integral to wholeness. Taking seriously Augustine's idea that we find the divine in memory, MacKendrick argues that memory does not lead us back in time to a tidy answer but opens onto a complicated and fragmented time in which we find that the one and the many, before and after and now, even sacred and profane are complexly entangled. Time becomes something lived, corporeal, and sacred, with fragments of eternity interspersed among the stretches of its duration. Our sense of ourselves is correspondingly complex, because theological considerations lead us not to the security of an everlasting, indivisible soul dwelling comfortably in the presence of a paternal deity but to a more complicated, perpetually peculiar, and paradoxical life in the flesh. Written out of MacKendrick's extensive background in both recent and late-ancient philosophy, this moving and poetic book can also be an inspiration to anyone, scholar or lay reader, seeking to find contemporary significance in these ancient theological doctrines. (shrink)

This article discusses the theological implications of Adorno’s writings on Beckett by specifically examining their constellative motifs of death, reconciliation and redemption. It addresses not only their content but also their form, suggesting a mutually stimulating relationship between the two as based both on a negative-dialectical approach and an inverse-theological trajectory. Focusing on Adorno’s discussion of Beckett’s oeuvre as a “metaphysical entity,” I argue that Adorno’s reading of Beckett is peculiar because it is inextricably tied to his own critical-theological venture. (...) The essay claims that Adorno’s reflections on Beckett contour, at their most basic level, meditations on theology in the age of its impossibility. (shrink)

This paper addresses the multiple readings that Foucault offers of Descartes’ Meditations during the whole span of his intellectual career. It thus rejects the (almost) exclusive focus of the literature on the few pages of the History of Madness dedicated to the Meditations and on the so-called Foucault/Derrida debate. First, it reconstructs Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy in a series of unpublished manuscripts written between 1966 and 1968, when Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. It then (...) addresses the important shifts that took place in Foucault’s thought at the beginning of the 1970s, which led him to elaborate a new approach to the Meditations in terms of ‘discursive events’. Finally, it argues that those shifts opened up to Foucault the possibility of developing an original reading of Descartes’ philosophy, surprisingly close to his own interest in ancient askēsis and the techniques of the self. (shrink)

The central theme of this study is that Descartes is a teacher who develops his arguments for the different philosophical orientations of his students. Indeed, according to Cunning, so respectful is Descartes of their orientations that he actually misrepresents his own view in the Meditations on central doctrinal matters like the basis for dualism. The exegetical argument for this is the central argument of the book, though many other aspects of the Meditations are discussed in novel and interesting (...) ways. Descartes describes himself as establishing the duality of mental and physical substances in two stages in the Meditations. It is in Meditation II, he says in the Fourth Replies, where he shows that a .. (shrink)

Consisting of twelve newly commissioned essays and enhanced by William Molyneux’s famous early translation of the _Meditations_, this volume touches on all the major themes of one of the most influential texts in the history of philosophy. Situates the Meditations in its philosophical and historical context. Touches on all of the major themes of the Meditations, including the mind-body relation, the nature of the mind, and the existence of the material world.

In this work, Descartes' metaphysics and epistemology are clearly stated and assiduously analyzed. It is shown that Descartes' epistemic foundationalism is tenable, and that his mind-body dualism is correct if taken to concern the relationship of mentalistic (mind-related) data to physicalistic data, even though it is incorrect if taken to concern the relationship of mind per se to body per se. Descartes' analysis of causation is shown to be correct, notwithstanding the copious criticism to which centuries have subjected it. Descartes (...) arguments for God's existence are clearly stated and, thereby, shown to be masterpieces of dialectical ingenuity. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that there is a blanket norm requiring the performer to present the work “in the best light possible,” and that the performer “make the ends of the work his own” or “live the work” in performance. Through careful consideration of a particular performance, I suggest that this is an inadequate conception of a performer’s obligations. I argue that the form of identification between performer and work commonly propounded by philosophers, musicologists, music teachers, and performers alike is (...) illuminated by what I take to be an exemplary metaphor deployed by Roger Scruton: the life in music. The problems with requiring a performer to identify with and affirm a work are made vivid by careful consideration of the requirements of “living the work,” or understanding the “life in tones.” I argue that this call for identification and affirmation ultimately denies the performer the capacity for critical interpretation and amounts either to a denial of modernity or to a desire to step behind it. (shrink)

In this classic work, best-selling author Harry Frankfurt provides a compelling analysis of the question that not only lies at the heart of Descartes's Meditations, but also constitutes the central preoccupation of modern philosophy: on what basis can reason claim to provide any justification for the truth of our beliefs? Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen provides an ingenious account of Descartes's defense of reason against his own famously skeptical doubts that he might be a madman, dreaming, or, worse yet, deceived (...) by an evil demon into believing falsely.Frankfurt's masterful and imaginative reading of Descartes's seminal work not only stands the test of time; one imagines Descartes himself nodding in agreement. (shrink)

In the _Fifth Meditation, Descartes introduces a being for which his system appears to leave no room. He clearly and distinctly perceives geometrical properties and concludes that, even though they may not actually exist, their _true and immutable natures exist nonetheless. Here I argue that the wedge that Descartes drives between an object and its true and immutable nature is only temporary and that, in the final analysis, a true and immutable nature of any X is just X itself. Given (...) the analytic method of the _Meditations, it is to be expected that the 'meditator' would not notice any of this in the _Fifth Meditation. He must wait until his epistemic position is more enhanced. (shrink)

The first article of the cycle “The role of skeptical evidence in the First and Second ‘Meditations’” compares the Cartesian and Sextus Empiricus’ concepts of doubt in, respectively, “Metaphysical meditations” and “Outlines of Pyrrhonism”. The article starts with the current state of the problem “Descartes and skepticism” and admits the existence of consensus about Cartesian perception of skeptical tradition: Cartesius (1) was influenced by all skeptical movements, known in his time, and (2) created a generalized notion that contains (...) elements of both Academic and Pyrrhonian origin. This consensus is the source of many contemporary studies on how different skeptical doctrines influenced certain parts of Cartesian philosophy. This article attempts to analyze possible Descartes’ use of Sextus Empiricus’ notion of phenomenon. Sextus clearly states in “Outlines of Pyrrhonism” that one cannot doubt phenomenon as something perceived directly. The article proves that (a) Sextus’ thesis about the “sensory” nature of phenomenon is metaphorical, so far as it includes (without distinction) both sensuality and the experience of thinking; (b) the phenomenon is realized through a wide range of passive states of mind that all have irresistible force of influence; (c) the impact of phenomena is always mediated by our self, because all skeptical phrases are strictly correlated with the first person singular. Some researchers distinguish Sextus’ isostenia, as one of such insurmountable states, from Cartesian doubt at the First Meditation, which is allegedly based on a purely volitional decision. The article proved that this argument is artificial, since Descartes’ volitional decision is caused by initial inability to take the dubious as if it were certain. Thus, Cartesian approach can be considered a specific kind of isostenia. Such parallelism is a reason to assume a key role of Sextus’ understanding of insurmountable power of phenomena in Cartesian anti-sceptical argumentation. This assumption will be tested in the following articles of the cycle. (shrink)

Descartes' ideas not only changed the course of Western philosophy but also led to or transformed the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, physics and mathematics, political theory and ethics, psychoanalysis, and literature and the arts. This book reprints Descartes' major works, _Discourse on Method_ and _Meditations_, and presents essays by leading scholars that explore his contributions in each of those fields and place his ideas in the context of his time and our own. There are chapters by David Weissman on metaphysics (...) and psychoanalysis, John Post on epistemology, Lou Massa on physics and mathematics, William T. Bluhm on politics and ethics, and Thomas Pavel on literature and art. These essays are accompanied by others by David Weissman and by Stephen Toulmin that introduce the idea of intellectual lineages, discuss the period in which Descartes wrote, and reexamine the premises of his philosophy in light of contemporary philosophical, political, and social thinking. (shrink)