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Deborah J. Brown [17]Deborah Jean Brown [3]
  1.  32
    Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life.Deborah J. Brown & Calvin G. Normore - 2019 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Edited by Calvin G. Normore.
    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 (...)
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  2.  47
    Descartes and the Passionate Mind.Deborah J. Brown - 2006 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    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, (...)
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  3. Cartesian Functional Analysis.Deborah J. Brown - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (1):75 - 92.
    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 (...)
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  4.  76
    (1 other version)The Duck's Leg: Descartes's Intermediate Distinction.Deborah J. Brown - 2011 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 35 (1):26-45.
  5. Swampman of la mancha.Deborah J. Brown - 1993 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (3):327-48.
    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 (...)
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  6.  38
    Descartes on True and False Ideas.Deborah J. Brown - 2007 - In Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 196–215.
    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.
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  7.  28
    Is absence of evidence of pain ever evidence of absence?Deborah J. Brown & Brian Key - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3881-3902.
    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 (...)
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  8.  52
    The Puzzle of Names in Ockham's Theory of Mental Language.Deborah J. Brown - 1996 - Review of Metaphysics 50 (1):79 - 99.
    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 (...)
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  9.  25
    What if worms were sentient? Insights into subjective experience from the Caenorhabditis elegans connectome.Oressia Zalucki, Deborah J. Brown & Brian Key - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (5):1-25.
    Deciphering the neural basis of subjective experience remains one of the great challenges in the natural sciences. The structural complexity and the limitations around invasive experimental manipulations of the human brain have impeded progress towards this goal. While animals cannot directly report first-person subjective experiences, their ability to exhibit flexible behaviours such as motivational trade-offs are generally considered evidence of sentience. The worm _Caenorhabditis elegans_ affords the unique opportunity to describe the circuitry underlying subjective experience at a single cell level (...)
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  10.  18
    Nature, Artifice, and Discovery in Descartes’ Mechanical Philosophy.Deborah Jean Brown - 2023 - Philosophies 8 (5):85.
    It is often assumed that in the collapse of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature that results from the rise of mechanical philosophies in the early modern period, the collapse falls on the side of art. That is, all of the diversity among natures that was explained previously as differences among substantial forms came to be seen simply as differences in arrangements of matter according to laws instituted by the “divine artificer”, God. This paper argues that, for René Descartes, (...)
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  11. A furry tile about mental representation.Deborah J. Brown - 1996 - Philosophical Quarterly 46 (185):448-66.
  12.  58
    Aquinas' missing flying man.Deborah J. Brown - 2001 - Sophia 40 (1):17-31.
    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 (...)
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  13.  21
    The Social Dimension of Generosity in Descartes and Astell.Deborah J. Brown & Jacqueline Broad - 2022 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 60 (3):409-427.
  14.  19
    Petticoat Power? Mary Astell's Appropriation of Heroic Virtue for Women.Deborah J. Brown & Jacqueline Broad - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-20.
    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 (...)
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  15.  69
    Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes's Philosophy.Deborah J. Brown - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (4):731-734.
    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. Clarke (...)
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  16.  38
    (1 other version)Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism (review).Deborah Jean Brown - 2008 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (1):173-175.
    Deborah J. Brown - Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 173-175 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Deborah Brown University of Queensland Gary Steiner. Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism. JHP Book Series. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. Pp. 352. Cloth, $60.00. This work takes as its starting point the need to ground Descartes's moral philosophy in something more fundamental (...)
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  17. Swampman of la Mancha and Other Tales About Meaning.Deborah Jean Brown - 1993 - Dissertation, University of Toronto (Canada)
    There is, currently, much resistance to so-maligned Cartesian or internalist theories of meaning and mental content in the philosophies of mind and language. Internalist semantics tend to view the meaning of psychological attitudes as primary and that of public language items as essentially derivative. Moreover, internalists regard meaning as determined by internal facts--mental representations, mental sentences, conceptual roles, cognitive procedures--to name the favourites. In opposition, externalists argue that meaning is determined by external causal and social factors. They claim to provide (...)
     
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  18.  67
    Thomas Aquinas, Saint and Private Investigator.Deborah J. Brown - 2002 - Dialogue 41 (3):461-.
    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 (...)
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