Descartes's Changing Mind

2009-07-06
Descartes's Changing Mind

PDF Descartes's Changing Mind Download

  • Author: Peter Machamer
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 1400830435
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 273

Descartes's works are often treated as a unified, unchanging whole. But in Descartes's Changing Mind, Peter Machamer and J. E. McGuire argue that the philosopher's views, particularly in natural philosophy, actually change radically between his early and later works--and that any interpretation of Descartes must take account of these changes. The first comprehensive study of the most significant of these shifts, this book also provides a new picture of the development of Cartesian science, epistemology, and metaphysics. No changes in Descartes's thought are more significant than those that occur between the major works The World (1633) and Principles of Philosophy (1644). Often seen as two versions of the same natural philosophy, these works are in fact profoundly different, containing distinct conceptions of causality and epistemology. Machamer and McGuire trace the implications of these changes and others that follow from them, including Descartes's rejection of the method of abstraction as a means of acquiring knowledge, his insistence on the infinitude of God's power, and his claim that human knowledge is limited to that which enables us to grasp the workings of the world and develop scientific theories.

Descartes's Theory of Mind

2005
Descartes's Theory of Mind

PDF Descartes's Theory of Mind Download

  • Author: Desmond M. Clarke
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
  • ISBN: 9780199284948
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 280

Descartes is possibly the most famous of all writers on the mind, but his theory of mind has been almost universally misunderstood, because his philosophy has not been seen in the context of his scientific work. Desmond Clarke offers a radical and convincing rereading, undoing the received perception of Descartes as the chief defender of mind/body dualism. For Clarke, the key is to interpret his philosophical efforts as an attempt to reconcile his scientific pursuits with the theologically orthodox views of his time.

Descartes' Error

2005-09-27
Descartes' Error

PDF Descartes' Error Download

  • Author: Antonio Damasio
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • ISBN: 014303622X
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 338

"An ambitious and meticulous foray into the nature of being." -- The Boston Globe A landmark exploration of the relationship between emotion and reason Since Descartes famously proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am," science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—"one of the world’s leading neurologists" (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.

Descartes's Concept of Mind

2009-07-01
Descartes's Concept of Mind

PDF Descartes's Concept of Mind Download

  • Author: Lilli Alanen
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 9780674020108
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 404

Descartes's concept of the mind, as distinct from the body with which it forms a union, set the agenda for much of Western philosophy's subsequent reflection on human nature and thought. This is the first book to give an analysis of Descartes's pivotal concept that deals with all the functions of the mind, cognitive as well as volitional, theoretical as well as practical and moral. Focusing on Descartes's view of the mind as intimately united to and intermingled with the body, and exploring its implications for his philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Lilli Alanen argues that the epistemological and methodological consequences of this view have been largely misconstrued in the modern debate. Informed by both the French tradition of Descartes scholarship and recent Anglo-American research, Alanen's book combines historical-contextual analysis with a philosophical problem-oriented approach. It seeks to relate Descartes's views on mind and intentionality both to contemporary debates and to the problems Descartes confronted in their historical context. By drawing out the historical antecedents and the intellectual evolution of Descartes's thinking about the mind, the book shows how his emphasis on the embodiment of the mind has implications far more complex and interesting than the usual dualist account suggests.

Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception

2017-04-28
Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception

PDF Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception Download

  • Author: Walter Ott
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0192509454
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 256

The seventeenth century witnesses the demise of two core doctrines in the theory of perception: naïve realism about color, sound, and other sensible qualities and the empirical theory, drawn from Alhacen and Roger Bacon, which underwrote it. This created a problem for seventeenth century philosophers: how is that we use qualities such as color, feel, and sound to locate objects in the world, even though these qualities are not real? Ejecting such sensible qualities from the mind-independent world at once makes for a cleaner ontology, since bodies can now be understood in purely geometrical terms, and spawns a variety of fascinating complications for the philosophy of perception. If sensible qualities are not part of the mind-independent world, just what are they, and what role, if any, do they play in our cognitive economy? We seemingly have to use color to visually experience objects. Do we do so by inferring size, shape, and motion from color? Or is it a purely automatic operation, accomplished by divine decree? This volume traces the debate over perceptual experience in early modern France, covering such figures as Antoine Arnauld, Robert Desgabets, and Pierre-Sylvain Régis alongside their better-known countrymen René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche.

The Mind-Body Stage

2013-08-21
The Mind-Body Stage

PDF The Mind-Body Stage Download

  • Author: R. Darren Gobert
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • ISBN: 080478826X
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 265

Descartes's notion of subjectivity changed the way characters would be written, performed by actors, and received by audiences. His coordinate system reshaped how theatrical space would be conceived and built. His theory of the passions revolutionized our understanding of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectators. Yet theater scholars have not seen Descartes's transformational impact on theater history. Nor have philosophers looked to this history to understand his reception and impact. After Descartes, playwrights put Cartesian characters on the stage and thematized their rational workings. Actors adapted their performances to account for new models of subjectivity and physiology. Critics theorized the theater's emotional and ethical benefits in Cartesian terms. Architects fostered these benefits by altering their designs. The Mind-Body Stage provides a dazzlingly original picture of one of the most consequential and confusing periods in the histories of modern theater and philosophy. Interdisciplinary and comparatist in scope, it uses methodological techniques from literary study, philosophy, theater history, and performance studies and draws on scores of documents (including letters, libretti, religious jeremiads, aesthetic treatises, and architectural plans) from several countries.

Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life

2019
Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life

PDF Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life Download

  • Author: Deborah Jean Brown
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 0198836813
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 266

Brown and Normore show how Descartes accounted for the complex and diverse objects of human experience within his metaphysical system. They argue that, far from reducing them all to two basic categories of substance, mind and body, he recognized irreducible composites that resist reduction and require their own distinctive modes of explanation.

Rational Intuition

2014-08-25
Rational Intuition

PDF Rational Intuition Download

  • Author: Lisa M. Osbeck
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 1107022398
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 451

Rational Intuition explores the concept of intuition as it relates to rationality through mediums of history, philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology.

Another Mind-Body Problem

2018-05-22
Another Mind-Body Problem

PDF Another Mind-Body Problem Download

  • Author: John Harfouch
  • Publisher: State University of New York Press
  • ISBN: 1438469977
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 270

The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human,' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems.

Meditations on First Philosophy

2000
Meditations on First Philosophy

PDF Meditations on First Philosophy Download

  • Author: René Descartes
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780941736121
  • Category : First philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0