Serfati discusses some of the dominant positions in the philosophy of mathematics, in Rene Descartes and in Gottfried Leibniz, and to their consequences drawn by these authors in Mathematical ...Analysis. He then treats of Descartes' epistemological conceptions of analysis and of the primacy of order, both of which are excellently exposited in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind and of various mathematical devices which he developed later, from the time of the Cogitationes privatae until the Geometrie.
: Contrary to received opinion, Descartes’ view on the merits of the ontological proof may actually agree with that of Thomas Aquinas, whose rejection of the a priori existence proof has stocked the ...armories of anti‐Anselmians ever since. In a rarely noted passage of the First Replies, Descartes claims not to differ in any respect from Thomas on the proof, a claim that gains sense in light of recent work on the Fifth Meditation. That work in turn reveals a well‐founded, if surprising, understanding of the Cartesian proof and of Cartesianism's true relation to Thomism.
Descartes’ Demon Gillespie, Alex
Theory & psychology,
12/2006, Letnik:
16, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Descartes argued that the existence of reflective thought should be the first principle of philosophy because it is indubitable. The present paper draws on Bakhtinian and Meadian theories to analyse ...the three key paragraphs in the Meditations in which Descartes argues this point. The analysis demonstrates: (1) that Descartes’ text contains the traces of significant others and the discourses of his time; (2) that the sequence of thoughts that leads Descartes to his first principle is fundamentally dialogical; (3) that Descartes’ self-awareness, which he takes as primary, depends upon his reflecting upon himself from the perspective of a more or less generalized other; and finally (4) that Descartes takes the perspective of the other by reversing his own reactions towards others, such that he reacts to himself in the same way that he previously reacted to others. This reanalysis challenges Cartesian solipsism, arguing that the mind, or self-reflection, is fundamentally social.
Mark Twain's Dream Life Davis, Philip E.
Mark Twain journal (1954),
04/2013, Letnik:
51, Številka:
1/2
Journal Article, Magazine Article
After writing the work for which he is best known, Descartes had it sent out to various philosophers for their criticisms-a practice which was perhaps the first of its kind. Since Hobbes happened to ...be in France at the time and was by then a celebrated English philosopher, a request for comments was also sent to him. ...he came to believe that both universes are dream-like and equally real.11 Many commentators have suggested that although Twain was fully aware that dwelling on these notions might induce insanity, or genuine psychosis as Freud would describe it, he managed to avoid this possible consequence, although there is some lingering doubt that he did wholly escape. "20 The latter claim seems a bit discordant with respect to Twain's own treatments of the matter, and with his own two identities, as Mark Twain on the one hand, and as Samuel Clemens on the other, which Van Wyck Brooks and Justin Kaplan both claim were at war with one another. Since Clemens himself chose "Mark Twain" as his literary pseudonym, he could hardly claim not to know who the author by that name was. James' pragmatic solution starts from the assumption that all feelings and ideas are for the sake of action {The Meaning of Truth, p. 189). ...to use one of his examples, "if a ruffian were assaulting and drubbing my body, to spend much time in subtle speculation either as to whether his vision of my body resembled mine, or as to whether the body he really meant to insult were not some body in his mind's eye, altogether other than my own" would be ridiculous.
Almost four centuries after his death, René Descartes remains one of the most reviled figures in the history of Western thought. Whether as the father of the “modernist visualist paradigm” (Martin ...Jay) or the main instigator of a “masculinization of thought” (Susan Bordo), intellectual historians, students of sound, and feminists tend to dismiss the philosopher’s work as incompatible with the critical agenda they espouse. Yet there exists a surprising, if largely unacknowledged, parallel between the unstable place of Cartesian thought within the feminist project and the troubled relationship of the emerging field of sound studies to Descartes’s views of the sense of hearing. Descartes’s acoustic studies and anatomical work on the fetus reveal a persistent concern with resonance. But instead of subsuming resonance and its rich metaphorical field (which comprises vibration, sympathy, and consonance) under his infamous mind-body dualism, Descartes invokes resonance to think through what is his most important project—to model the unity of body and mind.
The origins of the intellectual inspiration that drives Clarice Lispector are not easily identified. Critics have attempted to apply perspectives of both existentialism and feminism to her works, and ...such perspectives do reveal a true connection between the writer and her time. However, they do not serve to explain the author herself or provide a unified understanding of her works from the initial years of her career to the end of her life. In this essay I will attempt to identify some of the specific philosophical concepts that provide structure to the author's earliest work, not as the result of the influence of intellectual movements or social contemporaries, either in Brazil or in Europe, but almost uniquely from personal elements and experiences in her own early life and also the significant early influence of the French philosopher René Descartes.
About Descartes: uses and misuses Sages, Roger
Cultural studies of science education,
09/2011, Letnik:
6, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this Forum paper I examine how Orlander and Wickman represent Descartes philosophy, noting that while it might be tempting to apply one facet of a philosopher’s argument, such as Descartes ...separation of mind and body, by doing that we do not capture the development of his thinking. I propose the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl can assist researchers to move beyond simple dichotomies.
Barth attempts to get a grip on Leibniz's conception of conscientia by extracting the Cartesian roots of this conception and by determining the differences between both conceptions. He provides ...textual evidence for the view that Leibniz attributed to Descartes a reflective conception of conscientia and remarks on Cartesian conscientia. He also addresses the first respect in which Leibniz departs from Descartes. Furthermore, he provides a summary of the key features of Leibnizian conscientia and its differences compared to Descartes's conception.
Living with Strabismus
Economic and political weekly,
12/2014
Journal Article, Magazine Article
Picture a man in his mid-20s on board a public transportation system, immersed in his book so as to make best use of the commute time. In what has gone down in public memory as the " Damini incident" ...- alluding to the 1993 Rajkumar Santoshi movie, in which a rape victim fights a losing battle with life - the event of 16 December 2012 in Munirka in south Delhi shook the conscience of the nation. A particularly pugnacious elderly fellow led the verbal assault on the young man, only to realise the victim's anatomical condition soon after, by which time damage had already been done.
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