C. A. Campbell and the Reprise of Cartesian Subjectivity

Abstract

In his Meditations Descartes advances an argument that contains the essentials of the so-called “hard problem” of explaining consciousness. I show how this Cartesian argument was taken up in the twentieth century by C. A. Campbell, the moral libertarian and student of idealist Henry Jones. Campbell can be regarded as the model of what John Passmore and Simon Glendinning have respectively dubbed a “recalcitrant metaphysician” or “honorary Continental” philosopher—labels that attach largely to metaphysically-minded, mainly British thinkers who, with varying degrees of affiliation to idealism, resisted the twentieth-century trends of logical behaviorism and the “revolutionary” linguistic method. In the course of this paper, I situate Campbell’s version of Descartes’ argument within the broader history of the development of the hard problem.