Reading Of Descartes Research Articles

Descartes on Place and Motion: A Reading through Cartesian Commentaries.

This paper offers a reconstruction of the interpretations of Descartes's ideas of place and motion by Dutch Cartesians (Henricus Regius, Johannes de Raey, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich). It does so by focusing on the reading of Descartes's Principia philosophiae (1644) offered, in particular, by the dictated commentaries on it. It is shown how such commentaries bring to the light new potential Aristotelian-Scholastic sources of Descartes, and the different ways Dutch Cartesians brought to the fore, also with the help of such sources, the rationale of the Cartesian text: in doing so, they constituted a philosophical school.

La phénoménologie française ou résistances de la métaphysique

Abstract Starting again from Descartes' philosophy, our intention in this article is not to leave phenomenology, but to return to it in order to shed new light on how it encounters metaphysics and revives it. It is a question of inscribing French phenomenology in another history of metaphysics, one that is underground and unofficial and which lives, in truth, from that very thing that completes the other or which the other completes. Initially, we will focus on Jean-Luc Marion's reading of Descartes from the paradigm offered by Heidegger. Secondly, we would like to replay the confrontation between Descartes and Pascal. Only in the third stage, then, will we be able to return to how metaphysics, most often assumed as such from its Cartesian configuration, has worked under the surface of the phenomenology its French representatives received from Husserl and Heidegger. Levinas can often serve as an exemplary figure.

Experience in Descartes

ABSTRACT I will focus on Anik Waldow’s reading of Descartes as contributing towards a specific form of human experience and the related capacity for self-determination. I discuss how this notion of experience relates to what is often taken to be the crux of Descartes’s Meditations. I conclude by noting that three elements are central to Waldow’s interpretation: Descartes’s intellectual metaphysical pursuit for epistemic certainty about essences of things, the specific kind of experience of our selves that arises out of the embodied state of the mind revealing ourselves as both active and passive, and a resulting new capacity for self-determination. The moral of Waldow’s reading is that we should not read the Meditations as an account of what the mind is but as an account of what the mind can do and how we can upraise ourselves not as metaphysicians but in our interactions with the world and others.

承認與創造——對〈承認理論的創造論回歸〉一文的評論性回應

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 在〈承認理論的創造論回歸一一一項關於人倫構成的哲學研究〉一文中，唐文明(以下簡稱作者)圍繞倫理共同體的超越性奠基這一核心問題，從分析黑格爾與霍耐特的承認理論之得失出發，引入阿倫特對奥古斯丁記憶理論的闡發及其提出的“誕生性”概念，力圖在古代儒學語境中釐清天人之倫的垂直向度對於人人之倫的水準向度所具有的前提性意義。(撮要取自內文首段)
 Professor Tang's essay successfully presents the theoretical connection between the theory of recognition and the doctrine of creation in the Christian and Confucian traditions. The following critical review consists of four parts: (1) an evaluation of Tang's method of intellectual history, (2) a criticism of Tang's reading of Descartes' third meditation, (3) an analysis of Arendt's concept of natality, and (4) a discussion of the importance of gender equality in the Confucian moral theory of society.

Das Cogito als Fundament des Wissens

Abstract In this essay, I discuss three readings of Descartes’ Meditations. According to the first reading, “I exist” is for Descartes the foundation of our knowledge. This reading is dismissed on the grounds that, in his view, as long as God’s existence is not proven there is a good reason to doubt this proposition. Proponents of the second reading claim that there are two kinds of Cartesian knowledge: perfect and imperfect knowledge. The meditator has imperfect knowledge of “I exist” before God’s existence is proven. Subsequently, she acquires perfect knowledge of various metaphysical theorems. This reading is repudiated, too. I argue for a third reading, according to which “I think” – and not “I exist” – is the foundation of our knowledge.

En deçà de la tautologie symbolique du cogito Variations sur Descartes et Augustin à travers Levinas et Marion

In this paper, I explore the thesis according to which ipseity cannot be conceived of without acknowledging a radical absence and alterity in its very core that makes it possible. To develop this thesis, I draw on Levinas’ reading of Descartes and Marion’s reading of Augustine. After a brief introductory part on what we could call, with Marc Richir’s term, the symbolic tautology of ipseity, I show how such a tautology is deconstructed by Levinas’ interpretation of the idea of the infinite in Descartes’ Third Meditation. I then proceed to contrast the results of this reading with Marion’s take on the problem of the memoria in Augustin’s Confessions. Both readings point towards a radical and immemorial dimension of absence that – by impeding the self from fully possessing itself – makes paradoxically ipseity possible in the first place. In the conclusion, I pose the question of whether – in order to account for this absence that reveals a transcendence in the most inner intimate of the self – one has to abandon phenomenology for ethics or some kind of new theology or if a strictly phenomenological description of this dimension of the experience of ipseity is possible.

Of Cartesianism and Spiritual Exercises

This article challenges the recurrent critique that Pierre Hadot’s identification of ancient philosophy with the practice of spiritual exercises introduces a non- or irrational dimension into metaphilosophy. The occasion to do this is provided by Kerem Eksen’s recent reading of Descartes’s Meditations as consisting of solely intellectual, rather than spiritual, exercises—since the latter, Eksen claims, involve extrarational means and ends. Part 2 presents an alternative account of the role of cognition in the ancient meditatio at issue in understanding Descartes’s antecedents. This account is indebted to Michel Foucault’s characterization of ancient meditation as involving two cognitive mechanisms: an appropriation of thought, and an experiment in identification. Part 3 argues that attempts such as Eksen’s to depict spiritual exercises as wholly noncognitive themselves are the product of an “unexamined Cartesianism” that is fundamentally at odds with the monistic psychology of ancient Stoics like Marcus Aurelius as discussed in Hadot’s studies.

The Skeptical Origins of Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

This paper demonstrates that two signature methodological concepts in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, the epoche and the phenomenological reduction, derive from his reflections on the history and significance of epistemological skepticism in the Western tradition. Drawing on his Lectures on Logic and Epistemology (Hua XXIV) from the Winter semester of 1906–07, it is argued that Husserl derives his conception of the fundamental task of transcendental philosophy from his reading of a novel skeptical challenge posed by David Hume’s philosophy—a kind of skeptical challenge that Husserl did not recognize in his earlier treatments of Hume. On Husserl’s revised reading, Hume promotes a certain kind of philosophical “despair” (Verzweiflung) or, as it may be called today, “quietism” as the only possible response to the traditional problems of epistemology stemming back to the ancient skeptics. Husserl’s criticism of Hume’s quietism is presented. And Husserl’s reading of Descartes’s cogito as the first decisive uncovering of the limits of epistemological skepticism in the Western tradition is shown to be the source of two key elements of Husserl’s positive alternative to Humean epistemological quietism, which ultimately become the heart of a novel conception of critical transcendental philosophy. These two key elements are the phenomenological epoche and phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s arguments are presented for the claim that these are essential parts of any epistemological program that can answer traditional skeptical challenges.

Review

Review

Philosophie et théologie dans le cartésianisme : la théorie cartésienne de la création des vérités éternelles et sa postérité

This article examines Descartes’ theory of the free creation of eternal truths, showing the theological implications of its underlying philosophical principles. The author ponders the way in which Descartes treats certain topics that pertain to natural theology (God’s dignity and power, the equivocity between the finite and the infinite), as well as the Christological tension that runs through his theory. The theological echoes of this theory are then assessed, looking at thinkers after Descartes as well as the minores, with a focus on two theological themes: the recovery of univocity, and some of the contours of the kind of Christology Descartes’ theory authorizes. The aim of the article, by showing the fruitfulness of an approach that places modern philosophy and theology in conversation, is to ask how a theological reading of Descartes and Cartesian thought may help renew its study.

Fanon's insurgence

ABSTRACT This article offers a reading of Frantz Fanon in relation to the word ‘I’, perhaps the privileged term for the reflection on sociality and form in the European, colonial tradition. It considers the refusal and advance of a coherent subject of knowledge and social form in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and its reiteration in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Through a reading of Sylvia Wynter's interpretation of Fanon, and in a close reading of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (1637) in relation to Denise Ferriera da Silva's Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Jacques Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am (2006), and Martin Heidegger's ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (1938), I argue that Fanon reiterates the forms he wishes to contest, and that this double gesture suggests his work not only creates an insurgency but that it insurges: it overflows the privileged categories for philosophical reflection and sociality, and in doing so enacts the practice of decolonisation it also promises. This article argues that Fanon discombobulates the temporal terms he also presumes, and that he therefore gives us a practice of struggle, and a sociality, that occurs without a recognisable subject, time, form or sense.

L'Empreinte cartésienne: L'interaction psychophysique, débats classiques et contemporains by Sandrine Roux

Reviewed by: L'Empreinte cartésienne: L'interaction psychophysique, débats classiques et contemporains by Sandrine Roux Andrew Platt Sandrine Roux. L'Empreinte cartésienne: L'interaction psychophysique, débats classiques et contemporains. Preface by Steven Nadler. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018. Pp. 438. Paper, €48,00. Sandrine Roux's L'Empreinte cartésienne addresses what she describes as one of the "persistent problems" in philosophy, namely, the mind-body problem raised by Descartes's substance dualism (17). Her book carefully lays out the various puzzles, both real and perceived, raised [End Page 175] by Descartes's theory of humans as a mind-body union. She distinguishes clearly between the way these problems are understood by Descartes, and the way they were seen by some of his seventeenth-century followers, especially the occasionalists, Louis de La Forge, Géraud de Cordemoy, and Malebranche. And she tries to orient the Cartesian mind-body problem with respect to theories in contemporary philosophy of mind. The first two parts are primarily historical in focus (though they also make use of contemporary analytic philosophy to clarify the issues and arguments discussed). In the first part, Roux presents Descartes's views regarding mind-body interaction and the mind-body union, and uses Jaegwon Kim's "pairing problem" objection to Cartesian dualism to clarify the issues raised by Descartes's position. Roux goes on to contrast Descartes's response to these issues with the perspective of the Cartesian occasionalists, La Forge and Cordemoy. Roux's analysis of their arguments does well to highlight the importance of the claim, found in both authors, that causal interaction between two bodies is no more conceivable than causal interaction between a mind and a body. The second part focuses on problems for Descartes having to do with our knowledge or experience of the mind-body union. Roux presents an objection put to Descartes by Arnauld, based on the observation that we do not have knowledge of the physiological processes inside our body when we engage in voluntary motion. Following Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine, Roux labels this the "defect of knowledge" problem (159). Roux links this problem with the "Quod nescis" argument for occasionalism, found in Cordemoy and Malebranche. Roux analyzes Malebranche's version of this argument in terms of a distinction—developed in papers from the 1960s by Arthur Danto, and in Alvin Goldman's A Theory of Human Action (1970)—between "basic" and "non-basic" actions. She then draws on Danto, Goldman, and Donald Davidson to consider possible responses to Malebranche's reasoning. This leads to an especially interesting discussion of what Roux takes to be a crucial difference between Malebranche's conception of the mind-body union and that of Descartes: While Malebranche and other Cartesians think the mind-body union is grounded in causal relations between the mind and body, Roux argues that Descartes takes the mind-body union to be metaphysically primitive. Roux's interpretation is (I think) plausible as a reading of Descartes. It is also of particular interest with reference to Kim's pairing problem. Roux turns to this problem in the third part, which concerns contemporary philosophy of mind. (In addition to responding to Kim, Roux discusses, among others, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Frank Jackson, Joseph Levine, and Robert Stalnaker.) She develops a "Cartesian response" to Kim's argument that Cartesian souls cannot act in the physical world (290). Building on Descartes's account of the primitive notion of the mind-body union and his analogy of a sailor in a ship, Roux argues that a Cartesian mind can be paired with a body on the basis of sensation. Roux makes a compelling case that (on her interpretation) Descartes has the resources to reply to Kim's argument. One way we might take this is to say that Kim's criticisms of the position he labels "Cartesian dualism" miss their mark. Kim presents the pairing problem as a clarification of the historical mind-body problem in Descartes. But if Roux is correct, then the position that Kim attacks is not Descartes's view, but rather a view found in later Cartesians (who themselves reject mind-body causal interaction). However, this seems to undermine...

Cartesian Secularity: “Disengaged Reason,” the Passions, and the Public Sphere Beyond Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007)

AbstractAlthough explicitly challenging overly simplistic dichotomies between secular reason and religious affect, Charles Taylor’s monumental genealogy A Secular Age (2007) downplays the role of the body in Descartes’s theory of agency and mistakenly projects this understanding of the “Cartesian” self upon the public sphere of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through a careful reading of Descartes’s last work, Les Passions de l’Âme (1649), and drawing on existing work by Cottingham (2012), Kahn (2006), and Kirkebøen (2001), this article argues the Passions is better seen as an attempt to reinscribe politics in the body through Descartes’s theory of the habit. A focus on the latter yields a complex understanding of the emergence of the public sphere, not as a neutral space for the free exchange of rational speech acts, but as a power-driven environment shaped by the manipulation of habit-creating experiences. The article ends by considering some implications for the genealogy of our “secular age.”

Descartes and Socrates on the Possibility and Point of Inquiry

Commentators have often noted ‘la présence latente du Ménon dans le cartésianisme’, but have not offered a sustained account of what this presence consists in. The author argues there exist strong parallels between Meno and the Recherche de la vérité, Descartes’ only extant dialogue, grounded partly in Descartes’ awareness of Plato's text. This parallel offers a useful approach to the Recherche. The first part of the article presents Meno and gives an outline of its reception. The second gives a reading of Descartes’ text. Since the concerns of the Recherche reflect arguments and approaches taken up in other texts like the Méditations, the author closes in the third part by suggesting the parallel allows us to say, more generally, that Descartes’ approach to inquiry, and to his fight with scholasticism, is a Socratic one.

Bonds of Trust

This paper seeks to address whether human life harbours the possibility of a gratuitous or non-reciprocal form of trust. To address this issue, I take up Descartes’ account of the cogito as the essence of all appearing. With his interpretation of Descartes’ account of the cogito as an immanent and affective mode of appearing, I maintain that Henry provides the transcendental foundation for a non-reciprocal form of trust, which the history of Western philosophy has largely covered over by forgetting this aspect of Descartes’ thought. I demonstrate that Heidegger’s reading of Descartes serves as a pre-eminent example of this. Because Heidegger overlooks Descartes’ insight into the essence of appearing, and reduces this essence to the finite transcendence of the world, I maintain that Heidegger reduces trust to reciprocal relations of understanding between beings of shared contexts of significance.

Descartes’s Conception of Mind Through the Prism of Imagination: Cartesian Substance Dualism Questioned

Abstract The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian Dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As a mode considered as a general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body.

Logic of the Egotistical Sentence: A Reading of Descartes

This text is a translation of two extracts from Vincent Descombes' 2014 book Le parler de soi. The majority of the translation consists of the chapter (I.3) that Descombes dedicates to discussing Descartes extensively. In this text, Descombes analyzes “egotistical sentences,” or I-statements, beginning with the infamous example from Descartes (cogito ergo sum). From here, he develops a substantial meditation on the nature of the self and its inherent philosophical paradoxes. The “radical question” guiding Descombes is whether or not an egotistical sentence has or implies a subject in the metaphysical sense. The conclusion, ultimately supported in part by Anscombe’s work on “I-thoughts,” explains how it could be that a subject is not implied by an egotistical sentence.

Descartes and the notion of animal spirits: a brief historico-philosophical remark on Sonya Marie Scott's 'Crises, confidence, and animal spirits: exploring subjectivity in the dualism of Descartes and Keynes'

In ‘Crises, confidence, and animals spirits: exploring subjectivity in the dualism of Descartes and Keynes,’ Sonya Marie Scott sets out to deepen our understanding of Keynes’ use of animal spirits in his influential work in economics, by exploring one of the sources from which he appears to have acquired the notion—in the work of Seventeenth-Century philosopher René Descartes. The examination to follow will focus almost exclusively on Descartes’s view, where I hope to bring to light, for future discussion, both historical and philosophical troubles lurking in the account of Descartes as found in Scott’s article. I shall focus on two issues: first, I shall say a few critical words about the analogy offered by Scott, the analogy between Descartes’s and Keynes’ respective ‘dualisms;’ secondly, I shall look briefly at Scott’s reading of Descartes on animal spirits. As a quick bit of preliminary stage-setting, let me preface my remarks with a brief account of Descartes’s dualism and his account of the human being.

Descartes and More on the infinity of the world

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I address the controversy between Henry More and René Descartes on the indefinite extension of the world. I provide a new reading of Descartes’ famous final answer of 15 April 1649. I read the entire debate in the terms of a disagreement concerning the epistemological status of the necessity of our judgement about the extension of the universe. Accordingly, the disagreement on the infinity of the world constitutes a case of a more general disagreement on the nature of the necessity of the theorems of Cartesian Physics. In particular, as concerns Descartes’ last reply, I argue that his assertion that a finite world is contradictory should be interpreted as a reply to More’s claim that the thesis of the infinity of the world, in so far as it cannot be grounded on the identity between matter and extension, does not express a logical necessity. Descartes’ assertion of the logical impossibility of a finite world, far from being, as it has always been read, a concession he made under the pressure of More’s objections, expresses the more radical element of the entire debate about the extension of the universe.

Razón y enfermedad. La locura del cogito y los límites de la ficción moderna

Descartes buscaba apartarse de las cosas sensibles para hallar un fundamento sólido para el conocimiento. Sin embargo, en ocasiones recurría a una ficción. Este tema se halla en una conocida polémica entre Foucault y Derrida y, a la vez, en una reciente discusión de Jean-Paul Margot de la lectura foucaultiana de Descartes. En este artículo examinamos estas posiciones con respecto al “gesto cartesiano” a la luz de las relaciones entre la locura y el nacimiento del Hospital, así como entre la locura, el arte y la filosofía.