Sixth Meditation Research Articles

Science contra the Meditations: The Existence of Material Things

ABSTRACT In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes intends to prove that material things exist. His proof, which centers on the origin of the ideas of material things, has frequently been judged weak. But there is another proof—centered on the existence of one’s own body—that assumes as a starting point the feelings of pain and pleasure, which recent interpreters consider more substantial than the proof from the ideas of external objects. I argue that the doubt raised in the Sixth Meditation regarding the deceptions of internal senses, such as pain and pleasure, suggests that the most critical doubt about the existence of one’s own body comes from that very science that the Meditations intend to validate, in particular from physiology. As the proof of the existence of one’s own body grounded on pain and pleasure exploits the results of Cartesian physiology, it is precisely these feelings that show that it is not possible to prove that one’s own body and external bodies exist. Thus, instead of permitting a simpler answer to the question of the existence of one’s own body and external bodies, Descartes’ novel theory of physiology makes it impossible to give a satisfactory solution to exactly this question. This conclusion, moreover, is confirmed by Descartes’ followers such as La Forge and Malebranche.

The Curious Sensations of Pain, Hunger and Thirst. Reliabilism in the Second Part of Descartes’ Sixth Meditation

Osobliwość takich doznań, jak ból, głód i pragnienie. Reliabilizm w drugiej części szóstej Medytacji Kartezjusza
 Artykuł omawia epistemiczny status cielesnych doznań takich, jak ból, głód i pragnienia, o których mowa w drugiej części szóstej Medytacji Kartezjusza. Argumentuję, że ów fragment stanowi integralny komponent epistemologicznego programu, który można znaleźć w Medytacjach. Na ogół widzi się Kartezjusza jako zwolennika infallibilizmu, internalizmu oraz fundacjonalizmu. Tymczasem w odniesieniu do wiedzy i przekonań opartych na doznaniach cielesnych przyjmuje on fallibilizm, eksternalizm i reliabilizm. Na rzecz tego wniosku przemawia z jednej strony, analiza tego, czego naucza nas – według Kartezjusza – natura przez wrażenia bólu, głodu i pragnienia, z drugiej strony jego analiza błędów, którym podlega nasza natura, przeprowadzona przeze mnie z wykorzystaniem zaproponowanego przez Wilfrida Sellarsa podziału na logiczną przestrzeń rozumu oraz empiryczną przestrzeń przyczyn.

Сучасна українська феноменологічна термінологія і підходи до перекладу «Картезіанських медитацій» Едмунда Гусерля

The article is a translator’s commentary to the Ukrainian translation of E. Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. The task of this article is twofold: On the one hand, to reveal the historical context of the writing and publishing of Cartesian Meditations, on the other hand, to outline the strategic and terminological aspects of the Ukrainian translation of this work. The first part of the article is devoted to the history of creation of the text of Cartesian Meditations. In particular, the author answers the question of why the German text of Cartesian Meditations was not published until 1950, almost twenty years after the French translation of the book was released. The historico-philosophical investigation conducted in the article shows that Husserl considered the publication of Cartesian Meditations as an opportunity to systematically present his phenomenological philosophy and, eventually, recognized the impossibility of embracing the complexity of his doctrine within this work. The difficulty of this systematic presentation led to the enhancement of the role of Husserl’s assistant, Eigen Fink, in the editing of Cartesian Meditations and, ultimately, to the creation of Fink’s Sixth Meditation. The latter, as the author of the article demonstrates, puts previous developments in the phenomenology of static and genetic types into a new theoretical perspective, mainly by introducing the method of constructive phenomenology. In the second part of the article, the author offers one of the possible strategies for translating Husserlian texts that consists in structural simplification and stylistic improvement of the text. This strategy is proposed to be implemented by using simpler grammatical structures, by supplementing the text with translator’s comments, as well as by consistent usage of the Ukrainian phenomenological terminology. During the analysis of the terminological discourse of contemporary Ukrainian phenomenology, the author revises some of the established Ukrainian translations, such as the translation of the phenomenological terms Ausschaltung and Zeitbewusstsein and introduces the translation of new terms, such as Vergemeinschaftung, Person, reell and ideell.

Descartes on Body-to-Mind Causation in the Sixth Meditation

In the Sixth Meditation of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes presents an account of sensations as mental modes arising from the causal interaction between two distinct substances, mind and body. According to Margaret Wilson, that the causal relation is instituted one way rather than another is at best arbitrary and purely contingent. In this paper, I will argue, contra Wilson, that there are important constraints restricting the scope of arbitrariness and contingency characterizing the institution of the causal relation. In particular, I argue that the causal relation between mind and body is in fact necessary within the restricted context of human nature, which determines the nature of the causal relation itself, and thereby places constraints on the sort of relations that can occur between mind and body.

Richard F. Hassing, Cartesian Psychophysics and the Whole Nature of Man: On Descartes’s Passions of the Soul

Cartesian Psychophysics and Whole Nature of Man: On Passions of SoulRichard F. Hassing, Cartesian Psychophysics and Whole Nature of Man: On Passions of Soul (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015)Of major works, The Passions of Soul remains neglected, especially if compared to Discourse on Method, Meditations, and Principles of Philosophy. For this reason alone, Richard F. Hassing's study is a welcome sight. It does not take up entirety of The Passions, but focuses on ways in which connection between physics and his account of emotions play out, or fail to. declared hope is to show how his mechanistic physics, especially that of body, can be connected to operations of soul, thereby analyzing human in its totality. For Hassing, Descartes's physics and psychophysics (the scientific apparatus) is necessary for his account of human but not sufficient (207) in that self-esteem and generosity become of central importance and cannot be derived from physics.To demonstrate this claim, introduction and first chapter give an account of Aristotelian and Thomistic hylomorphic, hierarchically structured soul, and replacement of it with a mechanical body, an ensouled pineal gland, an association between thought and motion, and a psychogenetic theory to connect physical impressions on brain and corresponding connections between thoughts via passions. The second through fourth chapters lay out background that led Descartes in this direction as found in Treatise of Man, Sixth Meditation, and chapter 5 of Discourse. While these chapters are interesting, they run longer than necessary, especially introduction and first chapter, which read as repetitive, particularly for scholars of Descartes, book's presumed audience.Chapters 5 through 9 bring attention to Part One and specific articles in Part Two of The Passions. In chapters 5 and 6, focus is on what is common to passions in general and power that soul has over them, respectively. Chapter 5 shows how distinction between causes of ensouled motion (words that anger us) and bodily motion proper (drinking too much wine) enables Descartes to distinguish between degrees of voluntariness in imaginations, where voluntary imaginations are formed by soul, involuntary imaginations are caused by body, and partially voluntary imaginations involve voluntarily imagining a chimera and erroneously believing in its real existence (91). These last can lead to fanaticism as well as self-satisfaction. If we can master our wills in terms of these distinctions, we can master our passions, focus of chapter 6, leading Hassing to posit an anthropological Cartesian dualism between our universal biology and our particular historical being. Chapters 7 and 8 discuss new organization and derivation of passions that Descartes gives. On Hassing's reading, objects presented to do not of themselves generate a passion. Instead, a passion emerges from relation between object and perceiving soul, especially insofar as it is the relation of being important to us (135). Distinguishing passions in terms of their importance to is not dependent on physics of body, and soul's faculties and passions can be ordered by generosity. …

I—Sarah Patterson: Descartes on Nature, Habit and the Corporeal World

Descartes says that the Meditations contains the foundations of his physics. But how does the work advance his geometrical view of the corporeal world? His argument for this view of matter is often taken to be concluded with the proof of the existence of bodies in the Sixth Meditation. This paper focuses on the work that follows the proof, where Descartes pursues the question of what we should think about qualities such as light, sound and pain, as well as the size and shape of particular bodies. His inquiry makes crucial use of the notion of a teaching of nature originating from God, as contrasted with an apparent teaching of nature originating from habit. I attempt to reconstruct Descartes's use of these notions in order to clarify the way in which he makes space for his geometrical conception of the corporeal world.

II—John Cottingham: Descartes and Darwin: Reflections on the Sixth Meditation

The best way to understand the Meditations is through the lens of Descartes's theistic metaphysics rather than via his programme for physical science. This applies to his use of the concept of ‘nature’ in the Sixth Meditation, which serves Descartes's goal of theodicy. In working this out, Descartes reaches a conclusion about the functional role of sensory perception that is, paradoxically, not far from that offered by Darwinian naturalism. So far from being inherently geared to tracking the truth, the role of sensation is linked to its survival value for the organism. In virtue of his theistic metaphysics however, Descartes is able to set this conclusion against the background of other cognitive faculties that are in principle accurate detectors of the truth; the absence of such a resource for modern Darwinian naturalists creates difficulties for the presumption that humans are cognitively equipped to search for the truth.

Disraeli and Scott: Oriental Aristocracy and the Tory Novel

Previous articleNext article No AccessDisraeli and Scott: Oriental Aristocracy and the Tory NovelMatthew ScottMatthew Scott Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 2Spring 2012Special Issue: Encountering Malta Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043973 Views: 14Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Starting with Descartes

1. Introduction 2. Descartes and his Project 3. The First Meditation: Methodological Doubt 4. The Second Meditation: The Cogito 5. The Third Meditation: The Causal Argument for God's Existence 6. A Brief Interlude 7. The Fourth Meditation: Explaining the Possibility of Error 8. The Fifth Meditation: The Ontological Argument for God's Existence 9. The Sixth Meditation: The World's Existence 10. Conclusion Glossary Select Bibliography Index.

DESCARTES' RESOLUTION OF THE DREAMING DOUBT

After resolving the dreaming doubt at the end of the Sixth Meditation, Descartes concedes to Hobbes that one could apply the criterion for waking experience in a dream and thus be deceived, but he no longer considers this possibility to have skeptical force. I argue that this is a legitimate response by Descartes since 1) the dreaming doubt in the Sixth Meditation is no longer a global skeptical hypothesis as it is in the First, and 2) the level of certainty that sensory experience must meet in the Sixth Meditation is lower than it must meet in the First.

Between two worlds: a reading of Descartes's Meditations

Preface ix Note on Translations xv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The First Meditation 27 Chapter 2: The Second Meditation 65 Chapter 3: (I) The Third Meditation: The Truth Rule and the Chief and Most Common Mistake 128 Chapter 3: (II) The Third Meditation: Two Demonstrations of God's Existence 168 Chapter 4: The Fourth Meditation 223 Chapter 5: The Fifth Meditation 280 Chapter 6: The Sixth Meditation 359 Notes 427 Bibliography 489 Index Locorum 495 Subject Index 505

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Mind–Body Causation, Mind–Body Union and the ‘Special Mode of Thinking’ in Descartes

In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes speaks of a ‘special mode of thinking’ (AT VII, 78; CSM II, 54) wherein the mind contemplates images in the brain. I shall refer to this as the ‘Special Cognition...

Descartes's Substance Dualism and His Independence Conception of Substance

Descartes maintained substance dualism, the thesis that no substance has both mental and material properties. His main argument for this thesis, the so-called separability argument from the Sixth Meditation (AT VII: 78) has long puzzled readers. In this paper I argue that Descartes' independence conception of substance (which Descartes presents in article 51 of the Principles) is crucial for the success of the separability argument and that Descartes used this conception of substance to defend his argument for substance dualism from an important objection.

"In Idea, a thousand nameless Joys": Secondary Qualities in Arnauld, Locke, and Haywood's Lasselia

Cartesian dualism is articulated as a particular kind of conundrum in Descartes' Sixth Meditation (1640), where he advances proof that have a Here, incompatibility of Descartes's and his body assumes its most impacted, most aggravated, and, paradoxically, its most resolvable and irresolvable form when Descartes narrates event of perception:Nature . . . teaches me . . . that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking thing, would not feel pain when body was hurt, but would perceive damage purely by intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken. Similarly, when body needed food or drink, I should have an explicit understanding of fact, instead of having sensations of hunger and thirst. For these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain and so on are nothing but modes of thinking which arise from union and, as it were, of mind with body.1In this passage, Descartes maintains his commitment to difference between extended (divisible, hence imperfect) body and unextended (indivisible, hence divinized) mind. But at same time, he concedes confused sensations, confused modes of thinking, union, and intermingling which transpire when, for example, he feels hunger. Rather than incarnating a mind-body split that would, so to speak, cut through Descartes himself, he is compelled by sensations like thirst, pain, or desire to reject hypostatized figure of rationality modeled by sailor in his ship. Yet as Sixth Meditation proceeds, Descartes revises his account of of mind and body which accompanies either sensations like hunger or perceptions about things located outside us. This is so not simply because a person mistakes things like real size of star that she perceives as the flame of a small light,2 but also because insight proven, for Descartes, by star-that its truth can be adjudicated only by intellect-applies equally to a person's perception of her own body. For Descartes, movement that stimulates body ultimately bears likeness3 to feelings which result inside brain, a discrepancy he vividly illustrates in Principles of Philosophy (1644): A sword strikes our body and cuts it; but pain is completely different from local motion of sword or body that is cut-as different as colour or sound or smell or taste.4 Even in this maximally entangled scene of intermingling, mind might indeed behave like a sailor in a ship when it judges truth of external objects; Descartes divorces ensuing ideas from sensory stimulation which cuts into of body itself.A close reader of Descartes, John Locke makes anti-Cartesian argument that ideas enter mind only through medium of body.5 (However immaterial it may be, Locke's mind harbors no innate ideas of divinity.) Yet Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) recurs to Cartesian example of sword when Locke likewise invokes swath of aesthetic sensations remote from particles of matter that move a person to perceive color or sound or smell or taste: It being no more impossible, to conceive, that God should annex such Ideas to such with which they have no similitude; then that he should annex Idea of Pain to motion of a of Steel dividing our Flesh, with which that Idea hath no resemblance.6 In following essay, I pursue relation between subject and object dramatized by Locke's borrowed piece of Steel-a subject whose internal idea fails to resemble an external object whose Motions, even in this graphically commingled case, produce that idea. But for Locke, as for his crucial predecessor Antoine Arnauld, difference between insensible corpuscular motion and such ideas as color or pain, far from isolating latter in Cartesian mind, drives them deeper and deeper into perceiving body. …

Descartes and the Passionate Mind (review)

Reviewed by: Descartes and the Passionate Mind Sean Greenberg Deborah J. Brown . Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 231. Cloth, $85.00. In the past two decades, Descartes's last work, The Passions of the Soul, has received considerable attention from Descartes scholars. In the first English-language monograph on the Passions, Deborah Brown mounts a case for the work's philosophical significance. Brown takes Descartes's treatment of the passions to extend the discussion of the mind-body union initiated in the Sixth Meditation, and in her book seeks "to show that it is the passions more than any other modes of mind that are fundamental to our experience of unity, and to show why that experience is necessary to our practical and theoretical enterprises, insofar as these depend on the co-operation of the body" (7). Brown also claims that "the value of the 'little treatise' [the Passions] extends beyond the narrow topic of the passions and bears upon a proper understanding of Descartes's whole thought" (10). [End Page 499] In the first two chapters of the book, Brown puts the Passions in historical context and thereby establishes her book's interpretive framework. In chapter one, she locates the Passions in relation to Descartes's writings. She naturally begins by considering Descartes's correspondence with Princess Elizabeth, since his sustained reflection on the passions began in this correspondence. Brown suggests that the Passions may be seen as a kind of response to Elizabeth's famous questions about Cartesian dualism, and claims that "the search for congruence between reason and passion"—a recurring theme of the correspondence with Elizabeth—"is the overarching theme of the Passions, and the one that unifies it" (13). She concludes the chapter by advancing the interesting interpretive hypothesis that the Passions "complements the Meditations and extends its project into the practical realm" (27). In chapter two, Brown succinctly and usefully locates the Passions in the context of related work by Descartes's predecessors and contemporaries, examining a range of texts from both the medical and philosophical traditions. According to Brown, Descartes's approach to the passions is distinctive because it reflects the "unitary" conceptions of mind and body that Descartes derives from his metaphysics. The remainder of the book divides into two parts: chapters 3–5 treat theoretical issues about the passions, while chapters 6–8 treat practical issues. In chapters 3–5, Brown examines, in turn, the function of the passions in promoting the survival of the embodied mind, their intentionality and ontological status, advancing distinctive positions on all these topics. The discussion of the function of the passions in chapter three is the most interesting and novel interpretive contribution of this part of the book. Brown argues that the passions are functionally related to, although distinct from, sensations: her suggestion seems to be that sensations give the embodied mind information, and passions somehow respond to that information in order to motivate action. While Brown is absolutely right to emphasize the motivational function of the passions, her interpretation of their function is somewhat underdeveloped, and could be strengthened with more attention to the relation between sensations and the passions, on the one hand, and the passions and the will, on the other. In chapters 6–8, Brown considers themes in Descartes's Passions and related writings that have received relatively little scholarly attention: the role of the passions of wonder and love in promoting and sustaining the search for knowledge, including self-knowledge, the relation between the passions and self-mastery, and the place of the passions in the virtuous life. Although Brown's discussion in these chapters is very imaginative—her comparison between Descartes's and Machiavelli's conceptions of virtue in chapter eight is particularly intriguing—she does not make an especially convincing case for the depth or significance of Descartes's thinking about issues in moral psychology, which is somewhat piecemeal. Brown's book is historically and philosophically rich and provocative. Her discussion in chapters 3–5 deftly illustrates the way in which attention to the Passions helps to shed a new light on long-standing questions in the interpretation of...

Generosity and the Utility of the Passions: Cartesian Ethics in Restoration England

Les Passions de l'Ame was the second of Descartes's works to be translated into English, appearing in 1650 just a year after the original French editions had been printed. Yet despite its precipitate appearance, historians have generally ignored this book (and the story of Cartesian ethics to which it gives rise) in charting the narrative of England's reception of Descartes.1 Most such narratives begin, instead, by recording Descartes's acquaintance with Digby, Newcastle and Hobbes, or the circulation of the Meditations and Principes amongst scholars of Oxford and Cambridge and the Royal Society. Ever since Lamprecht established the agenda for histories of this sort in a seminal essay of 1935,2 studies of Descartes's English reception have then, typically, proceeded to emphasise not the Frenchman's ethics but the contentions occasioned by his adoption of a purely mechanistic natural philosophy, or by his differentiation between corporeal and spiritual substances on the grounds that the one is an extended, the other a thinking thing.3 Henry More's responses to Carte-sianism, especially, have attracted numerous commentators whose analyses all focus on these metaphysical concerns.4 Despite the fact that Descartes made a point of drawing More's attention to Les Passions in a letter of 15 April 1649,5 and notwithstanding, too, More's claim to have read it with Lord Conway whilst ambling in the Jardins du Luxembourg,6 only three commentators - Tulloch, de Pauley and Fiering - have broached the question of that book's relevance to More's Enchiridion Ethicum.7 Similarly, only Saveson has noted the part played by Passions in John Smith's ethics.8Where Saveson, Tulloch et al. cite two isolated examples, the aim of this essay is to trace the larger story of Restoration England's engagement with Descartes's theory of the emotions, a story which connects More and Smith to the physicians, Walter Charleton and William Ramesey, both of whom - though the fact has not hitherto been noticed - incorporated extensive material from Passions into their own treatises on the affections. Both More and Smith found in Descartes the rationale for a moral valorisation of the passions, and More exploited this to complement his sensuous and markedly affective conception of the boniform faculty. Ramesey and Charleton, too, took from the Frenchman a demonstration of the passions' ethical worth, but they also emphasised the latter's physiological usefulness. Furthermore, they extracted from Passions Descartes's influential celebration of 'generosite' - a passion-cum-virtue which (like More's boniform faculty) could be lined up in opposition to that Hobbesian egotism identified by all these writers as so lamentable a feature of their own milieu. Such, then, are my concerns, but before turning to them I sketch Descartes's theory of the passions.Les Passions de l'AmeFor all his interest in dualism Descartes followed Aristotle's De Anima 413a8-9 in conceding in his sixth meditation, 'ie ne suis pas seulement loge dans mon corps, ainsi qu'vn pilote en son nauire, mais ... ie luy suis conioint tres-etroittement & tellement confondu & mesle, que ie compose comme vn seul tout auec luy' (AT 9i.64). If the soul's only task were to move the bodily members, if it perceived corporeal pain with equanimity (as a matter in which it was not ultimately concerned), it might indeed be but a pilot. However, in reality man's experience is that the soul, joined as it is to every part of the body through the pineal gland, seat of the imagination (AT 11.176, 9i.69), feels involved in all its body's sensations. The fact of that interaction is precisely the concern which animates Les Passions, a work which persistently probes the mechanisms of mind-body union.As early as 1629 Descartes hypothesised in his L'Homme that the soul interacted with the body through the medium of the pineal gland (or conarium). He renewed this claim in article 34 of Passions,9 arguing, first, that nerve impulses (movements of animal spirits) from throughout the body all converge on that gland, from whence they are communicated to the soul; and second, reciprocally, that the soul induces diverse bodily activities (both muscular movements and changes to internal organs) precisely by altering the axial orientation of that same conarium - those alterations then initiating outflows of animal spirit from this gland into other body parts. …

Descartes/Husserl: a relação entre idéias e coisas materiais

This work deals with a contemporary interpretation of the cartesian work, especially the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. The article intends to present and discuss the importance of founding the proof to the existence of material things, present in the sixth meditation, in the ideas of the mind, exposed in the third meditation. The aim is to explain the correlation between the material things and the ideas.

Does Descartes’s Real Distinction Argument Prove Too Much?

Arnauld raised the concern that Descartes's real distinction argument proved too much, because it seemed to lead us back to the Platonic view according to which the mind uses the body as its vehicle. Descartes responds bypointing out that he argued against this account of mind-body union in the Sixth Meditation. Descartes believes he did not prove too much, because he offers an argument against this view whose premises and conclusion are consistent with the real distinction argument. In this paper, the union argument is reconstructed and evaluated in order to see if, through his rejection of the Platonic view, Descartes adequately addresses Arnauld's concern. In the end, Descartes adequately addresses this concern only if God's veracity provides a secure foundation for a crucial inference. Finally, these considerations show a way for those committed to the real distinction of mind and body to avoid the problem of their interaction.

The Fourth Meditation

Recent scholarship suggests that Descartes's effort to establish a truth criterion is not viciously circular (notwithstanding its reputation)-a fact that invites closer scrutiny of his epistemological program. One of the least well understood features of the project is his deduction of a truth criterion from theistic premises, a demonstration Descartes says he provides in the Fourth Meditation: the alleged proof is not revealed by a casual reading, nor have commentators fared any better; in general, the relevance of the Fourth Meditation has not been duly appreciated. This paper reconstructs the argument of the Fourth Meditation, detailing the steps in the demonstration of the criterion and clarifying its role in the larger program. Surprisingly, Descartes deduces a truth criterion more fundamental than clarity and distinctness; this more fundamental criterion helps explain what are otherwise cryptic (though central) epistemological moves in the Sixth Meditation.