Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning

Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning PDF Author: Andrea Strazzoni
Publisher: Firenze University Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a lively dialogue with other thinkers. On this ground, it addresses the ways in which René Descartes’s philosophy evolved and was progressively understood by intellectuals from different contexts and eras, either by considering direct interlocutors of Descartes such as Isaac Beeckman and Elisabeth of Bohemia, thinkers who developed upon his ideas and on particular topics as Nicolas Malebranche or Thomas Willis, those who adapted his overall methodology in developing new systems of knowledge as Johannes Clauberg and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, and contemporary thinkers from continental and analytic traditions like Emanuele Severino and Peter Strawson.

Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning

Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning PDF Author: Andrea Strazzoni
Publisher: Firenze University Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a lively dialogue with other thinkers. On this ground, it addresses the ways in which René Descartes’s philosophy evolved and was progressively understood by intellectuals from different contexts and eras, either by considering direct interlocutors of Descartes such as Isaac Beeckman and Elisabeth of Bohemia, thinkers who developed upon his ideas and on particular topics as Nicolas Malebranche or Thomas Willis, those who adapted his overall methodology in developing new systems of knowledge as Johannes Clauberg and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, and contemporary thinkers from continental and analytic traditions like Emanuele Severino and Peter Strawson.

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds PDF Author: John Carriero
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691135614
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
Between Two Worlds is an authoritative commentary on--and powerful reinterpretation of--the founding work of modern philosophy, Descartes's Meditations. Philosophers have tended to read Descartes's seminal work in an occasional way, examining its treatment of individual topics while ignoring other parts of the text. In contrast, John Carriero provides a sustained, systematic reading of the whole text, giving a detailed account of the positions against which Descartes was reacting, and revealing anew the unity, meaning, and originality of the Meditations. Carriero finds in the Meditations a nearly continuous argument against Thomistic Aristotelian ways of thinking about cognition, and shows more clearly than ever before how Descartes bridged the old world of scholasticism and the new one of mechanistic naturalism. Rather than casting Descartes's project primarily in terms of skepticism, knowledge, and certainty, Carriero focuses on fundamental disagreements between Descartes and the scholastics over the nature of understanding, the relation between the senses and the intellect, the nature of the human being, and how and to what extent God is cognized by human beings. Against this background, Carriero shows, Descartes developed his own conceptions of mind, body, and the relation between them, creating a coherent, philosophically rich project in the Meditations and setting the agenda for a century of rationalist metaphysics.

Descartes' Error

Descartes' Error PDF Author: Antonio Damasio
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014303622X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
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.

Meditations on First Philosophy

Meditations on First Philosophy PDF Author: René Descartes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780941736121
Category : First philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Another Mind-Body Problem

Another Mind-Body Problem PDF Author: John Harfouch
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438469977
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
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.

What Am I?

What Am I? PDF Author: Joseph Almog
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195177190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Almog decodes Descartes' argument for distinguishing between the human mind and body while maintaining their essential integration in a human being. His reading not only steers away from popular interpretations of the philosopher, but also represents a scholar coming to grips directly with Descartes himself.

Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Marco Faini
Publisher: Firenze University Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
This volume offers a series of insights into the fascinating topic of errors and false opinions in early modern Europe. It explores the semantic richness of the category of ‘error’ in a time when such category becomes crucial to European thought and culture. During decades of increasing normativity in the social and religious sphere as well as in the epistemological status of disciplines, recognizing and correcting error becomes an imperative task whose importance can hardly be overestimated. The efforts at establishing religious, political, and scientific orthodoxy led philosophers, doctors, philologist, scientist, and theologians, to reconsider the very foundations of knowledge in the attempt to dispel errors. Spanning geographically from Italy to France, England, and Germany, the articles here gathered provide stimulating glimpses into one of the most fascinating, multifaceted, and controversial aspects of early modern culture.

The Feeling of what Happens

The Feeling of what Happens PDF Author: Antonio R. Damasio
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156010757
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
The publication of this book is an event in the making. All over the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio's new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes' Error, Damasio revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the possibilities of human existence, a magnificent work of ingenious science, a gorgeously written book, The Feeling of What Happens is already being hailed as a classic.

Descartes's Concept of Mind

Descartes's Concept of Mind PDF Author: Lilli Alanen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020108
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
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.

The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics

The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics PDF Author: Ralph Stefan Weir
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000914321
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book evaluates the widespread preference in philosophy of mind for varieties of property dualism over other alternatives to physicalism. It takes the standard motivations for property dualism as a starting point and argues that these lead directly to nonphysical substances resembling the soul of traditional metaphysics. In the first half of the book, the author clarifies what is at issue in the choice between theories that posit nonphysical properties only and those that posit nonphysical substances. The crucial question, he argues, is whether one posits nonphysical things that satisfy an Aristotelian-Cartesian independence definition of substance: nonphysical things that could exist in the absence of anything else. In the second half, the author argues that standard and Russellian monist forms of property dualism are far less plausible than we usually suppose. Most significantly, the presuppositions of one of the leading arguments for property dualism, the conceivability argument, lead by parity of reasoning to the view that conscious subjects are nonphysical substances. He concludes that if you posit nonphysical properties in response to the mind-body problem, then you should be prepared to posit nonphysical substances as well. Mainstream philosophy of mind must take nonphysical substances far more seriously than it has done for the best part of a century. The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy.