This essay seeks to contribute to the critical reception of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by tracing the Taxonomy’s underlying philosophical assumptions. Identifying Bloom’s work as consistent with the legacy of Cartesian thought, I argue that its hierarchy of behavioral objectives provides a framework for certainty and communicability in ascertaining student learning. However, its implicit rejection of intuitive knowledge as well as its antagonism between the human subject and the known object promote the Enlightenment ideal of education as “intellectual work.” (...) When embodied in the Taxonomy, Cartesian assumptions foster a fundamental disposition in front of reality that is ultimately alienating. The paper begins with an explication of the Taxonomy’s affordances and philosophical assumptions. I then identify the Cartesian elements of these assumptions, particularly the Taxonomy’s inherent mind–body dualism and primacy of method. Finally, the paper employs these elements as an explanatory factor for the predominant critiques of the Taxonomy in educational theory literature. An addendum questions the possibility or plausibility of distance from objectives frameworks in the contemporary classroom. (shrink)

I am grateful that a set of fine scholars would be willing to reflect upon and write about Descartes and the First Cartesians. Their efforts are greatly appreciated and, on the whole, their observations are sound. It should be evident that I do not consider the work to be the final word on the subject of Descartes and Cartesians, that is, something exhaustive of it or complete for any of its topics. In fact, every time I reconsider an issue from (...) my book, I find that there is more to be said even in respect to what I wrote about in great detail. I will reply to the commentators in the following order: 1. Domenico Collacciani; 2. Lucian Petrescu; 3. Martine... (shrink)

This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a constant, lively dialogue with other thinkers, both in its internal evolution as well as in its reception, re-use, and assumption as a starting point in addressing past and present philosophical problems. In doing so, it focuses on a feature that is crucially emerging in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science, namely the complexity in the (...) production of knowledge. The book explores the applicability of this approach to a long-considered armchair philosopher, namely René Descartes, who is now more and more understood as a full-blown scientist, networker, and intellectual éminence grise rather than as the mere philosopher of the cogito, as well as the originator of different ‘Cartesianisms’ which encompassed many ideas and approaches for long captured by dichotomic historiographical categories as rationalism and empiricism, or speculative and experimental philosophy. The essays gathered in the volume aim to address the ways in which Descartes’s philosophy evolved and was progressively understood by scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from different contexts and eras, either by considering direct interlocutors of Descartes such as Isaac Beeckman and Elisabeth of Bohemia, early modern 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. (shrink)

In a 1669 letter to his mentor Thomasius, Leibniz writes that "hardly any of the Cartesians have added anything to the discoveries of their master" insofar as they "have published only paraphrases of their leader."1 The book that is the focus of my remarks here—Roger Ariew's Descartes and the First Cartesians —shows that Leibniz was most certainly incorrect. In particular, Ariew draws attention to the fact that there was a concerted effort to present a new sort of Cartesianism that conforms (...) to the structure of the early modern French scholastic curriculum. Though this effort was inspired by Descartes's own attempt to present his views in this manner, the later "Cartesian scholasticism"... (shrink)

Roger Ariew's new book, Descartes and the First Cartesians, will not be a methodological surprise for those who already read his previous work, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, as well as its expanded version, Descartes Among the Scholastics. Right at the beginning of DAS, Ariew justified the title of this book in the following way: A philosophical system cannot be studied adequately apart from the intellectual context in which it is situated. Philosophers do not usually utter propositions in a vacuum, (...) but accept, modify or reject doctrines whose meaning and significance are given in a particular culture. Thus Cartesian philosophy should... (shrink)

This article investigates the doctrine of intellectual memory in Descartes. In his writings, Descartes recognized not only a bodily memory, explainable in purely physiological terms, but also an intellectual or spiritual memory. In this article, I investigate whether Descartes postulated an intellectual memory for theological reasons or for philosophical reasons. From the analysis of certain texts in which Descartes explains what intellectual memory is, the paper will show that Descartes appeals, for strictly philosophical reasons, to intellectual memory to explain some (...) processes of reminiscence that occur in the human being. In contrast to what some contemporary commentators on the Cartesian doctrine of memory have argued, Descartes’s motivations for postulating intellectual memory are not theological. (shrink)

As Roger Ariew shows, one of the most fascinating challenges for the authors trying to create a Cartesian complete course on philosophy was coming up with a Cartesian Logic based on the existing texts of the master. Were the few simple rules from the Discourse on Method the "logic" of Descartes? Were the Rules for the Direction of the Mind "logic"? How can we even have a logic without syllogism? When looking at the authors studied by Ariew one finds that (...) the best that they could come up was adding some Cartesian elements on what remains basically a traditional Aristotelian Logic. It seems that there was no Cartesian Logic after all.I want to show here that Cartesian Logic is something else, not exactly... (shrink)

The book Descartes and the First Cartesians published by Roger Ariew in 2014, like the revised and expanded version of Descartes and the Last Scholastics, published in 2011 under the title Descartes Among the Scholastics, contributes in an exemplary way to eliminating the mythologization of modernity in the history of Cartesianism, and more generally, in the history of early-modern philosophy. From one book to the next, and with the help of numerous articles in the background that develop the same critique (...) of the mythology of the modern philosopher maintained by many commentators, Ariew patiently demonstrates that what one calls "the system of the philosophy of Descartes" constitutes neither the absolute beginning... (shrink)

The Port-Royal Logic includes a brief discussion of modal propositions, containing several mnemonic devices for rules of equivalence governing the possibility, necessity, impossibility, and contingency of propositions. When the mnemonics are decoded, it can be seen that these rules treat possibility and contingency as formally equivalent modes. The aim of this paper is twofold: to show that this identification of possibility and contingency follows from the Logic’s formal treatment of those modes; and to show that such a treatment of these (...) modes conflicts with claims the authors make in other contexts. In particular, the equivalence of possibility and contingency conflicts with the Cartesian principle that whatever is clearly and distinctly conceivable is possible—a principle that Arnauld and Nicole explicitly endorse elsewhere in the Logic. Why, then, would the authors adopt such equivalence rules? The paper concludes with a discussion of the historical precedents for these rules: they were a standard feature of Scholastic logic textbooks in seventeenth century France. It is likely that Arnauld and Nicole simply reproduced the rules for this reason, without recognizing that they were a poor fit for a Cartesian logic textbook like the Port-Royal Logic. (shrink)

La epistemología contemporánea sostiene la imagen de Descartes como un fundamentalista epistemológico clásico, apelando, para ello, a las certezas metafísicas y a la presunta deducción del resto de conocimiento a partir de dichos principios. Con todo, un examen más detallado del proyecto epistemológico cartesiano pone en cuestión esta interpretación. El presente artículo analiza el papel de la deducción y la certeza moral a fin de redefinir el fundamentalismo de Descartes en términos moderados.

Pierre-Sylvain Régis’s Cartesianism is quite singular in seventeenth-century French philosophy. Though, can we speak of a form of experimental science in Régis’s work? After exploring his notions of ‘system’ and ‘hypothesis’, I will define his position in relation to Claude Perrault, Jacques Rohault, and the Royal Society. I argue, first, that the contrasts which traverse French science are not so much about the use of experiments but about whether or not observational data can be traced back to hypotheses and to (...) a coherent system. Secondly, that we can detect a significant similarity between Boyle’s positions and the views expressed by Perrault and also by Régis. Lastly, that French science, even in its Cartesian version, is much more probabilistic than English experimental philosophy. (shrink)

In the article we consider the relationship of traditional provisions of basic logical concepts and confront them with new and modern approaches to the same concepts. Logic is characterized in different ways when it is associated with syllogistics (referential – semantical model of logic) or with symbolic logic (inferential – syntactical model of logic). This is not only a difference in the logical calculation of (1) concepts, (2) statements, and (3) predicates, but this difference also appears in the treatment of (...) the calculative abilities of logical forms, the ontological-referential status of conceptual content and the inferential-categorical status of logical forms. The basic markers or basic ideas that separate ontologically oriented logic from categorically oriented logic are the (1) concept of truth, the (2) concept of meaning, the (3) concept of identity, and the (4) concept of predication. Here, this differences are explicitly demonstrated by the introduction of differential terminology. From this differential methodology follows a new set of characterizations of logic. (shrink)

Central to Descartes’ philosophy is a view about immutable essences and eternal truths. After mentioning a Platonist account of recollection in Meditation V, Descartes declares that the ideas we have of mathematical notions “are not my invention but have their own true and immutable natures” (AT VII, 64/CSM II, 44).Descartes claims that other important philosophical notions, such as God, mind, body, and human free will (AT VII, 68; AT VIII-2, 348; AT III, 383; AT VII, 433, respectively), also have immutable (...) natures or essences. Although Descartes says a good many things about this view, nowhere does he offer definitive doctrine on the matter, and in fact frequently confuses his reader with apparently inconsistent pronouncements about immutable natures and eternal truths. In this essay, I focus on the immutable natures and propose a solution to two of the main problems associated with Descartes’ position, the metaphysical status of immutable natures and the purported indivisibility of their existence as ideas in the mind. (shrink)