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  1. Against Passionate Epistemology.Saja Parvizian - 2023 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 40 (3):258-277.
    A revisionary reading of Descartes's epistemology has emerged in the literature. Some commentators have argued that Descartes subscribes to passionate epistemology, which claims that epistemic progress in the Meditations requires contributions from the meditator's passions. This paper argues that the passions cannot perform any epistemic work in the Meditations. As such, the meditator's passions do not require us to revise our canonical understanding of the Meditations as an exercise of pure thought. Furthermore, we need not abandon the standard claim that (...)
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  • On the inseparability of reasoning and virtue: Madame de Maintenon's Maison royale de Saint‐Louis.Lisa Shapiro - 2023 - Metaphilosophy 54 (2-3):254-267.
    This paper engages with the curriculum at Madame de Maintenon's school for girls at Saint‐Cyr to raise and address a set of questions: What is it to teach someone to reason? The curricular materials of Saint‐Cyr suggest that learning to reason is a matter of practice. How is one to distinguish autonomous reason giving from habituation or automatic trained responses? How can practices in reason giving informed by social mores have objective validity? Moreover, if we think of the role of (...)
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  • On the Systematicity of Descartes' Ethics: Generosity, Metaphysics, and Scientia.Saja Parvizian - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago
    Descartes is not widely recognized for his ethics; indeed, most readers are unaware that he had an ethics. However, Descartes placed great importance on his ethics, claiming that ethics is the highest branch of his philosophical system. I aim to understand the systematic relationship Descartes envisions between his ethics and the rest of his philosophy, particularly his metaphysics and epistemology. I defend three main theses. First, I argue against the recent trend in the literature that claims that the chief virtue (...)
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  • Of Dreams, Demons, and Whirlpools: Doubt, Skepticism, and Suspension of Judgment in Descartes's Meditations.Jan Forsman - 2021 - Dissertation, Tampere University
    I offer a novel reading in this dissertation of René Descartes’s (1596–1650) skepticism in his work Meditations on First Philosophy (1641–1642). I specifically aim to answer the following problem: How is Descartes’s skepticism to be read in accordance with the rest of his philosophy? This problem can be divided into two more general questions in Descartes scholarship: How is skepticism utilized in the Meditations, and what are its intentions and relation to the preceding philosophical tradition? -/- I approach the topic (...)
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  • Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon.Lisa Shapiro - 2016 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (3):365-383.
    ABSTRACT:I reflect critically on the early modern philosophical canon in light of the entrenchment and homogeneity of the lineup of seven core figures: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. After distinguishing three elements of a philosophical canon—a causal story, a set of core philosophical questions, and a set of distinctively philosophical works—I argue that recent efforts contextualizing the history of philosophy within the history of science subtly shift the central philosophical questions and allow for a greater range of (...)
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  • Descartes on the Infinity of Space vs. Time.Geoffrey Gorham - 2018 - In Nachtomy Ohad & Winegar Reed (eds.), Infinity in Early Modern Philosophy. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. pp. 45-61.
    In two rarely discussed passages – from unpublished notes on the Principles of Philosophy and a 1647 letter to Chanut – Descartes argues that the question of the infinite extension of space is importantly different from the infinity of time. In both passages, he is anxious to block the application of his well-known argument for the indefinite extension of space to time, in order to avoid the theologically problematic implication that the world has no beginning. Descartes concedes that we always (...)
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  • Activating the Mind: Descartes' Dreams and the Awakening of the Human Animal Machine.Anik Waldow - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2):299-325.
    In this essay I argue that one of the things that matters most to Descartes' account of mind is that we use our minds actively. This is because for him only an active mind is able to re-organize its passionate experiences in such a way that a genuinely human, self-governed life of virtue and true contentment becomes possible. To bring out this connection, I will read the Meditations against the backdrop of Descartes' correspondence with Elisabeth. This will reveal that in (...)
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  • XIV—Assuming Epistemic Authority, or Becoming a Thinking Thing.Lisa Shapiro - forthcoming - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
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  • Generosity, the Cogito, and the Fourth Meditation.Saja Parvizian - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (1):219-243.
    The standard interpretation of Descartes's ethics maintains that virtue presupposes knowledge of metaphysics and the sciences. Lisa Shapiro, however, has argued that the meditator acquires the virtue of generosity in the Fourth Meditation, and that generosity contributes to her metaphysical achievements. Descartes's ethics and metaphsyics, then, must be intertwined. This view has been gaining traction in the recent literature. Omri Boehm, for example, has argued that generosity is foundational to the cogito. In this paper, I offer a close reading of (...)
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