One of the hallmarks of the early modern rationalists was their confidence that a great deal of metaphysics could be done by purely a priori reasoning. They thought so at least partly because they inherited via Descartes Anselm's confidence that the existence of God could be established by purely a priori reasoning in an ontological argument. They also inherited a Thomistic and scholastic confidence that the concept of God as supremely perfect being, if subjected to serious and deep analysis, would (...) yield sound doctrine. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all three took it that they had in their stock of ideas an idea of God sufficiently clear and detailed that a little analytic work could produce real metaphysical results, not only about God himself, but also about the universe in which they found themselves. Though they start with what purport to be ideas of the same God, they get radically different results in their analyses. (shrink)

The idea of self-knowledge divides naturally into two parts in accordance with the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. I know myself and I know things about myself. The latter I know partly from self-acquaintance, partly from the behavior, especially linguistic, of others, and partly from each of these. All aspects of self-knowledge are controversial, so I shall concentrate in this paper on the question of self-acquaintance. My purpose is both philosophical and historical. It is commonly believed (...) that Hume and Descartes held diametrically opposed, or at least strongly contrasting, views regarding self-acquaintance since Hume is regularly ridiculed for his denial of ability to discover his own Self whereas it would occur to no one to ascribe that same view to the author of the Meditations. In this paper I shall argue that contrary to appearances these two philosophers either held the same position or Descartes occupied the more agnostic extreme; and also that the position usually ascribed to Hume is, when properly understood, both correct and of fundamental philosophical significance. Part of my reason for selecting Hume and Descartes for analysis and comparison is to show thereby that the thesis of this paper is true independently of the rationalist/empiricist schism in philosophy. (shrink)

This journal article has been superseded by a revised version, published in the collection _Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes_, ed. by Stephen Voss (Oxford University Press, 1993), 259–287.

You have a rich inner life of conscious experiences. For example, you have pains and other sensations. And you have sensory experiences, such as that produced by chewing on something bitter. Scientists are currently puzzling over how to explain this inner life in scientific terms. Can we, for example, consciousness by appealing to certain facts about our brains?

Following the seminal work of Ingvar (1985. “Memory for the future”: An essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness. Human Neurobiology, 4, 127–136), Suddendorf (1994. The discovery of the fourth dimension: Mental time travel and human evolution. Master’s thesis. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand), and Tulving (1985. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 26, 1–12), exploration of the ability to anticipate and prepare for future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty has grown into a thriving research enterprise. (...) A fundamental tenet of this line of inquiry is that future-oriented mental time travel, in most of its presentations, is underwritten by a property or an extension of episodic recollection. However, a careful conceptual analysis of exactly how episodic memory functions in this capacity has yet to be undertaken. In this paper I conduct such an analysis. Based on conceptual, phenomenological, and empirical considerations,I conclude that the autonoetic component of episodic memory, not episodic memory per se, is the causally determinative factor enabling an individual to project him or herself into a personal future. (shrink)