En este artículo se desarrolla la hipótesis de que el conocimiento de la sustancia pensante en las Meditaciones sobre la filosofía primera y en Objeciones y Respuestas no es claramente explicitado por René Descartes. Se entiende que tal exposición es necesaria para una comprensión integral delestatus de la filosofía cartesiana en el momento de redactar las Meditaciones y, principalmente, paraasimilar cómo concebía Descartes el conocimiento de la sustancia pensante en los años 1641 y 1642.El conocimiento de la sustancia pensante es, (...) como se sabe, un elemento fundamental para toda la filosofía cartesiana. Para ello, se recurre, primeramente, a los dos modos en que Descartes presentael conocimiento de la sustancia pensante en las Meditaciones, destacando los problemas que cadauno de estos conlleva. Posteriormente, a partir de las Objeciones y Respuestas, principalmentela quinta y la séptima, se presenta las críticas de Pierre Gassendi y Pierre Bourdin sobre elconocimiento de la sustancia pensante. Tanto Gassendi como Bourdin subrayan que el texto deMeditaciones no es suficiente para esclarecer de qué manera la sustancia pensante es conocida. En este sentido, Gassendi y Bourdin cuestionan la posibilidad de este conocimiento, destacando la ambiguedad y oscuridad de las respuestas cartesianas. Se concluye que en las Meditaciones,Descartes enfrenta una brecha insalvable entre la ontología de la sustancia y su conocimiento, loque lo llevará a desarrollar y explicar mejor su teoría en escritos posteriores. (shrink)

Hume is known for his claim that our idea of causation is nothing beyond constant conjunction, and that our idea of necessary connection is nothing beyond a felt determination of the mind. In short, Hume endorses a "thin" conception of causation and necessary connection. In recent years, however, a sizeable number of philosophers have come to view Hume as someone who believes in the existence of thick causal connections - that is, causal connections that allow one to infer a priori (...) the effect from the cause, and vice versa. Hume doesn't wish to deny such connections, said philosopher's claim, he only seeks to demonstrate that we can't know anything about the nature of the thick causal connections that make up the natural world. In this dissertation, I defend the old or traditional interpretation of Hume on causation. I draw attention to the important but neglected role of clear and distinct perception in Hume's thought, arguing that for Hume our impressions are clear and distinct perceptions, whereas our ideas are faint and obscure. Accordingly, Hume's copy principle - the thesis that our ideas are copies of our impressions - is Hume's way of rendering our naturally obscure and confused ideas distinct. One need only discern the impression from which said ideas are copied. In this way, I show that Hume's opinion concerning our idea of thick causation is that it's an obscure and confused idea, and that the only clear and distinct idea we can have of causation is thin causation. Furthermore, since meaning for Hume is a matter of a word's being associated with an idea, Hume thinks that an expression such as "thick causation" is meaningless or confused. In one sense, then, Hume is a positivist, and as such doesn't believe in thick causal connections. (shrink)

Recently Samuel Fleischacker has developed Kant’s model of enlightenment as a “minimalist enlightenment” in the tradition of a relatively thin proceduralism focused on the form of public debate and interaction. I want to discuss the possibility that such a minimalism, endorsed by Fleischacker, Habermas, Rawls, and others, benefits from a metaphysics of critical individual subjectivity as a prerequisite for the social proceduralism of the minimalist enlightenment. I argue that Kant’s enlightenment, metaphysically thicker than much contemporary proceduralism, constitutes a recovery and (...) transformation of a subjective interiority deeply Cartesian in spirit and central to the reciprocity of the community of subjects in What is Enlightenment. This opens a space for a site of resistance to the social. Descartes’ solus secedo describes the analogical space of such a resistance for Kant’s sapere aude. The Meditations thus point forward implicitly to how a rational subject might achieve critical distance from tradition in its various forms, epistemic, ethical, moral, and political. (shrink)