Results for 'Descartes'

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  1. The Panopticon under the Light of Politics and Technology.Raphael Descartes M. Roldan - manuscript
    This paper focuses on Foucault's concept of the Panopticon. The Panopticon since time immemorial has been used as a concept in order to control society. Since this is being used as a tool to control society, this then is considered to be a form of technology of which is being used by individuals who hold power.
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  2. The Social Contract and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Raphael Descartes M. Roldan - manuscript
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  3. Thomas Aquinas On Knowledge.Raphael Descartes M. Roldan - manuscript
    This is an excerpt of Aquinas' proof of the existence of God. In proving God's existence, Aquinas lays out a cosmological argument of which also sets that tone for his seminal work in epistemology.
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  4. Yeşim Yılmaz.Tari̇hsel Bağlami İçi̇nde Descartes Ve Spinoza’Nin Töz Anlayişlarinin Karşilaştirilmasi - 2022 - Dissertation,
    Töz problemi Antik Çağ’dan bu yana farklı adlandırmalar, farklı yorumlamalar şeklinde tartışılmaktadır. Bu çalışma, modern felsefenin kurucularından ve rasyonalist düşünürler olan René Descartes’ın epistemolojisinde ve Benedictus Spinoza’nın ontolojisinde oldukça ciddi bir öneme sahip olan töz kavramının neye karşılık geldiğini ve ortaya çıkardığı temel problemleri ele almaktadır. Descartes’ın birden fazla tözün olabileceği fikri ile düalist bir töz anlayışı geliştirdiği yerde, Spinoza Descartes’a bir eleştiri olarak tek bir tözün kabulüne dayalı monist bir töz anlayışı geliştirmiştir. Doğal olarak bu çalışma (...)
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  5. Descartes’s Anti-Transparency and the Need for Radical Doubt.Elliot Samuel Paul - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5 (41):1083-1129.
    Descartes is widely portrayed as the arch proponent of “the epistemological transparency of thought” (or simply, “Transparency”). The most promising version of this view—Transparency-through-Introspection—says that introspecting (i.e., inwardly attending to) a thought guarantees certain knowledge of that thought. But Descartes rejects this view and provides numerous counterexamples to it. I argue that, instead, Descartes’s theory of self-knowledge is just an application of his general theory of knowledge. According to his general theory, certain knowledge is acquired only through (...)
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  6. Descartes, Methodical doubt, and the Grounding of Method.M. T. Shahed Tabatabaei - 2021 - Occidental Studies 12 (1):85-107.
    Descartes' methodical doubt is being criticized by naïve realists and others who don't find doubt as a good starting point for metaphysical thought, however, the philosophical achievements of his method have been absorbed in all later philosophies. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how an inevitable question concerning the foundation of Descartes' mathesis universalis, which led him to investigate this foundation by applying this very method in Metaphysics, has finally enabled him to discover his most important (...)
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  7.  56
    Descartes's Method for Achieving Knowledge.Elliot Samuel Paul - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    Descartes’s cogito – I am thinking, therefore I am – is an intuitive deduction. Contrary to Transparency, certainty of I am thinking does not come easily; it’s achieved by making introspection perfectly clear through radical doubt. Scientia – rational immunity to doubt – comes with the habit of intuiting with perfect clarity that skepticism is false. (This is the second of two companion entries; the prequel is called, "Descartes's Clarity First Epistemology.").
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  8. (1 other version)Descartes and the devil. The oratory of evil.Pablo Pavesi - 2018 - Ideas Y Valores 67 (168):243-265.
    RESUMEN En la Carta a Voetius, Descartes escribe que su enemigo es el diablo, el enemigo. La acusación es etimológicamente coherente e introduce una excepción a la metafísica, una voluntad de mal. Finalmente, la malignidad odia la verdad : es deliberadamente irracional. Examinamos aquí la oratoria del mal: primero, sus recursos retóricos ; segundo, las pasiones que excita y su combinación en una pasión particular, la cólera piadosa; tercero, sus efectos: la disolución del vínculo civil entre ciudadanos y amistoso (...)
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  9. Descartes on Selfhood, Conscientia, the First Person and Beyond.Andrea Christofidou - 2023 - In Andrea Strazzoni & Marco Sgarbi (eds.), Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning. Florence: Firenze University Press. pp. 9-40.
    I discuss Descartes’ metaphysics of selfhood, and relevant parts of contemporary philosophy regarding the first person. My two main concerns are the controversy that surrounds Descartes’ conception of conscientia, mistranslated as ‘consciousness’, and his conception of selfhood and its essential connection to conscientia. ‘I’-thoughts give rise to the most challenging philosophical questions. An answer to the questions concerning the peculiarities of the first person, self-identification and self-ascription, is to be found in Descartes’ notion of conscientia. His conception (...)
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  10. Descartes on Necessity and the Laws of Nature.Nathan Rockwood - 2022 - Journal of Analytic Theology 10:277-292.
    This paper is on Descartes’ account of modality and, in particular, his account of the necessity of the laws of nature. He famously argues that the necessity of the “eternal truths” of logic and mathematics depends on God’s will. Here I suggest he has the same view about the necessity of the laws of nature. Further, I argue, this is a plausible theory of laws. For philosophers often talk about something being nomologically or physically necessary because of the laws (...)
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  11. Descartes and Berkeley on mind: The fourth distinction.Walter Ott - 2006 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (3):437 – 450.
    The popular Cartesian reading of George Berkeley's philosophy of mind mischaracterizes his views on the relations between substance and essence and between an idea and the act of thought in which it figures. I argue that Berkeley rejects Descartes's tripartite taxonomy of distinctions and makes use of a fourth kind of distinction. In addition to illuminating Berkeley's ontology of mind, this fourth distinction allows us to dissolve an important dilemma raised by Kenneth Winkler.
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  12. Descartes and the Danger of Irresolution.Shoshana Brassfield - 2013 - Essays in Philosophy 14 (2):162-178.
    Descartes's approach to practical judgments about what is beneficial or harmful, or what to pursue or avoid, is almost exactly the opposite of his approach to theoretical judgments about the true nature of things. Instead of the cautious skepticism for which Descartes is known, throughout his ethical writings he recommends developing the habit of making firm judgments and resolutely carrying them out, no matter how doubtful and uncertain they may be. Descartes, strikingly, takes irresolution to be the (...)
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  13. Descartes, Spacetime, and Relational Motion.Edward Slowik - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (1):117-139.
    This paper examines Descartes' problematic relational theory of motion, especially when viewed within the context of his dynamics, the Cartesian natural laws. The work of various commentators on Cartesian motion is also surveyed, with particular emphasis placed upon the recent important texts of Garber and Des Chene. In contrast to the methodology of most previous interpretations, however, this essay employs a modern "spacetime" approach to the problem. By this means, the role of dynamics in Descartes' theory, which has (...)
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  14. Descartes and the 'Thinking Matter Issue'.Simone Guidi - 2022 - Lexicon Philosophicum 10 (10):181-208.
    In this paper, I aim to address a specific issue underpinning Cartesian metaphysics since its first public appearance in the Discourse right up until the Meditations, but which definitely came to the surface in the Second and Fifth Replies. It involves the possibility that to be thinking and to be extended do not actually contrast as two entirely different properties; hence, these two essences cannot serve as the basis for a disjunctive, real distinction between two corresponding substances, the mind and (...)
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  15. Descartes’s Clarity First Epistemology.Elliot Samuel Paul - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    Descartes has a Clarity First epistemology: (i) Clarity is a primitive (indefinable) phenomenal quality: the appearance of truth. (ii) Clarity is prior to other qualities: obscurity, confusion, distinctness – are defined in terms of clarity; epistemic goods – reason to assent, rational inclination to assent, reliability, and knowledge – are explained by clarity. (This is the first of two companion entries; the sequel is called, "Descartes's Method for Achieving Knowledge.").
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  16. Is Descartes a Temporal Atomist?Ken Levy - 2005 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (4):627 – 674.
    I argue that Descartes' Second Causal Proof of God in the Third Meditation evidences, and commits him to, the belief that time is "strongly discontinuous" -- that is, that there is actually a gap between each consecutive moment of time. Much of my article attempts to reconcile this interpretation, the "received view," with Descartes' statements about time, space, and matter in his other writings, including his correspondence with various philosophers.
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  17. Descartes’ God is a deceiver, and that’s OK.Joseph Gottlieb & Saja Parvizian - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-29.
    That Descartes’ God is not a deceiver is amongst the canonical claims of early modern philosophy. The significance of this (purported) fact to the coherence of Descartes’ system is likewise canonical, infused in how we teach and think about the _Meditations_. Though prevalent, both ends of this narrative are suspect. We argue that Descartes’ color eliminativism, when coupled with his analysis of the cognitive structure of our sensory systems, entails that God is a deceiver. It’s doubtful that (...)
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  18. Descartes and his contesters: Between Elizabeth of Bohemia and Gottfried Leibniz readings.Gustavo Ruiz da Silva - 2024 - Missões 9 (3):107-123.
    This paper explores two Cartesian-based resolutions which embody a very fruitful problem for Cartesianism: the communication between body and soul. Keeping with the principles defended by the interlocutor, Elisabeth of Bohemia develops her philosophical position in the epistles exchanged with Descartes and argues that the soul should be conceived materially. Conversely, this communication between soul and body is argued differently from the perspective of Leibniz, who pursues a spiritualistic solution to the problem by making the body aggregated with inferior (...)
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  19. 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 (...)
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  20. Descartes and Individual Corporeal Substance.Edward Slowik - 2001 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (1):1 – 15.
    This essay explores the vexed issue of individual corporeal substance in Descartes' natural philosophy. Although Descartes' often referred to individual material objects as separate substances, the constraints on his definitions of matter and substance would seem to favor the opposite view; namely, that there exists only one corporeal substance, the plenum. In contrast to this standard interpretation, however, it will be demonstrated that Descartes' hypotheses make a fairly convincing case for the existence of individual material substances; and (...)
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  21. Descartes on Physical Vacuum: Rationalism in Natural-Philosophical Debate.Joseph Zepeda - 2013 - Society and Politics 7 (2):126-141.
    Descartes is notorious for holding a strong anti-vacuist position. On his view, according to the standard reading, empty space not only does not exist in nature, but it is logically impossible. The very notion of a void or vacuum is an incoherent one. Recently Eric Palmer has proposed a revisionist reading of Descartes on empty space, arguing that he is more sanguine about its possibility. Palmer makes use of Descartes’ early correspondence with Marin Mersenne, including his commentary (...)
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  22. Towards Descartes’ Scientific Method: a posteriori Evidence and the Rhetoric of Les Météores.Patrick Brissey - 2018 - In James A. T. Lancaster & Richard Raiswell (eds.), Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences. Cham: Springer. pp. pp. 77-99.
    I argue that Descartes uses his method as evidence in the Discours and Les Météores. I begin by establishing there is a single method in Descartes’ works, using his meteorology as a case study. First, I hold that the method of the Regulae is best explained by two examples: one scientific, his proof of the anaclastic curve (1626), and one metaphysical, his question of the essence and scope of human knowledge (1628). Based on this account, I suggest that (...)
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  23. Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning.Andrea Strazzoni & Marco Sgarbi (eds.) - 2023 - Florence: Firenze University Press.
    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 (...)
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  24. Imitation and ‘Infinite’ Will: Descartes on the Imago Dei.Marie Jayasekera - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 8:1-38.
    This paper investigates Descartes’s understanding of the imago Dei, that it is above all in virtue of the will that we bear the image and likeness of God. I challenge the key assumption of arguments that hold that Descartes’s comparison between the human will and the divine will is problematic—that in his conception of the imago Dei Descartes is alluding to Scholastic conceptions of analogy available to him at the time, which would place particular constraints on the (...)
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  25. Descartes on Will and Suspension of Judgment: Affectivity of the Reasons for Doubt.Jan Forsman - 2017 - In Gábor Boros, Judit Szalai & Oliver Toth (eds.), The Concept of Affectivity in Early Modern Philosophy. Budapest, Hungary: Eötvös Loránd University Press. pp. 38-58.
    In this paper, I join the so-called voluntarism debate on Descartes’s theory of will and judgment, arguing for an indirect doxastic voluntarism reading of Descartes, as opposed to a classic, or direct doxastic voluntarism. More specifically, I examine the question whether Descartes thinks the will can have a direct and full control over one’s suspension of judgment. Descartes was a doxastic voluntarist, maintaining that the will has some kind of control over one’s doxastic states, such as (...)
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  26. Descartes’s Schism, Locke’s Reunion: Completing the Pragmatic Turn in Epistemology.John Turri & Wesley Buckwalter - 2017 - American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (1):25-46.
    Centuries ago, Descartes and Locke initiated a foundational debate in epistemology over the relationship between knowledge, on the one hand, and practical factors, on the other. Descartes claimed that knowledge and practice are fundamentally separate. Locke claimed that knowledge and practice are fundamentally united. After a period of dormancy, their disagreement has reignited on the contemporary scene. Latter-day Lockeans claim that knowledge itself is essentially connected to, and perhaps even constituted by, practical factors such as how much is (...)
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  27. (1 other version)Descartes on Nothing in Particular.Eric Palmer - 1999 - In Gennaro Rocco & Huenemann Charles (eds.), New Essays on the Rationalists. Oxford University Press. pp. 26-47.
    How coherent is Descartes' conception of vacuum in the Principles? Descartes' arguments attacking the possibility of vacuum are difficult to read and to understand because they reply to several distinct threads of discussion. I separate two strands that have received little careful attention: the scholastic topic of annihilation of space, particularly represented in Albert of Saxony, and the physical arguments concerning vacuum in Galileo that are also continued after the publication of the Principles in Pascal. The distinctness of (...)
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  28. Descartes and Skepticism.Raman Sachdev - 2019 - Humanities Bulletin 2 (1):71-84.
    In this paper, I present an interpretation of Descartes that deemphasizes his skepticism. I analyze a selection of remarks from Descartes’ correspondence in which he makes judgments about the skeptics. I argue that such remarks display Descartes’ attitude of contempt for skeptical philosophy. Since Descartes associates the skeptics with the activity of constant and total doubting and yet presents scenarios that seemingly arise from extreme doubt—like the malicious demon hypothesis—I look at what Descartes says in (...)
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  29. The Development of Descartes’ Idea of Representation by Correspondence.Hanoch Ben-Yami - 2023 - In Andrea Strazzoni & Marco Sgarbi (eds.), Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning. Florence: Firenze University Press. pp. 41-57.
    Descartes was the first to hold that, when we perceive, the representation need not resemble what it represents but should correspond to it. Descartes developed this ground-breaking, influential conception in his work on analytic geometry and then transferred it to his theory of perception. I trace the development of the idea in Descartes’ early mathematical works; his articulation of it in Rules for the Direction of the Mind; his first suggestions there to apply this kind of representation-by-correspondence (...)
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  30. Descartes on Perception and Knowledge of the Self: An Explication of Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations I-II.Nia McCabe - manuscript
    Focusing on Descartes’ conclusion in the second Meditation that bodies are strictly perceived through the intellect alone, I contextualize, outline, and elucidate Descartes’ first two Meditations. I begin with a summary of key themes from the first Meditation and outline the reasons for Descartes’ radical doubt. I then provide a detailed explication of Descartes’ argumentitive journey in the second meditation, wherein Descartes arrives at the hypothesis that he is a thinking thing, and demonstrates the plausibility (...)
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  31. Rene Descartes’ skepticism in Thomas Reid’s reading.Vinícius França Freitas - 2022 - O Que Nos Faz Pensar? 29 (48):55-82.
    The paper advances the hypothesis that René Descartes presents a skeptical system of philosophy in Thomas Reid’s reading. There is a sort of ‘involun-tary’ or ‘accidental’ skepticism that results from the adoption by Descartes of both a skeptical method and a skeptical principle. The first section shows to what extent the Cartesian method of doubt – which focuses on the reliability of the faculties of the mind - is a skeptical demand that cannot be satisfied. The second section (...)
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  32. Thinking Descartes in Conjunction, with Merleau-Ponty: The Human Body, the Future, and Historicity.James Griffith - 2019 - Filozofia 2 (74):111-125.
    This article addresses a debate in Descartes scholarship over the mind-dependence or -independence of time by turning to Merleau-Ponty’s "Nature" and "The Visible and the Invisible." In doing so, it shows that both sides of the debate ignore that time for Descartes is a measure of duration in general. The consequences to remembering what time is are that the future is shown to be the invisible of an intertwining of past and future, and that historicity is the invisible (...)
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  33. Descartes on Free Will and Moral Possibility.Brian Embry - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:380-398.
    An early modern scholastic conception of moral possibility helps make sense of Descartes's own perplexing use of that concept and solves the exegetical puzzles surrounding Descartes's conflicting remarks about free will.
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  34. Descartes y las leyes de caridad. Derecho privado y público en la 'Carta a Voetius'.Pablo Pavesi - 2019 - Revista de Filosofía 44 (2):193-209.
    Planteamos el problema siguiente: Descartes contesta la acusación irracional de Voetius interpretando, excepcionalmente, los Evangelios y afirma que las _leyes de caridad _son _afines _a las _leyes de la amistad natural _que rigen las funciones del pastor y del profesor. Proponemos que Descartes excluye el examen de las virtudes teologales e incursiona en el derecho privado y civil para probar que Voetius no es un _verdadero _profesor, ni un _verdadero _pastor, y usurpa las atribuciones del juez. Frente a (...)
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  35. Descartes’ Discours as a Plan for a Universal Science.Patrick Brissey - 2013 - Studia UBB. Philosophia [Special Issue on Descartes' Scientific and Philosophical Disputes with His Contemporaries] 58 (2):37-60.
    My thesis is that Descartes wrote the Discours as a plan for a universal science, as he originally entitled it. I provide an interpretation of his letters that suggests that after Descartes began drafting his Dioptrics, he started developing a system that incorporated his early treatises from the 1630s: Les Méteores, Le Monde, L’Homme, and his 1629 Traité de métaphysique. I argue against the mosaic and autobiographic interpretations that claim these were independent treatises or stages in Descartes (...)
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  36. Descartes on the Theory of Life and Methodology in the Life Sciences.Karen Detlefsen - 2015 - In Peter Distelzweig, Evan Ragland & Benjamin Goldberg (eds.), Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 141-72.
    As a practicing life scientist, Descartes must have a theory of what it means to be a living being. In this paper, I provide an account of what his theoretical conception of living bodies must be. I then show that this conception might well run afoul of his rejection of final causal explanations in natural philosophy. Nonetheless, I show how Descartes might have made use of such explanations as merely hypothetical, even though he explicitly blocks this move. I (...)
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  37. Descartes on certainty in deduction.Jacob Zellmer - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 105 (C):158-164.
    This article examines how deduction preserves certainty and how much certainty it can preserve according to Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind. I argue that the certainty of a deduction is a matter of four conditions for Descartes. First, certainty depends on whether the conjunction of simple propositions is composed with necessity or contingency. Second, a deduction approaches the certainty of an intuition depending on how many “acts of conceiving” it requires and—third—the complexity or difficulty of (...)
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  38. De Descartes a Hegel (y vuelta): Sobre el origen y actualidad teórica del idealismo absoluto.Hector Ferreiro - 2017 - In Balladares Javier, Elguera Yared, Huesca Fernando & Olvera Zaida (eds.), Hegel: Ontología, estética y política. Fides. pp. 17-46.
    Con excepción de Aristóteles, no hay quizá ningún otro filósofo al que Hegel se haya referido repetidamente en forma tan elogiosa como Descartes. Descartes es para Hegel quien por primera vez en la Historia de la Filosofía, antes que Fichte, advierte que la autoconciencia es un momento esencial de la objetividad del conocimiento humano y convierte así a la actividad como tal del pensar en principio fundamental de la filosofía. La introducción de este nuevo paradigma, a saber: el (...)
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  39. Descartes' Refutation of Atheism: A Defense.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    Descartes argues that, apart from the existence of a veracious God, we can have no reason to believe that we possess reliable cognitive faculties, with the result that, if atheism is true, not even our seemingly most certain beliefs can count as knowledge for us. Since the atheist denies the existence of God, he or she will be precisely in this position. I argue that Descartes' argument is sound, and that atheism is therefore self-refuting.
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  40. Descartes on Human Freedom.Marie Jayasekera - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (8):527-539.
    In this paper, I explore René Descartes' conception of human freedom. I begin with the key interpretive challenges of Descartes' remarks and then turn to two foundational issues in the secondary literature: the philosophical backdrop of Descartes' remarks and the notions of freedom that commentators have used to characterize Descartes. The remainder of the paper is focused on the main current debate: Descartes' position on the relationship between freedom and determinism.
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  41. Descartes and the Meteorology of the World.Patrick Brissey - 2012 - Society and Politics [Special Issue on God and the Order of Nature in Early Modern Thought: Topics in Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Science] 6 ( 2):88-100.
    Descartes claimed that he thought he could deduce the assumptions of his Meteorology by the contents of the Discourse. He actually began the Meteorology with assumptions. The content of the Discourse, moreover, does not indicate how he deduced the assumptions of the Meteorology. We seem to be left in a precarious position. We can examine the text as it was published, independent of Descartes’ claims, which suggests that he incorporated a presumptive or hypothetical method. On the other hand, (...)
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  42. Descartes' Solitude Thesis: A Neglected Aspect of the Cartesian Methodology.Ioannis Trisokkas - 2014-2015 - New Europe College Yearbook - EntE:153-182.
    Recent research has defended the surprising thesis that in many cases the search for truth is better off if the information exchanged between the members of an epistemic community is limited. This is what one may call the limited information thesis. There is, however, the possibility of an even more radical position than this: the thesis that any communication between peers has zero epistemic value and that the search for truth is better off if the truth-inquirer does not take into (...)
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  43. Descartes on Place and Motion: A Reading through Cartesian Commentaries.Andrea Strazzoni - 2024 - Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 47 (3):179-214.
    This paper offers a reconstruction of the interpretations of Descartes's ideas of place and motion by Dutch Cartesians (Henricus Regius, Johannes de Raey, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich). It does so by focusing on the reading of Descartes's Principia philosophiae (1644) offered, in particular, by the dictated commentaries on it. It is shown how such commentaries bring to the light new potential Aristotelian-Scholastic sources of Descartes, and the different ways Dutch Cartesians brought to the fore, also with (...)
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  44. Descartes' argument for mind-body dualism.Douglas C. Long - 1969 - Philosophical Forum 1 (3):259-273.
    In his Meditations Descartes concludes that he is a res cogitans, an unextended entity whose essence is to be conscious. His reasoning in support of the conclusion that he exists entirely distinct from his body has seemed unconvincing to his critics. I attempt to show that the reasoning which he offers in support of his conclusion. although mistaken, is more plausible and his mistakes more interesting than his critics have acknowledged.
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  45. Descartes' Quantity of Motion: 'New Age' Holism meets the Cartesian Conservation Principle.Edward Slowik - 1999 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (2):178–202.
    This essay explores various problematical aspects of Descartes' conservation principle for the quantity of motion (size times speed), particularly its largely neglected "dual role" as a measure of both durational motion and instantaneous "tendencies towards motion". Overall, an underlying non-local, or "holistic", element of quantity of motion (largely derived from his statics) will be revealed as central to a full understanding of the conservation principle's conceptual development and intended operation; and this insight can be of use in responding to (...)
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  46. Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism.John Sutton - 1998 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control (...)
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  47. Descartes' Rules and the Workings of the Mind.Eric Palmer - 1997 - North American Kant Society:269-282.
    I briefly consider why Descartes stopped work on the _Rules_ towards the end of my paper. My main concern is to accurately characterize the project represented in the _Rules_, especially in its relation to early-modern logic.
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  48. Descartes and the Crazy Argument.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    In Meditation I, Descartes dismisses the possibility that he might be insane as a ground for doubting that the senses are a source of knowledge of the external world. In this paper, I argue that Descartes was justified in so doing, and draw some general epistemological conclusions from this result.
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  49. Responsibility in Descartes’s Theory of Judgment.Marie Jayasekera - 2016 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3 (12):321-347.
    In this paper I develop a new account of the philosophical motivations for Descartes’s theory of judgment. The theory needs explanation because the idea that judgment, or belief, is an operation of the will seems problematic at best, and Descartes does not make clear why he adopted what, at the time, was a novel view. I argue that attending to Descartes’s conception of the will as the active, free faculty of mind reveals that a general concern with (...)
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  50. Descartes’ debt to Teresa of Ávila, or why we should work on women in the history of philosophy.Christia Mercer - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (10):2539-2555.
    Despite what you have heard over the years, the famous evil deceiver argument in Meditation One is not original to Descartes. Early modern meditators often struggle with deceptive demons. The author of the Meditations is merely giving a new spin to a common rhetorical device. Equally surprising is the fact that Descartes’ epistemological rendering of the demon trope is probably inspired by a Spanish nun, Teresa of Ávila, whose works have been ignored by historians of philosophy, although they (...)
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