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Descartes' Dream by Philip J. Davis,Reuben Hersh Pdf
These provocative essays take a modern look at the 17th-century thinker's dream, examining the influences of mathematics on society, particularly in light of technological advances. They survey the conditions that elicit the application of mathematic principles; the applications' effectiveness; and how applied mathematics transform perceptions of reality. 1987 edition.
Ann Scholl revises the traditional understanding of the role of imagination and sensory perception in Descartes's Meditations. Traditionally, Cartesian scholars have focused primarily on sensory perception as the more significant of the two «special» modes of thought. In this work, Ann Scholl describes how a better understanding of Descartes's skepticism and his arguments for dualism are reached when imagination instead is understood as the more primary of the two special modes of thought. The result is a fresh reading and interpretation of Descartes's most influential work.
The late Gregor Sebba was fond of describing his monumental "Bibliographia Cartesiana: A Critical Guide to the Descartes Literature, 18001960 "as a by-product of his research begun in 1949 for an article he had in mind titled "The Dream of Descartes."The bibliography has been indispensable to Descartes scholars since its appearance in 1964. When Sebba died in 1985, his manuscript for "The Dream of Descartes "was still unfinished. Here, with materials provided by Anibal A. Bueno, Richard H. Popkin, and Helen Sebba, Richard A. Watson presents the completed work based on a 1973 draft, letters, outlines, and other manuscript material. The result is a fascinating analysis of Descartes dreams as seminal in the creative process of genius."
René Descartes (1596—1650) is one of the towering and central figures in Western philosophy and mathematics. His apothegm “Cogito, ergo sum” marked the birth of the mind-body problem, while his creation of so-called Cartesian coordinates has made our intellectual conquest of physical space possible. But Descartes had a mysterious and mystical side, as well. Almost certainly a member of the occult brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, he kept a secret notebook, now lost, most of which was written in code. After Descartes’s death, Gottfried Leibniz, inventor of calculus and one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, moved to Paris in search of this notebook–and eventually found it in the possession of Claude Clerselier, a friend of Descartes’s. Liebniz called on Clerselier and was allowed to copy only a couple of pages–which, though written in code, he amazingly deciphered there on the spot. Liebniz’s hastily scribbled notes are all we have today of Descartes’s notebook. Why did Descartes keep a secret notebook, and what were its contents? The answers to these questions will lead the reader on an exciting, swashbuckling journey, and offer a fascinating look at one of the great figures of Western culture.
Feminist Interpretations of RenŽ Descartes by Susan Bordo Pdf
Contributors are Susan Bordo, Stanley Clarke, Erica Harth, Leslie Heywood, Luce Irigaray, Genevieve Lloyd, Mario Moussa, Eileen O'Neill, Adrianna Paliyenko, Ruth Perry, Mario S&áenz, Karl Stern, Thomas Wartenberg, and James Winders.
Thought's Ego in Augustine and Descartes by Gareth B. Matthews Pdf
In his concise and ambitious book, Gareth B. Matthews explores the implications of doing philosophy in the first person. He focuses on the most notable attempts in the history of philosophy to take this perspective: Augustine's Confessions, perhaps the first significant autobiography in Western culture, and Soliloquies, a dialogue between himself and reason; and Descartes's Meditations and Discourse on Method. "By examining the first-personalization of philosophy in these two historical figures," he writes, "we can learn something important about our own philosophical options, and about those of any other thinker who dares, philosophically, to say 'I.'"
Ch. 1.The dream of Descartes --ch. 2.The revelation of science --ch. 3.The deposition of wisdom --ch. 4.The Cartesian proofs of God --ch. 5.The Cartesian heritage.
Descartes's Method of Doubt by Janet Broughton Pdf
Descartes thought that we could achieve absolute certainty by starting with radical doubt. He adopts this strategy in the Meditations on First Philosophy, where he raises sweeping doubts with the famous dream argument and the hypothesis of an evil demon. But why did Descartes think we should take these exaggerated doubts seriously? And if we do take them seriously, how did he think any of our beliefs could ever escape them? Janet Broughton undertakes a close study of Descartes's first three meditations to answer these questions and to present a fresh way of understanding precisely what Descartes was up to. Broughton first contrasts Descartes's doubts with those of the ancient skeptics, arguing that Cartesian doubt has a novel structure and a distinctive relation to the commonsense outlook of everyday life. She then argues that Descartes pursues absolute certainty by uncovering the conditions that make his radical doubt possible. She gives a unified account of how Descartes uses this strategy, first to find certainty about his own existence and then to argue that God exists. Drawing on this analysis, Broughton provides a new way to understand Descartes's insistence that he hasn't argued in a circle, and she measures his ambitions against those of contemporary philosophers who use transcendental arguments in their efforts to defeat skepticism. The book is a powerful contribution both to the history of philosophy and to current debates in epistemology.
Through the Eyes of Descartes by Cecilia Sjöholm,Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Pdf
"I shall here present my life," writes Descartes in Discourse on Method, "as in a painting" and my method "as a fable." Through the Eyes of Descartes demonstrates how a Cartesian aesthetics is interwoven in his thought. It brings together a variety of materials: his metaphysical writings and essays in natural philosophy, through to his letters, drawings, and printed images. Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback seek to bring Descartes into dialogue with contemporary phenomenology as well as contemporary psychoanalytic thought. They focus on how perception interacts with emotions and thought, and the way in which our gaze is directed toward limit-phenomena of beauty and fascination. In Through the Eyes of Descartes, Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback counter the traditional picture of Descartes by presenting his work in an entirely different light: a Descartes of the arts, of sensibility, of inner images, and of imagination.
A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies. Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. In Dreaming, Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness. Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research.
Covering both the history of mathematics and of philosophy, Descartes's Mathematical Thought reconstructs the intellectual career of Descartes most comprehensively and originally in a global perspective including the history of early modern China and Japan. Especially, it shows what the concept of "mathesis universalis" meant before and during the period of Descartes and how it influenced the young Descartes. In fact, it was the most fundamental mathematical discipline during the seventeenth century, and for Descartes a key notion which may have led to his novel mathematics of algebraic analysis.
Descartes' ideas not only changed the course of Western philosophy but also led to or transformed the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, physics and mathematics, political theory and ethics, psychoanalysis, and literature and the arts. This book reprints Descartes' major works, Discourse on Method and Meditations, and presents essays by leading scholars that explore his contributions in each of those fields and place his ideas in the context of his time and our own. There are chapters by David Weissman on metaphysics and psychoanalysis, John Post on epistemology, Lou Massa on physics and mathematics, William T. Bluhm on politics and ethics, and Thomas Pavel on literature and art. These essays are accompanied by others by David Weissman and by Stephen Toulmin that introduce the idea of intellectual lineages, discuss the period in which Descartes wrote, and reexamine the premises of his philosophy in light of contemporary philosophical, political, and social thinking.
