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Receptions of Descartes is a collection of work by an international group of authors that focuses on the various ways in which Descartes was interpreted, defended and criticized in early modern Europe. The book is divided into five sections, the first four of which focus on Descartes' reception in specific French, Dutch, Italian and English contexts and the last of which concerns the reception of Descartes among female philosophers.
Rene Descartes credited his success in philosophy, mathematics, and physics to the discovery of a universal method of inquiry, but he provided no systematic description of his method. Descartes and Method carefully examines Descartes' scattered remarks on his application and puts forward a systematic account of his method with particular attention to the role it plays in the Meditations. Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen boldly and convincingly argue against the orthodox conception that Descartes had no method. Through a rigorous and thorough examination, Flage and Bonnen unearth and explain the role of the method of analysis in the Meditations. Descartes and Method is a ground-breaking book that is sure to make a considerable impact on the philosophy community. Anyone wishing to gain a new understanding of Descartes's Meditations should read this book.
This is the third volume of a series that focuses upon the period in which extraordinary intellectual progress was made in the field of philosophy. The period begins, very roughly with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant.
This volume explores the themes of vanishing matter, matter and the laws of nature, the qualities of matter, and the diversity of the debates about matter in the early modern period. Chapters are unified by a number of interlocking themes which together enable some of the broader contours of the philosophy of matter to be charted in new ways. Part I concerns Cartesian Matter; Part II covers Matter, Mechanism and Medicine; Part III covers Matter and the Laws of Motion; and Part IV covers Leibniz and Hume. Bringing together some of the world’s leading scholars of early modern philosophy, as well as some exciting new researchers, Vanishing Matter and the Laws of Motion stakes out new territory that all serious scholars of early modern philosophy and science will want to traverse.
What was the basis for the adoption of mathematics as the primary mode of discourse for describing natural events by a large segment of the philosophical community in the seventeenth century? In answering this question, this book demonstrates that a significant group of philosophers shared the belief that there is no necessary correspondence between external reality and objects of human understanding, which they held to include the objects of mathematical and linguistic discourse. The result is a scholarly reliable, but accessible, account of the role of mathematics in the works of (amongst others) Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, and Berkeley. This impressive volume will benefit scholars interested in the history of philosophy, mathematical philosophy and the history of mathematics.
Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy has proven to be not only one of the canonical texts of Western philosophy, but also the site of a great deal of interpretive activity in scholarship on the history of early modern philosophy over the last two decades. David Cunning's monograph proposes a new interpretation, which is that from beginning to end the reasoning of the Meditations is the first-person reasoning of a thinker who starts from a confused non-Cartesian paradigm and moves slowly and awkwardly toward a grasp of just a few of the central theses of Descartes' system. The meditator of the Meditations is not a full-blown Cartesian at the start or middle or even the end of inquiry, a...
This book sheds new light on the role of freedom in Descartes' thought and defends the theory of an internal relation between freedom and reason in his metaphysics.
This book deals with Descartes’ efforts in his Meditations to discover the first principles of human knowledge, that is, what must be known before anything else can be known. In order for these principles to be first principles, they cannot be conclusions obtained through deductive reasoning. Further, Descartes insists that these first principles cannot be known through the senses, but only through intuition or meditation, our only cognitive faculties for grasping self-evident first principles. This book provides Descartes’ reasons for rejecting the senses as the source of these first principles, and offers textual support for the role of intuition and meditation in apprehending the first principles of human knowledge. Although the bulk of the book is largely exegetical in nature, the last chapter proceeds more critically to show the failures of Descartes’ approach.
Rene Descartes is generally accepted as the "father of modern philosophy", and his Meditations is perhaps the most famous philosophical text ever written. In this Routledge Philosophy GuideBook, Gary Hatfield guides the reader through the text of the Meditations, providing commentary and analysis throughout. He assesses Descartes' importance in the history of philosophy and his continuing relevance to contemporary thought. Descartes and the Meditations will be essential reading for all students of philosophy, and for anyone coming to Descartes for the first time.