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Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen
In this classic work, best-selling author Harry Frankfurt provides a compelling analysis of the question that not only lies at the heart of Descartes'sMeditations, but also constitutes the central preoccupation of modern philosophy: on what basis can reason claim to provide any justification for the truth of our beliefs?Demons, Dreamers, and Madmenprovides an ingenious account of Descartes's defense of reason against his own famously skeptical doubts that he might be a madman, dreaming, or, worse yet, deceived by an evil demon into believing falsely.
Frankfurt's masterful and imaginative reading of Descartes's seminal work not only stands the test of time; one imagines Descartes himself nodding in agreement.
eBook
Between Two Worlds
Between Two Worlds is an authoritative commentary on--and powerful reinterpretation of--the founding work of modern philosophy, Descartes's Meditations. Philosophers have tended to read Descartes's seminal work in an occasional way, examining its treatment of individual topics while ignoring other parts of the text. In contrast, John Carriero provides a sustained, systematic reading of the whole text, giving a detailed account of the positions against which Descartes was reacting, and revealing anew the unity, meaning, and originality of the Meditations. Carriero finds in the Meditations a nearly continuous argument against Thomistic Aristotelian ways of thinking about cognition, and shows more clearly than ever before how Descartes bridged the old world of scholasticism and the new one of mechanistic naturalism. Rather than casting Descartes's project primarily in terms of skepticism, knowledge, and certainty, Carriero focuses on fundamental disagreements between Descartes and the scholastics over the nature of understanding, the relation between the senses and the intellect, the nature of the human being, and how and to what extent God is cognized by human beings. Against this background, Carriero shows, Descartes developed his own conceptions of mind, body, and the relation between them, creating a coherent, philosophically rich project in the Meditations and setting the agenda for a century of rationalist metaphysics.
eBook
Powers : a study in metaphysics
This book sees that the solution to a number of the problems of contemporary philosophy lies in the development of an alternative to Hume's metaphysics. This alternative would have real causal powers at its centre. This book sets about developing a thorough account of powers that might persuade those who remain, perhaps unknowingly, in the grip of Hume's assumptions. This book shows both that the notion of a power is central and that it could serve to dispel a number of long-standing philosophical problems. This book's account of powers is as realistic as any that has appeared so far, and shows that dispositions are as real as any other properties. Specifically, they do not depend on their manifestations for their existence; nevertheless, they are directed towards such manifestations. The book thus appropriates the notion of intentionality from Brentano and argues that it is the essential characteristic of powers. It offers a persuasive case for the existence of some basic and ungrounded powers, thus ruling out the reducibility of the dispositional to the non-dispositional. However, the book does allow that there are non-power properties as well as power properties. In this respect, the book's final position is dualistic.
eBook
The Cambridge companion to Descartes' Meditations
\"Descartes' enormously influential Meditations seeks to prove a number of theses: that God is a necessary existent; that our minds are equipped to track truth and avoid error; that the external world exists and provides us with information to preserve our embodiment; and that minds are immaterial substances. The work is a treasure-trove of views and arguments, but there are controversies about the details of the arguments and about how we are supposed to unpack the views themselves. This Companion offers a rich collection of new perspectives on the Meditations, showing how the work is structured literally as a meditation and how it fits into Descartes' larger philosophical system. Topics include Descartes' views on philosophical method, knowledge, scepticism, God, the nature of mind, free will, and the differences between reflective and embodied life. The volume will be valuable to those studying Descartes and early modern philosophy more generally\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Inferring as a way of knowing
Plausibly, an inference is an act of coming to believe something on the basis of something else you already believe. But what is it to come to believe something on the basis of something else? I propose a disjunctive answer: it is either for some beliefs to rationally cause another—where rational causation is understood as causation that is either actually or potentially productive of knowledge—or for some beliefs to “deviantly” cause another, but for the believer mistakenly to come thereby to believe that the former have rationally caused the latter. The result, I argue, is both a theoretically satisfying account of the act of inferring and a demonstration of the power of a knowledge-first approach to the philosophy of mind.
Journal Article
Michelle Obama
\"Michelle Obama is a former First Lady of the United States...and an inspiring role model!\"--Back cover.
BOOK
Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx
Around 1800, German romanticism developed a philosophy this study calls \"Romantic organology.\" Scientific and philosophical notions of biological function and speculative thought converged to form the discourse that Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ reconstructs-a metaphysics meant to theorize, and ultimately alter, the structure of a politically and scientifically destabilized world.
eBook