Category: Descartes
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The Cartesian Dream Argument and an Austinian Contrast Argument
In this Substack entry I defend the Frenchman against the Englishman. Continentals 1 – Insular Islanders 0. A number of contrast arguments are examined.
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Mind-Body Dualism in Aquinas and Descartes: How Do They Differ?
Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation. Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are…
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Grace
Between phenomenology and theology. Stack leader.
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Competing Interpretations of Descartes
Magnificent in aspiration, philosophy is miserable in execution. Thus one of my aphorisms. Not only do competent practitioners disagree about every issue, we also disagree about the interpretation of the great philosophers. The infirmity of finite reason in a fallen world kicks us humans to the ground where we learn doxastic humility. Or at least…
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A ‘Feuerbachian’ Objection to Descartes’ First Meditation III God Argument
Descartes gives three arguments for the existence of God in his Meditations on First Philosophy. This entry discusses the first argument and commenter Elliot's objection to it. We can call it the argument from the representational content of the God-idea. In a subsequent entry I hope to set forth the argument in full dress and…
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A Problem in Husserl
Edmund Husserl has a beef with Descartes. In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to make the transcendental turn (die transzendentale Wendung). He stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt), from which he then argues to get back what he had earlier doubted, including…
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Descartes Meets Meinong: Might I be a Nonexistent Individual?
Lukas Novak thinks I am being politically, or rather philosophically, 'correct' in rejecting Meinongianism. And a relier on 'intuitions' to boot. I plead innocent to the first charge. As for the second, I rather doubt one can do philosophy at all without appealing to some intuition somewhere. That would make for an interesting metaphilosophical discussion. …
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Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity
From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox. Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only…
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Personal and Impersonal Uses of the First-Person Singular Pronoun
Panayot Butchvarov in his latest book claims that the first-person singular pronoun as it functions in such typical philosophical contexts as the Cartesian cogito is "a dangling pronoun, a pronoun without an antecedent noun." (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 40) In this entry I will try to understand and…
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A Cartesian Argument Against Meinong
The following is excerpted from my "Does Existence Itself Exist? Transcendental Nihilism Meets the Paradigm Theory" in The Philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov: A Collegial Evaluation, ed. Larry Lee Blackman, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, pp. 57-73, excerpt pp. 67-68. If anything can count as an established result in philosophy, it is the soundness of Descartes'…
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Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle
In Misattributed to Socrates, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression." But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.' And yesterday I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin. Today I received from Claude Boisson an example of…
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Nonsense about Descartes from the Science Page of the New York Times
This is an old post from the Powerblogs site. Now seems an opportune time to give it a home here. One of the purposes of this weblog is to combat scientism. …………….. Here we read: But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes,…
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The Cartesian Dream Argument and an Austinian Contrast Argument
J. L. Austin, in a footnote to p. 49 of Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962), writes of ". . . the absurdity of Descartes' toying with the notion that the whole of our experience might be a dream." In the main text, there is a sort of argument for this alleged absurdity. The argument may…
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Pseudo-Intellectual Tripe from William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin (Credo, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 5) thinks to correct Socrates and Descartes but makes a fool of himself in the process. Here is what he says: Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was mistaken;…
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Was Descartes Poisoned by a Catholic Priest?
As we have been learning, the conceivability of such theological doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, and Transubstantiation depends on one's background ontology. Erlangen University's Theodor Ebert, according to this Guardian account, argues that the father of modern philosophy was poisoned with an arsenic-laced communion wafer by a Catholic priest because his metaphysical position is inconsistent with…