Descartes and the Ingenium

Descartes and the Ingenium
Author: Raphaële Garrod
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2020-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004437622

A historically-informed account of the lasting importance of embodied thought in the intellectual trajectory of René Descartes, still remembered today as the founding father of dualism.

Descartes and the Ingenium

Descartes and the Ingenium
Author: Raphaële Garrod
Publisher: Brill's Studies in Intellectua
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004437616

"Descartes and the 'Ingenium' tracks the significance of embodied thought (ingenium) in the philosophical trajectory of the founding father of dualism. The first part defines the notion of ingenium in relation to core concepts of Descartes's philosophy, such as memory and enumeration. It focuses on Descartes's uses of this notion in methodical thinking, mathematics, and medicine. The studies in the second part place the Cartesian ingenium within preceding scholastic and humanist pedagogical and natural-philosophical traditions, and highlight its hitherto ignored social and political significance for Descartes himself as a member of the Republic of Letters. By embedding Descartes' notion of ingenium in contemporaneous medical, pedagogical, but also social and literary discourses, this volume outlines the fundamentally anthropological and ethical underpinnings of Descartes's revolutionary epistemology"--

Descartes's Method

Descartes's Method
Author: Tarek Dika
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2023-03-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192869868

Tarek Dika presents a systematic account of Descartes' method and its efficacy. He develops an ontological interpretation of Descartes's method as a dynamic and, within limits, differentiable problem-solving cognitive disposition or habitus, which can be actualized or applied to different problems in various ways, depending on the nature of the problem. Parts I-II of the book develop the foundations of such an habitual interpretation of Descartes's method, while Parts III-V demonstrate the fruits of such an interpretation in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and mathematics. This is the first book to draw on the recently-discovered Cambridge manuscript of Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1620s): it gives a concrete demonstration of the efficacy of Descartes's method in the sciences and of the underlying unity of Descartes's method from Rules for the Direction of the Mind to Principles of Philosophy (1644).

Spiritual Exercises and Early Modern Philosophy

Spiritual Exercises and Early Modern Philosophy
Author: Simone D'Agostino
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2023-09-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004515534

In his renowned collection Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot suggests that the original aspect of philosophy as a method by which one exercises oneself to achieve a new way of living and seeing the world fails with the rise of modernity. In that period, philosophy becomes increasingly theoretical, tending toward a system. However, Hadot himself glimpses at the dawn of modernity some instances of the original aspect of philosophy still very much present, and in his wake, Michel Foucault warns that between the late 16th and early 17th centuries the philosophical question of the reform of the mind attests to a still very close link between asceticism and access to truth. This book aims to develop just such an idea by thoroughly analyzing the most representative works of the reform of the mind in the early modern period: Francis Bacon’s New Organon (1620), René Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (1637), and Baruch Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677). From this analysis it will emerge that these modern works fully deserve to be counted among the tradition of philosophy as way of life. On closer inspection, the inquiries about method elaborated in these works are fully understandable only when read in the light of a broader and more complex philosophical need: to establish the spiritual conditions for accessing truth and aspiring to full self-realization.

Teaching Philosophy in Early Modern Europe

Teaching Philosophy in Early Modern Europe
Author: Susanna Berger
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030846210

This book examines how philosophy was taught in the early modern period in Europe. It breaks new ground in a number of ways. Firstly, it seeks to bring text-based scholars in the history of philosophy together with social and cultural historians to examine the interaction between tradition and innovation in the early modern classroom, the site where traditional views of the world were transmitted to the generation that was to give birth to modern philosophy and science. Secondly, it draws together scholars who are centered on ideas and words with other scholars who focus on the role of images in the classroom and the intellectual world in this central period of history. The volume advances our understanding of how philosophy was understood and transmitted in this rich and crucial era. The principal audience for Teaching Philosophy are historians of science, philosophy, art, visual culture, and print culture. The chapters are written in a tone accessible to upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. It also reaches non-specialist readers interested in subjects including the “scientific revolution,” the organization of information, and Renaissance and Baroque visual art.

Logodaedalus

Logodaedalus
Author: Alexander Marr
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2019-02-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822986302

Before Romantic genius, there was ingenuity. Early modern ingenuity defined every person—not just exceptional individuals—as having their own attributes and talents, stemming from an “inborn nature” that included many qualities, not just intelligence. Through ingenuity and its family of related terms, early moderns sought to understand and appreciate differences between peoples, places, and things in an attempt to classify their ingenuities and assign professions that were best suited to one’s abilities. Logodaedalus, a prehistory of genius, explores the various ways this language of ingenuity was defined, used, and manipulated between 1470 and 1750. By analyzing printed dictionaries and other lexical works across a range of languages—Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, German, and Dutch—the authors reveal the ways in which significant words produced meaning in history and found expression in natural philosophy, medicine, natural history, mathematics, mechanics, poetics, and artistic theory.

The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism

The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism
Author: Steven M. Nadler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 843
Release: 2019
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198796900

An illustrious team of scholars offer a rich survey of the thought of Rene Descartes; of the development of his ideas by those who followed in his footsteps; and of the reaction against Cartesianism. Epistemology, method, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, political thought, medical thought, and aesthetics are all covered.

Rubens’s Spirit

Rubens’s Spirit
Author: Alexander Marr
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1789144000

Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity, and genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal in the transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius. Ranging across the artist’s entire career, it explores Rubens’s engagement with these themes in his art and life. Alexander Marr looks at Rubens’s forays into altarpiece painting in Italy as well as his collaborations with fellow artists in his hometown of Antwerp, and his complex relationship with the spirit of pleasure. It concludes with his late landscapes in connection to genius loci, the spirit of the place.