The Descartes Legacy

The Descartes Legacy
Author: Nina Croft
Publisher: Entangled: Select Otherworld
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2013-09-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1622661060

Her truth is more deadly than his revenge... Lucas Grafton has spent the last ten years hunting the Conclave, a secret organization who took everything from him: his wife, his child, his very identity. Now he has a lead—an imminent terrorist attack on London—code-named Descartes. Born with a genetic illness, Jenna Young has always known she was different. But the unexpected death of her father catapults her into a world of murder and terrorism she never expected. In order to stay alive, she must solve a twenty-five year old mystery—and her only ally a hard bitter man in search or retribution, her only clue the Descartes Highlands, an area on the near side of the moon. Luke's need for revenge collides with Jenna's hunt for the past, and together they must stand against the Conclave. All the while uncovering the truth behind Jenna's illness, a truth that will make Jenna question her very humanity.

The Failure of Modernism

The Failure of Modernism
Author: Brendan Sweetman
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1999
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780966922615

The contributors to The Failure of Modernism are influenced by the view that modernism has failed, and most of the essays attempt to critique specific features of modernism, often from a more traditional perspective. Modernism in philosophy is characterized by skepticism and anti-realism in epistemology, and by relativism in ethics and politics.

The Nature of True Minds

The Nature of True Minds
Author: John Heil
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 1992-09-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0521413370

This work proposes a way to a naturalistic synthesis, one that accords the mental a place in the physical world alongside the non-mental.

Another Mind-Body Problem

Another Mind-Body Problem
Author: John Harfouch
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2018-05-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438469977

The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human,' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems.

Soul, Mind and Brain from Descartes to Cognitive Science

Soul, Mind and Brain from Descartes to Cognitive Science
Author: Paolo Pecere
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030514633

This interdisciplinary book ties the historical work of Descartes to his successors through current research and critical overviews on the neuroscience of consciousness, the brain, and cognition. This text is the first historical survey to focus on the cohesions and discontinuities between historical and contemporary thinkers working in philosophy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience. The book introduces and analyzes early discussions of consciousness, such as: metaphysical alternatives to scientific explanations of consciousness and its connection to brain activity; claims about the possibilities and limits of neuroscientific accounts of consciousness and cognition; and the proposition of a “non-reductive naturalism” concerning phenomenal consciousness and rationality. The author assesses the contributions of early philosophers and scientists on brain, consciousness and cognition, among them: Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, Haller, Kant, Fechner, Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond. The work of these pioneers is related to that of modern researchers in physiology, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, including: Freud, Hilary Putnam, Herbert Feigl, Gerald Edelman, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, amongst others. This text appeals to researchers and advanced students in the field.

A Companion to Descartes

A Companion to Descartes
Author: Janet Broughton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2010-11-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 144433784X

A collection of more than 30 specially commissioned essays, this volume surveys the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, while integrating unique essays detailing the context and impact of his work. Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on the work of Descartes Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals Explores the philosophical significance of his contributions to mathematics and science Concludes with a section on the impact of Descartes's work on subsequent philosophers

Reading Descartes Otherwise

Reading Descartes Otherwise
Author: Kyoo Lee
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823261255

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book’s series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes’ signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. The author patiently unravels the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes, the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes, the father of modern philosophy”—a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere. In the process, she revitalizes and reframes the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way more mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces.

Diderot and Descartes

Diderot and Descartes
Author: Aram Vartanian
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2015-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400877180

A study of scientific naturalism in the Enlightenment. In tracing the materialism of Diderot, La Mettrie, Buffon, and D'Holbach to its sources, it offers a fresh appraisal of the total influence of Descartes on the Enlightenment. Originally published in 1953. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes

The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes
Author: Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2007-11-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226204448

Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80) and René Descartes (1596–1650) exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their correspondence contains the only known extant philosophical writings by Elisabeth, revealing her mastery of metaphysics, analytic geometry, and moral philosophy, as well as her keen interest in natural philosophy. The letters are essential reading for anyone interested in Descartes’s philosophy, in particular his account of the human being as a union of mind and body, as well as his ethics. They also provide a unique insight into the character of their authors and the way ideas develop through intellectual collaboration. Philosophers have long been familiar with Descartes’s side of the correspondence. Now Elisabeth’s letters—never before available in translation in their entirety—emerge this volume, adding much-needed context and depth both to Descartes’s ideas and the legacy of the princess. Lisa Shapiro’s annotated edition—which also includes Elisabeth’s correspondence with the Quakers William Penn and Robert Barclay—will be heralded by students of philosophy, feminist theorists, and historians of the early modern period.