Rationalists' Concept of Mental Activity: The Cartesian Example (original) (raw)
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Análisis. Revista de Investigación filosófica, Vol. 2, nº 1 (2015): 163-193.
In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the Cartesian proof of the external world sheds light on some vexatious questions concerning his theory of sense perception. Three main points emerge from the discussion: a picture of the mind, conceived as the power of understanding, as essentially related to the physical world; an extension of rationality such that it includes a set of necessities that neither can be deduced from the principles furnished by pure understanding alone nor are to be found among the particular items of sense experience; and a conception of human sense perception as a composite power that includes sensory awareness as well as understanding, and so that establishes a sharp distinction between human and animal sensory awareness. As far as agency is a constitutive ingredient of human sense perception, Descartes’ doctrine is in line with some current versions of a virtue epistemology.
The Enminded Body. Spinoza, Descartes, and the Philosophy of Cognition – A Critical Note
Ontologically, Baruch Spinoza and Rene Descartes take significantly different stands on truth, mind and meaning. It this respect, the latter can be regarded as the founder of modern epistemology, phenomenology, and scientific thinking. Nevertheless, Spinoza's mysticism and resounding Spinozist rejections of Cartesian rationalism can be found at the root of modern analytic philosophy and, even more surprisingly, in most basic assumptions of current cognitive science. The main issue of this "metaphysical" debate is the status of mind, consciousness, mental representations, truth, and meaning in general, and therefore the debate concerns the possibility of a cognitive semantics.
Ideas and Reality in Descartes
Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza, edited by Martina Reuter and Frans Svensson. London: Routledge, 2019
This chapter explores some key issues within Descartes’s theory of cognition. The starting-point is a recent interpretation, according to which Descartes is part of a tradition of theorizing about human cognition, beginning from the idea that we are in principle capable of articulating or grasping the basic order of reality. Earlier readings often take Descartes to question whether we have any cognitive access to reality at all. On the new reading, Descartes instead defends a robust conception of our cognitive relation to reality—our cognition needs to be “determined by reality,” as John Carriero puts it. One important element of Carriero’s interpretation is that Descartes’s notion of idea is to be understood along the lines of the Aristotelian doctrine of formal identity between cognizer and cognized. Here it is argued that retaining the latter doctrine faces some difficulties, given the novel conception of the structure of reality defended by Descartes. This chapter proposes that he needs an alternative account of what it is for a cognizer to be determined by reality. Attending to some important differences between the innate idea of extension and that of God, the chapter concludes that Descartes may not have a fully worked-out account of his own. Considering some of the problems inherent in his views can, however, shed light on the, from our contemporary perspective, peculiar role both Spinoza and Leibniz give to God in accounting for cognition.
A Critique of Descartes' Mind-Body Dualism
In this enterprise, I shall present Descartes' theory of 'methodic doubt,' moving systematically as he (Descartes) himself would suppose we do, from the establishment of the being of his thinking self (his soul), through the existence of a non-mischievous, infinitely, perfect Being, God, to the existence of a corporeal, extended substance (his body), as distinct from his mind; and the ultimate interaction of the two distinct and separate substances: mind and body. Also, I shall give a critical evaluation of Descartes' method, bringing into focus the alternative theories of other philosophers aimed at resolving the Cartesian dualism. The scientific standpoint on the issue shall also be considered. Through these analyses, I shall establish the thesis that, the interaction of mind and body is only probable.
Descartes' s Conception of Mind through the Prism of Imagination: Cartesian Dualism Questioned
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2018
The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian Dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As a mode considered as a general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body.
Teorema Revista Internacional De Filosofia, 1996
La distinción de Descartes entre substancia material y substancia pensante da lugar a un problema tanto sobre nuestro conocimiento del mundo exterior como sobre el conocimiento de otras mentes. Sorprendentemente, Descartes dice poco sobre esta segunda cuestión. En la Segunda Meditación escribe sobre nuestro juicio (único) de que las figuras que se ven a través de su ventana son hombres y no autómatas. En este artículo se argumenta que pensar en el juicio como una operación de este modo equivale a pasar por alto el hecho de que, dada la metafísica cartesiana, nuestro juicio es susceptible aquí de un doble error. Puede ser erróneo respecto de que la figura que está ante mí sea un ser humano; y puede ser erróneo respecto de que la figura que está ante mí tenga una mente. Se sugiere que una de las razones de que Descartes pase por alto la posibilidad de este doble error es su supuesto de que todos y sólo los animales, de entre todos los seres corpóreos, tienen mentes. Se argumenta también que la sugerencia de que Descartes pasó por alto esta posibilidad de un doble error está apoyada por su propuesta, en el Discurso V, de una "prueba del hombre real": el uso del lenguaje por parte del otro.