The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes Volume 2 Pdf

[Elia Khensamphanh]

Descarteshas been heralded as the first modern philosopher. He isfamous for having made an important connection between geometry andalgebra, which allowed for the solving of geometrical problems by wayof algebraic equations. He is also famous for having promoted a newconception of matter, which allowed for the accounting of physicalphenomena by way of mechanical explanations. However, he is mostfamous for having written a relatively short work, Meditationes dePrima Philosophia (Meditations On First Philosophy),published in 1641, in which he provides a philosophical groundwork forthe possibility of the sciences.

In 1643, at the age of forty-seven, Descartes moved to Egmond du Hoef.With the Voetius controversy seemingly behind him (though, asmentioned above, it would again raise its head and climax five yearsdown the road), Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia began tocorrespond. In this exchange, Princess Elisabeth probed Descartes onthe implications of his commitment to mind-body dualism. During thistime, he completed a final draft of a new textbook, which he had begunthree years earlier, the Principia Philosophiae(Principles of Philosophy), and in 1644 it was published. Hededicated it to Princess Elisabeth.

In the above, the Adam and Tannery volumes, Oeuvres De Descartes, (11 volumes) are cited. Such citations are abbreviated as AT,followed by the appropriate volume and page numbers. I have wheneverpossible used the Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch translation, The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes (3 volumes). Volume 3 includes Anthony Kenny as a translator. Thishas been abbreviated as CSMK, followed by the appropriatevolume and page numbers. The AT and CSMK numbers arecited, side by side, separated by a semicolon.

308 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL 1997 not immediately perceived at all. Instead, it is the nature of perception itself, here whether unconscious inference (Descartes) or experience (Gassendi) provides shape. The only weakness in this sophisticated and cogent account is the largely irrelevant account that sets up the Descartes-Gassendi option; this is space--nearly half the essay--that might have been better employed in developing her intriguing comments about simple ideas and judgment, for example. Peter Alexander has produced much brilliant work on Locke, but his paper here does not offer much light. The question is why Locke and others should have held that perfectly hard bodies are capable of rebound upon impact. Except for Descartes, whom Locke rejected, all the material, including some very late material right down to Maxwell, comes after the formation of Locke's view. Locke is at his most subtle and insightful with his doctrine of freedom; Vere Chappeli on that doctrine is no less so. The issue is the apparent incompatibility between Locke's early thesis of volitional determinism and his later view that desire can be suspended. Quite in addition to its historical and textual contributions, a nice feature of the paper is to cast the difference, not in terms of Locke's notorious and variously induced indeterminacy, but of the problem, still unsolved in Chappell's view, of direct versus instrumental willing. Ian Harris investigates a question in Christian anthropology with profound and extensive implications in the seventeenth century: the sin of Adam and its relation to human nature. For Locke, one exemplary implication is that Adam cannot have represented his descendents, for representation must always be a matter of choice on the part of the represented. A thorough case is made by James Tully that Locke's Two Treatises provided the concepts of land use, property, and political society that were used to dispossess Amerindians . An interesting residual question is whether the issue lay with Locke's theory or with the use to which it was put, even by Locke himself, on the basis of empirically false premises about Amerindian society. Relevant in this regard are the papers by Janina Rosicka and Paschalis Kitromilides on the reception of Locke in Poland and Greece. Assuming the standard view of Locke on toleration, they show that, in these areas remote from the epicenter of the European Enlightenment, the spread of liberalism was commensurate with the promulgation of Locke's views. THOMAS M. LENNON University of Western Ontario Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel AllwiU. Edited and translated by George di Giovanni. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995. Pp. xv + 683. Cloth, $9o.oo. Despite his enormous influence upon German philosophy and letters, F. H. Jacobi has long been virtually ignored in the Anglophone world. This neglect is all the more puzzling when one considers that he was at the center of three of the most important and fateful intellectual controversies of his time: the "pantheism controversy" over BOOK REVIEWS 309 Lessing's alleged Spinozism; the "atheism controversy" over the implicit "nihilism" of the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Fichte; and the revived pantheism controversy with Schelling concerning the philosophy of nature and the "revelation of divine things." No longer need anyone complain about the paucity of material concerning Jacobi in English, however, for George di Giovanni has now provided us with graceful and accurate translations of virtually all of Jacobi's most important philosophical writings, including: Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn (complete translation of the first edition of 1785, plus excerpts from the expanded second edition of 1789); David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism (complete translation of the first edition of 1787, plus the long introduction to the second edition of 1815); Edward AUwiU'sCollection of Letters (first edition, x792); and Jacobi to Fichte (1799, including the important supplements and appendix). Had this volume included only these English translations ofJacobi's writings it would have been a major contribution not only to our appreciation of an important, interesting , and neglected thinker, but also to our understanding of the history of German philosophy during the...

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The article is an analysis of Hegel's early thinking about the system of spirit, which he develops already during his time in Bern and Frankfurt in the theological context, and uses later, albeit it in other terms, in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The so-called First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement was not published during Kant's lifetime, for Kant wrote a replacement for the publication of the work when it appeared. It includes a large overview of the entirety of the Critical system, arranged in its final form.

The paper addresses the recurrent charge that Richard Rorty is a "linguistic idealist". I show what the charge consists of and try to explain that there is a charitable reading of Rorty's works, according to which he is not guilty of linguistic idealism. This reading draws on Putnam's well-known conception of "internal realism" and accounts for the causal independence of the world on our linguistic practices. I also show how we can reconcile this causal independence of things and the sense of our discourse being guided by them with our autonomy with regard to the construction of various "vocabularies" with which we describe, or cope with, reality. In the final part, I address in some detail Rorty's animadversions concerning the idea of the intrinsic nature of reality. I show them to be only partly successful.

Translation of the post-mortem edition of the The Spirit of the Laws ( L'esprit des lois), from 1757, Montesquieu's influential work in political theory. The translated text is accompanied by commentary.

An important task for every major philosopher is to offer us an understanding of the nature of mind. The essays in this volume discuss different aspects of the philosophical theories of mind put forward in the century and a half that followed Descartes' Meditations of 1641. These years, often referred to as the 'early-modern period', are probably unparalleled for originality and diversity in conceiving the mind. The volume includes two essays on Descartes' own thinking, as well as examinations of what Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, the Cambridge Platonists, and others, have to say about the nature of mind.

Kant developed his critique of the rationalistic metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectics of the Critique of Pure Reason. His conception of Ideas and his theory of the Unconditioned founded a new understanding of metaphysics. Kant scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to this important issue. The volume seeks to remedy this.

The translation is a new translation [after 70 years] of this foundational text of modern political theory, more generally of modern English philosophy. The translation includes for the first time the complete English text of 1651 as well as a comprehensive index. In view of the scope and importance of the work, which covers philosophy of mind, language, epistemology and theory of motivation and value, the nature of the individual and society, sovereignty, stability of political order and peace, as well as the relation between secular and religious power, the translators sought to render not only a faithful and philosophically informed translation but one which they hoped would lay foundations for future translations of British philosophical texts.

The central theme of this work is the changes in the methodology of the historiography of science. The book describes the history of the historiography of science as an autonomous discipline since its beginnings in the 17th century, focusing above all on changes in its approach to the history of science. The exposition of these changes is grounded in the assumption that there are four main methodological stances in the historiography of science: anachronic, diachronic, internalistic and externalistic. The main thesis of the study is that, from the methodological point of view, it is possible to understand the history of the historiography of science as a transition from anachronic internalism to diachronic externalism.

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