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Western modernity has systematically made ancestral and indigenous knowledge invisible through their use of scientific logic, making school a space of hegemonic control through the western knowledge taught in the official curriculum. Despite that, in Chile advances in matters of constitutional recognition and cultural value are rare. Ten years ago, on the country's southern coast, the first mapuce bafkehce school was erected with a curriculum designed to reflect and benefit its own territory. The Kom Pu Lof Ñi Kimeltuwe is an institution that, through mapuce bafkehce pedagogy and insurgent education, challenges and reframes kimeltuwun/kimkantun (teaching-learning) practices. This paper provides an account of the insurgent education which took place in Jaqepvjv lof1 while also exploring the central elements that constitute the educational project present in this Lof, known as Kom Pu Lof Ñi Kimeltuwe, located in the Araucanía Region, Teodoro Smith commune, Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre-Sylvain Regis, once a well-known defender of Cartesianism, offers an unusually rich and innovative refutation of Spinoza. While many of his early modern contemporaries raised narrower objections to particular claims in Spinoza's Ethics , Regis develops a broader anti-Spinozistic position, one that threatens the very core of Spinoza's metaphysical ambitions and offers a philosophically robust alternative. However, as with any far-reaching philosophical commitment, Regis's gambit comes with substantive costs of its own, including creating instabilities within the core of his own philosophical system. Far from diminishing the significance of Regis's anti-Spinozism, this critical appraisal helps us better appreciate both the conceptual pull of Spinozism within early modern metaphysics and one sweeping, albeit costly way of escaping its orbit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ingenious thought of Anton Günther (1783–1863) is rarely mentioned in the annals of nineteenth-century philosophy. However, in the eyes of his contemporaries, Günther belonged to the key thinkers of his age on par with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. Günther was an original writer yet he left many of his insights undeveloped or ambiguously formulated. As a flamboyant and popular debater, he attacked the most influential philosophers of his time. His attacks were aimed especially at what he termed the unavoidable pantheism of these thinkers, a pantheism Günther often identified with monism. Monism, semi-monism, pantheism, and semi-pantheism are recurring charges of Günther against many influential thinkers, including even Descartes, whose thought Günther considered otherwise epoch-making. Based on a reformed Cartesianism, Günther elaborated his antidote he termed dualism. Yet Güntherian dualism turns out to be a synthesis properly termed organicism. On such a basis, Günther carried out a heroic attempt to transcend the horizon of traditional views and open the vista of an I-centered philosophy built on the universal notion of revelation. By re-reading this Bohemia-born thinker, one can have a better understanding of the scope and influence of what we term Austrian Philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pérez and Gomila's book underscores the importance of second- person perspectives and interactions in our lives. The authors question the conventional Cartesian and cognitivist views of the "mind" and social cognition. Instead, they support anti-Cartesian and post-cognitivist approaches, highlighting that social cognition is fundamentally shaped through second-person interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes new ways of characterizing eighteenth-century French Cartesianism. Besides two widely-accepted elements—the belief in "strict mechanism" and the idea that to demonstrate in physics does not involve mathematics, but reference to mechanical models—I add two more, hitherto neglected, features. First, a strong emphasis on experimentalism, namely the view that experiments are crucial to natural-philosophical practice. Second, an epistemological thesis that I call "conjecturalism," which consists in doubting that natural philosophy would attain an ultimate truth on the nature of things. To explore these facets of Cartesianism, I focus on the works of the Jesuit Noël Regnault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the supernatural occurrences in the Marquis's castle, several characters of Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance adhere to the tenets of Lockean empiricism to interpret their sensory perception. Conversely, a few characters adopt Cartesian scepticism to dismiss the validity of sensory experience. To date, no exhaustive study of Ann Radcliffe's fiction has inspected the incorporation of Lockean empiricism and the Cartesian method of René Descartes into her novels. By conducting a historical analysis of the philosophical scene of the Enlightenment era, this paper aims to substantiate that not only does A Sicilian Romance encompass seminal philosophical notions of the age of Enlightenment, but it also points to the shifting philosophical scene within this period, characterised by the dominance of empiricism and the residuality of Cartesianism. By examining the reflection of these philosophies in Radcliffe's novel, this article challenges the supposition that the Gothic novel necessarily contains anti-Enlightenment impulses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the effective history of cartesianism, Mary Astell's reflection on the real self is a significant approach to the problem of defining the soul and its relationship with the body. Accordingly, this work focuses on the viewpoint that this autor has concerning dualism and shows how it has to do with a practical interest: to consolidate a speculative strategy that allows women to become autonomous subjects against the tyranny of custom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following texts include the works of both senior scholars in cartesianism and novel researchers. Furthermore, they are part of a research project financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, [Referencia PID2021-126133NB-I00], titled Ethics and metaphysics of affections. The modern genesis of the present (EMAP). We are, therefore, offering the studies that resulted from this investigation, which began in September 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an alternative solution to the perennial philosophical problem of human nature. The view proposed is “Neo-Thomistic Organicism”, a form of dualism, of the hylomorphist type, that does not subscribe both to the extreme characteristics of Cartesian dualism, and to complementarian non-reductionist physicalist views. Our optic integrates the scientific elements of a form of biological vitalism and both shares Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics, and alienates from Thomas Aquinas in crucial points. In this sense, our perspective is constituted as a scientific-metaphysical understanding regarding human nature, in general, and regarding the soul-body relationship, in particular. The novelty brought by our article does not lie in a completely new perspective, but in some of the morelandian modifications made to classical Thomism and in the holistic approach to the subject that integrates the relevant scientific discoveries in the field of biology and neuroscience. In opposition to Moreland, on the question of individuation, this article is proposing a hybrid approach to how substances and bare particulars possess properties. To achieve its purpose, our analytical approach will begin by offering an exposition of Thomas Aquinas treatise on human nature as it is registered in Summa Theologica, Ia, qq. 75-89, especially to outline, on this basis, some of the fundamental points in which we differ from classical Thomism. This will be followed by a presentation of our perspective, of the morelandian type, and its compatibility with scientific research in biology and neurology. Next, in order to further clarify our position, we will turn to a comparison between the morelandian perspective and complementarian naturalist-physicalist conceptions of human nature, especially of substance. At the end of this comparison we will outline the objections to the morelandian view that distinguish us from it. Finally, we will offer a response to the causal pairing physicalist objection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on addressing misconceptions in existential psychotherapy, challenging the notion that it lacks a conceptual framework and exploring its philosophical roots. It mentions the influence of Cartesian dualism on Western thought and highlights existential concepts such as the correlation of subject and world, and the concept of freedom as a crucial aspect of existence.

Early in his career, Valentin Asmus gave a polemical lecture on Descartes's dialectics, and during the "Thaw" he published a book on René Descartes's life and scientific work. Asmus was the guardian of classical philosophical culture in the worst of times, when it was attacked by ideologically biased and semi-literate "Red professors." They proclaimed Descartes founder of "modern idealism" and of a "mechanical worldview" hostile to dialectics. Asmus responded by arguing that Descartes had contributed much to the development of the dialectic and materialist view of the world—this was the only possible way to rehabilitate Descartes's philosophical legacy from ideological accusations. In his 1956 book, Asmus gave an overview of Descartes's philosophy as a whole. He was fluent in the philosophical techniques of Marxist histmat (short for "historical materialism"); at the same time, the portrait he draws of Descartes clearly shows the Kantian way of thinking, which Asmus learned from the schoolroom in the pre-revolutionary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the manner in which René Descartes discovered the principle of the autonomy of the spirit as a Mathesis Universalis, as a universal science, his perception being much different from the medieval scholastic one, where the intellect corresponded with the sensible reality. Descartes reversed this suitability, considering that the intellect should not be guided by things and build judgments according to them, but, on the contrary, things are analyzed according to the intellect's abilities to give them meanings and sense, to make them intelligible. Firstly, we will demonstrate that, for Descartes, the very existence, the reality of a thing depends on this light of the intellect that unifies all knowledge through Mathesis Universalis. For the French philosopher, order and measure, captured by Mathesis Universalis, become the qualities by which God, the only perfect Being, created the Universe that obeys a coherent mathematical model. Secondly, we will highlight the fact that the starting point of this new metaphysics could be found in Descartes's view that God cannot be considered deceptive, that the world is not the creation of an evil and cunning Genius. In conclusion, knowledge through Mathesis Universalis leads the spirit to that place where the reasons of universal peace can be founded, whose purpose is to overcome those structures of the imaginary that wing the irrational drives dressed in the clothes of war and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presumption that consciousness is fundamental is one that has been purported often in philosophy; less so in psychological science. Yet, the Cartesian interplay of body/mind holds implications for clinical and experimental psychologists alike, perhaps most importantly relevant to one’s starting assumptions about an ontological reality. There are various problems inherent in drawing an argument around the fundamental nature of consciousness (as opposed to say, another primary quality, including most types of monism) without rounding out one’s considerations from disciplinary input across metaphysics, theology, and logic. Outside of a purely positivist (physicalism) inherent presumption, multidisciplinary dialogue is needed, as to posit that the debate has been resolved in one manner or another leads to epistemic and logical problems, some of which I overview here. These disciplines are thus invoked to temper, contravene, and in some cases query Stephan Schwartz’s (2023) ideas posited in his paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1650s, two professors of philosophy at the University of Utrecht defended atomism. Interestingly, one of them, Johannes de Bruyn, is considered to be a staunch Cartesian, while the other, Daniel Voet, was a neo-Aristotelian and strongly opposed to Descartes's philosophy. This article examines this curious situation and analyses the theories of both professors. While converging with Gassendi on several crucial points, their theories relied mainly on other sources. Since De Bruyn's atomistic view has never been studied before, the main part of the article is devoted to him and his sources. Surprisingly, it turns out that David Gorlaeus was a source of inspiration for De Bruyn's development of a new type of Cartesianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction summarises the nature of the strong intellectual links existing between the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) and the Low Countries. It retraces the main steps of his trip to the Spanish Low Countries and the Dutch Republic in 1629, and the importance of this trip for the development of his philosophy, as well as the epistolary network with his correspondents from that area, especially in the field of astronomy. Scholars in the Low Countries were receptive to atomistic theories, empiricism, and anti-dogmatism, all of which are central to Gassendi's philosophy. Gassendi's philosophy also provided arguments against Descartes's metaphysics, and helped disseminate Galileo's mechanics in the Low Countries. Gassendi's influence in the Low Countries lasted beyond his death, as can be seen in the philosophy of Spinoza and Bayle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that in the collapse of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature that results from the rise of mechanical philosophies in the early modern period, the collapse falls on the side of art. That is, all of the diversity among natures that was explained previously as differences among substantial forms came to be seen simply as differences in arrangements of matter according to laws instituted by the "divine artificer", God. This paper argues that, for René Descartes, the collapse occurs on both sides. Natures are artefacts of God, and human artefacts, under some conditions, can be classified as natures or, at least, continuous within nature. Drawing on developments across both horticulture and engineering in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as Descartes' mechanical philosophy, this paper explores challenges to the Aristotelian nature/art distinction. The question then is what, in the advent of this collapse, are human artificers doing when they construct artefacts? Are they replicating God's powers by creating new natures, or are they doing something else, and if so, what might that be? It is argued that we should view human invention for Descartes not as creating new natures so much as discovering them. These findings have consequences for how we interpret Descartes' use of the term "nature" in relation to automata and other artefacts produced by human hands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of mathematical concepts in philosophy, focusing on topology, which may be viewed as a modern supplement to geometry. We show that Plato and Parmenides were already employing geometric ideas in their research, and discuss three examples of the application of topology to philosophical problems: the first concerns the analysis of the Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans, the second the ontology of possible worlds of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and the third Leibniz's monadology. We also consider the role of topology in mathematical explanations of the sort found in science, arguing that it can perform a role in philosophy that is of comparable importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several well-known theodicies, whatever their merits, seem to make little sense of animal suffering. Here we argue that the problem of animal suffering has more layers than has generally been acknowledged in the literature and thus poses an even greater challenge to traditional Judeo-Christian Theism than is normally thought. However, the Neo-Cartesian (NC) defence would succeed in defanging this Expanded Problem of Animal Suffering. Several contemporary philosophers have suggested that recent evidence either supports the NC view or at least should decrease our incredulity with respect to it. We discuss new evidence that undermines the NC position and thus reassert the gravity of the Expanded Problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human–animal scholars have repeatedly accused Marx of standing in the tradition of a Cartesian human–animal dualism. One central piece of evidence brought forward to substantiate the attack is Marx's concept of labour. The present article, however, argues that Marx's conceptualisation of labour is actually non-speciesist and recognises non-waged and other than human forms of labour as well without renouncing qualitative distinctions between them. For Marx, both useful labour and the historically specific capitalist form of social labour cannot be reduced to something peculiar to man. Useful labour encompasses a wide range of ways to transform nature. Due to the bourgeois social relations, capitalist social labour is instead limited to human productive wage labour, excluding numerous types of human labour as well as animal labour. Thus, his concept of labour proves that Marx is not just another 'speciesist' scholar in the long Western tradition of philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally known for the Maupassant style of short story writing, Turkish writer Ömer Seyfettin does not explicitly provide an in-depth psychological analysis of the characters he constructs in his works. Therefore, this endeavor falls to the readers of his short stories. However, no instance can be expected to produce discourse independent of their real-life experience or socially constructed teachings. Therefore, it is significant that the philosophical and psychological aspects of the literary characters built by the writers be analyzed in-depth. In this study, the actions and discourse of the protagonist Sermet Bey are analyzed through Cartesian doubt besides phenomenological considerations to uncover the psychological aspects of the character in the short story titled “Perili Köşk” by Ömer Seyfettin, in which the social transformation of the era is recounted with an ironic attitude to the superstitions held by the society. It is believed that the method employed in discovering the character’s psyche in this study could guide the methodology of relevant future studies. The analysis reveals the skeptical personality of the protagonist in the short story, with the eyesight and sense of hearing supposed by the protagonist as providing deceptive and misleading perceptions and the sense of touch adopted as the only medium to rely on with a view to indirect experience. It is concluded that the skeptical attitude of the protagonist does not bear a complete loyalty to the Cartesian doubt under mind-body dualism due to the role appointed to the sense of touch as opposed to the sleep-wake analogy of Descartes in which he rejects the reliability of this sense, rather the psyche of the protagonist in this short story could be analyzed through the phenomenological considerations and premises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most influential intellectual battles in the history of ideas in the Western world took place in the 17th and 18th centuries and pitted a French mathematician against a Dutch philosopher. This short essay is certainly not the place to indulge in a counter-factual re-imagination of what international law would look like under the reign of a Spinozian epistemology. [Extracted from the article]

The demise of the scholastic worldview and the rise of the mechanistic one may give the impression of a parallel demise of the scholastic explanatory framework. In this paper, I argue that this impression is wrong. To this end, I first outline Descartes' representative and particularly sharp mechanistic criticism of the scholastic notion of explanation. Deploying conceptual machinery from contemporary philosophy of science, I then suggest a reconstruction of the scholastic notion that is immune to Descartes' criticism. Based on this reconstruction, I reinterpret the dispute between Descartes and the scholastics as one that concerns the extent of two legitimate conceptions of explanation. Finally, I outline a contemporary dispute within cognitive neuroscience that reflects the Cartesian-scholastic one as thus reinterpreted, thereby showing that aspects of the world may well require a scholastic-like approach for their explanation. The aim of this paper, then, is to shed light on a most important philosophical-cum-scientific historical controversy from a modern perspective, but also to highlight the deep historical roots of a related contemporary dispute. Based on this, the paper also seeks to draw a substantial philosophical conclusion concerning the issue under dispute in both controversies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a prominent theologian of Dutch Reformed orthodoxy, Samuel Maresius wrote De abusu philosophiae cartesianae (1670) to denounce the dangers of Cartesian theology. Despite its importance in the history of early modern Cartesianism, a crucial question about the work remains to be answered: which aspects of Cartesian theology did Maresius condemn as the most dangerous for Reformed orthodoxy? The present paper answers this question by selecting and analyzing four topics from De abusu: (1) freedom and grace, (2) the Trinity, (3) the world system, and (4) the origins of things. It shows that Maresius identified the danger of Cartesian theology as propagating heresies under the guise of benefitting the Reformed Church. He thus feared that Cartesian theology would destroy orthodoxy from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene is characterized by the definitive failure of the Promethean dream of capitalism about the absolute domination over nature. As a response to the deepening of global ecological crisis, new philosophical discussions have emerged that pivot around the ontological relationship between humans and nature in the Anthropocene. In this context, Marxian ecology that draws upon Marx's concept of "metabolic rift" is often accused of its outdated "Cartesian dualism" of Society and Nature. Against "hybridism" and "monism," which have become increasingly dominant in critical theory of nature thanks to Bruno Latour and Noel Castree, this article examines the legacy of Lukács's theory of "metabolism" in order to defend the contemporary validity of Marxian ecology. Although Lukács is also often criticized for his exclusion of nature from his dialectical analysis of society in History and Class Consciousness, this article shows that there is nothing wrong with categorically separating society and nature. A careful analysis of Lukács's little-known manuscript Tailism and the Dialectic demonstrates that "ontological monism" and "methodological dualism" are unique to his historical materialism. Based on this distinction, Lukács convincingly argues that the one-sided monist understanding of the social and the natural falls into fetishism, and this is exactly why his "methodological dualism" is essential to any ecosocialist critique of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the seventeenth-century French fairy tale investigates embodiment through the figure of metamorphosis in the examples of Charles Perrault's "The Mirror or the Metamorphosis of Orante" (1661), Charlotte-Rose de La Force's "Les jeux d'esprit" (1701) and "Plus Belle que Fée" (1698), and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy's "La Chatte Blanche" (1696). These fairy-tale metamorphoses do not present a rich embodied language, but rather invite us to reconsider the dichotomies between mind and body, at stake in Cartesian philosophy, and between cognition and culture, central to today's conceptualization of the mind as "extended" beyond the body. Deploying the marvelous in playful ways, the conteuses take embodiment beyond the limits of everyday mimesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems that in Cartesian thought the possibility of sense experience cannot easily be put forward because of the theoretical foundations of his philosophy. He, in his masterpiece, i.e., Meditations on First Philosophy, from the very beginning tries to erase any sign of sensory world - the main subject-matter of sense experience and its pre-condition - through (ordinary or hyperbolical) doubts. His attack on senses is so giant that until Sixth Meditation they cannot be restored unless through theology by recourse to the non-deceiving God. The restoration upon which there are great differences among scholars. In our paper, we try to show that regarding to the end of Cartesian philosophy as the mastery over nature, to the extent that he explicitly calls his philosophy, "practical" as opposed to the "theoretical" philosophy of Scholastics, we cannot help but accept not only possibility of sense experience but also its necessity. This mastery over nature can only be attained, for human beings, within the realm of sense experience which is the final link among man as the thinking thing and nature as the extended one, through which the Cartesian science is to be established. Now, if sense experiences have remained unexplained in Cartesian thought, Descartes' claim that "our philosophy makes us the lords and masters of the nature" remains unexplained, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martín Martínez was born in Madrid in 1684 and died fifty years later in the Spanish capital in 1734. He was one of the introducers of medicine and modern philosophy in the Spain of Philip V (Marañón 1962, 130). He is a focus for many of the aspects that bring together scientific research with literary writing and philosophical reflection. In fact, Martinez systematically considered the usefulness of writing science books in Spanish at the same time as he reflected on the scope of Cartesian or Gassendist philosophy and its relationship with scientific research in the sense that some sixty years earlier Robert Boyle had defined it in his The Sceptical Chymist (1661). He is therefore a model figure for observing the penetration of the Scientific Revolution in Spain in the early years of the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article intends to articulate specific themes to the history of philosophy and its disciplinary formation with the use that Merleau-Ponty makes of the history of philosophy, specifically when reading Descartes, in order to show that genuinely philosophical problems can be unfolded from readings that are consistent with the demands methods of the history of philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I analyze the reception of Rorty's article "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" in Diánoia 34, published in 1988. I intend to show how, based on this article, the authors of the texts proposed new theses that serve as antecedents for two trends widely disseminated in Mexico's historiography of philosophy: Benitez's Cartesian school and Beuchot's analogical hermeneutics. With this, the text seeks to deepen the study and understanding of the historiography of philosophy in Mexico during the second half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this text is to call attention to possible problems involved in two frequent strategies among Descartes's readers who maintain, on the one hand, that the Cartesian epistemic project is based on the metaphysical foundation of the truth of clear and distinct ideas and, on the other hand, that there is no circle in defending this reasoning which, in some way, depends on the truth of clear and distinct ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Leo Bersani's concept of the "continuity of being," a concept that attempts to overcome the epistemophiliac Cartesian dissociation of res cogitans from res extensa by means of phenomenological considerations of the proximate milieu, as well as a metaphysical intuition of the virtual One-All. The conception of the co-immanence of the One-All and the multiplicity of beings is pertinent to considerations of contemporary pandemics as well as to the climate crisis insofar as it offers neither hermeneutic resolution, policy diktats, or moral judgment, but simply one among many possible points of departure for whatever will count as thinking in whatever future there may be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pietro Daniel Omodeo aims to examine a variety of Cartesian philosophers active at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, with a focus on two figures: Johannes Placentinus (1630-1683) and Tobias Andreae (1633-1685). This book addresses the reception of Descartes's philosophy in Brandenburg-Prussia, a context largely neglected by modern scholarship on Descartes and Cartesianism. [Extracted from the article]

The main problem of Cartesian Dualism which turns it to an outdated view is mental causation; If mental and physical substance have no mutual property, how we could explain the causal relation between them. Jonathan Lowe reconsiders Cartesian view and introduces his Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism which maintains that I, as a subject of my own experiences, literally can have some physical properties of my body. However, I think his afford is not consequent; By introducing a distinction between negative and positive possibility, first I argue that he needs positive possibility for his view. But as he committed to this idea that the identity of a property depends, at least in part, on its substance, he cannot use the idea of having a property derivatively to show this possibility. However, by resorting to the idea of spatiality of mind, I think we can maintain his core idea and believe that mind literally could has some physical properties. At the end, I will also try to answer to Kim's critiques about the idea of spatiality of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asking from the truth of Cogito as the basis of knowledge, this paper tries to analyze all possible answers in Descartes' philosophy. Inductively, four possible answers are open to consideration: either Cogito is true 1) based on argumentation, 2) because it is clear and distinct, 3) because of being innate, or, lastly, 4) because of intuition. All of these explanations either entail accepting some prior knowledge to Cogito or fall in a vicious circle. A proper way to explain Cogito's truth is a new perspective to the meaning of intuition in Descartes' philosophy. Through this perspective Cogito is a presential experience. Lack of any gap, separation, and disjunction in this presential experience is the reason for the truth of Cogito because this lack is the lack of error's cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, influential historians of philosophy and science laid down the claim that the period between the thirteenth century and seventeenth century marked a watershed in the way we conceptualize the very purpose of natural philosophy and mathematics. From this angle, Foucault insisted on the empirical reality of a certain type of human practice that takes one's own everyday conduct as the object of a process of ethical and aesthetic self-fashioning, which in turn serves as preparation for authentically accessing truth. With Cardano, Bacon shared a strongly naturalistic analysis of divination (the imagination plays a starring role for Bacon). [Extracted from the article]

Richard Rorty notoriously maintained that philosophy is not an academic discipline. He thought that the only viable candidate for philosophy to be an academic discipline—where philosophy consists in a collection of permanent, pure topics—depends on a Cartesian conceptual framework. Once we overcome this framework, he maintained, there will be nothing left to be the distinct subject matter of philosophy. This article argues that there is a conception of philosophy that can be an academic discipline, even if we take Rorty's challenge seriously. It remains even if we overcome the Cartesian conceptual framework. In the end the article goes beyond Rorty's challenge and considers two further criteria for philosophy to be an academic discipline: that it have a distinct method, and that it be able to be done for the public good. The article argues that philosophy can fulfill these two criteria, and therefore that it can be an academic discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyzes Petrus van Maistricht's (1630–1706) critique of Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise found in his Novitatum cartesianarum gangraena (1677). The paper shows, first, that Mastricht regarded Spinoza's atheism as the inevitable outcome of the Cartesians' denial of philosophy's subordination to theology. Second, Mastricht, in refuting Spinoza, revised his earlier critique of Cartesianism. In his previous work, Mastricht had already pointed out the atheistic implications of Cartesianism, but in the Gangraena he could now clearly identify Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise as the atheistic consequence of Cartesianism. He was thus able to confirm his distinctive diagnosis of Cartesianism as a gangrene that would gradually worsen and eventually destroy the entire body of theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I study the contested role of magnification as an observational strategy in the generation theories of William Harvey and René Descartes. During the seventeenth century, the grounds under the discipline of anatomy were shifting as knowledge was increasingly based on autopsia and observation. Likewise, new theories of generation were established through observations of living beings in their smallest state. But the question formed: was it possible to extend vision all the way down to the first points of life? Arguing that the potential of magnification hinged on the metaphysics of living matter, I show that Harvey did not consider observational focus on the material composition of blood and embryos to be conducive to knowledge of living bodies. To Harvey, generation was caused by immaterial, and thus in principle invisible, forces that could not be magnified. Descartes, on the other hand, believed that access to the subvisible scale of natural bodies was crucial to knowledge about their nature. This access could be granted through rational introspection, but possibly also through powerful microscopes. The essay thus ends with a reflection on the importance of Cartesian corpuscularianism for the emergence of microscopical anatomy in seventeenth-century England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seventeenth-century French Benedictine philosopher Dom Robert Desgabets (1610–1678) has been taken by many historians as an idiosyncratic but ultimately loyal proponent of Cartesianism in the years following Descartes' death. As a Catholic cleric aware of the importance of squaring the new philosophical conclusions of the seventeenth-century with Church theology, Desgabets wrote extensively on the ways in which this could be achieved with regard to the most contentious and complex theological Church dogma of the time: transubstantiation. Through an examination of Desgabets' writings on transubstantiation, this article argues that he was emboldened by his particular religious context and preoccupations to undertake an in-depth theological interrogation and revision of Descartes' eucharistic thought, which motivated him to offer a more epistemologically and theologically ambitious account of transubstantiation than Descartes himself thought possible or wise. This article therefore uses Desgabets as an example of the complex interplay between theology and "new" philosophy in the early reception of Cartesianism. It shows how this interplay allowed early, theologically minded Cartesians like Desgabets to use the intellectual resources of the Catholic Church to fortify and safeguard the legacy of Cartesianism in a way Descartes himself did not do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context • Strongly influenced by Cartesian dualist philosophy, contemporary linguistic orthodoxy is unable to explain the nature and function of language in the human praxis of living. Structuralists and cognitivists alike continue to dehumanize language, viewing it as something external to body and mind, thereby impeding our understanding of life and world. Problem • Inability to change the orthodox perspective on language and failure to come to grips with the biology of language and cognition tells on the overall efficacy of linguistics, making it a prescience that negatively affects institutionalized social practices, especially education. Method • Building on Humberto Maturana's biology of cognition as a constructivist epistemology, I identify the epistemological errors of linguistics and show how a systems-theory approach helps us to arrive at a holistic view of language as our existential domain in which we arise as observers. Results • Consistent application of the tenets of the biology of cognition in theorizing language helps us to understand anew or reconceptualize many problems that have been stumbling blocks in linguistics, providing simple and coherent explanations of various linguistic phenomena as distinctions made in language by the observer. Implications • Instead of focusing on language as a system of abstract symbols used as a "tool" to be studied "in itself and for itself," language scientists should make a concerted effort to transform the humanities into a unified science of humanness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, Sabrina Ebbersmeyer draws on various historical evidence, including Elisabeth's correspondence with Constantijn Huygens, to support this interpretation of Elisabeth as a philosopher and polymath. The first section, on Elisabeth's intellectual context, begins in chapter 2 with a reconstruction of Elisabeth's academic and political training at Prinsenhof in Leiden. This chapter inverts the focus of the other essays, using Elisabeth to better understand Descartes. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the dispute between Burge and McDowell over methodology in the philosophy of perception. Burge (2005 , 2011) has argued that the disjunctivism posited by naive perceptual realists is incompatible with the results of current perceptual science, while McDowell (2010 , 2013) defends his disjunctivism by claiming an autonomous field of enquiry for perceptual epistemology, one that does not employ the classificatory schemes of the science. Here it is argued that the crucial point at issue in the dispute is Burge's acceptance, and McDowell's rejection, of the 'Cartesian idealization' of mind as a self-contained system. Burge's case against disjunctivism rests on the assumption of a clearly demarcated boundary between mind and world, a picture of the mind that McDowell's philosophy reacts against. This boundary is required for scientific, causal explanations of perceptual processing because it is a simplifying assumption that helps present scientists with a clearly demarcated object of investigation. Concurring with McDowell, I conclude that philosophers need not carve up their objects of investigation in the same way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On Evidence in Philosophy sketches an epistemology of philosophy itself, a method for philosophical inquiry. Part 1 defends a version of Moore's method of "common sense," in which humble, boring everyday facts like "I have hands" and "I had breakfast earlier today" trump the a priori philosophical premises of arguments for various eliminative idealisms and skepticisms. Part 2 exhibits the deeper poverty of philosophical method, arguing that philosophy cannot prove or even refute any interesting thesis. But Part 3 defends intuitions as giving us good prima facie reason to accept the judgments they support, and then develops the method of wide reflective equilibrium in the context of a broader explanatory‐coherentist epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bart Streumer thinks that we cannot believe the global normative error theory. Streumer's argument presupposes a Cartesian theory of belief fixation. The Cartesian theory entails that we can understand a proposition without believing it. But the Cartesian theory of belief fixation is false, and the Spinozan theory is true. The Spinozan theory of belief fixation entails that we cannot understand a proposition without believing it. The present paper argues that Streumer's claim is false, and we can believe the global normative error theory because the Spinozan theory is correct. The paper then applies the Spinozan theory of belief fixation to the "Now what?" problem for global normative error theory and responds to objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes Lev Vygotsky's attempts to utilize Spinoza's philosophical ideas in solving the methodological crisis of psychology in the 1920s and 1930s. Vygotsky had a manuscript, Uchenie ob emocijakh, where he scrutinized the doctrines of the effects on Descartes and Spinoza. Whilst Descartes' doctrine built on a dualistic soul versus body premise, Spinoza's starting point was monistic. Despite his clear sympathies for Spinoza's solution, which according to him was more compatible with Marxism, too, Vygotsky did not manage to finish his study. One may, indeed, doubt whether Spinoza was able to deliver the decisive key for the solution of the dualism problem, since his philosophy built on metaphysical postulates that were unacceptable to Vygotsky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]