Descartes's Method of Doubt

Descartes's Method of Doubt
Janet Broughton
Princeton 240 pp.

Descartes thought that we could achieve absolute certainty by starting with radical doubt. He adopts this strategy in the Meditations on First Philosophy, where he raises sweeping doubts with the famous dream argument and the hypothesis of an evil demon. But why did Descartes think we should take these exaggerated doubts seriously? And if we do take them seriously, how did he think any of our beliefs could ever escape them? Janet Broughton undertakes a close study of Descartes's first three meditations to answer these questions and to present a fresh way of understanding precisely what Descartes was up to.

Broughton first contrasts Descartes's doubts with those of the ancient skeptics, arguing that Cartesian doubt has a novel structure and a distinctive relation to the commonsense outlook of everyday life. She then argues that Descartes pursues absolute certainty by uncovering the conditions that make his radical doubt possible. She gives a unified account of how Descartes uses this strategy, first to find certainty about his own existence and then to argue that God exists. Drawing on this analysis, Broughton provides a new way to understand Descartes's insistence that he hasn't argued in a circle, and she measures his ambitions against those of contemporary philosophers who use transcendental arguments in their efforts to defeat skepticism. The book is a powerful contribution both to the history of philosophy and to current debates in epistemology.

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Descartes's Theory of Mind

Descartes's Theory of Mind
by Desmond Clarke

# Paperback: 280 pages
# Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; New Ed edition (November 3, 2005)

"Descartes' scientific ambitions were, to be sure, a crucial part of his philosophical project, and Clarke's careful and persuasive exploration of them provides an important addition to the literature." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"In this book Clarke offers an interesting spin on Descartes: rather than see him (as many do) simply as a substance dualist who offers a very poor account of the mind, Clarke sees him as a scientist pushing scientific explanation of the mind as far as it will go, and only exiting the path as a
substance dualist when explanation has reached its limits. ... Clarke is much to be commended for this reorientation of the bigger picture; but this book is even more to be commended for its detailed and thorough account of the various elements of Descartes's theory of mind. In being nearly a
compendium of Descartes's views about various mental phenomena...Clarke's book will be of interest to scholar and novice alike."--The Review of Metaphysics


Book Description
Descartes is possibly the most famous of all writers on the mind, but his theory of mind has been almost universally misunderstood, because his philosophy has not been seen in the context of his scientific work. Desmond Clarke offers a radical and convincing rereading, undoing the received
perception of Descartes as the chief defender of mind/body dualism. For Clarke, the key is to interpret his philosophical efforts as an attempt to reconcile his scientific pursuits with the theologically orthodox views of his time.

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Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science

Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science
by Daniel Garber

# Hardcover: 352 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press (December 18, 2000)

Review
"This volume is valuable in that it collects in one place essays otherwise not too easy to come by and which together offer a compelling interpretation of Descartes's thought by one of its most distinguished contemporary readers." Review of Metaphysics

"The quality of scholarship and intelligence of the author make for an excellent and highly recommended book for upper-division undergraduates through faculty and advanced scholars." Choice

Book Description
This volume collects some of the seminal essays on Descartes by Daniel Garber, one of the preeminent scholars of early-modern philosophy. A central theme unifying the volume is the interconnection between Descartes's philosophical and scientific interests, and the extent to which these two sides of the Cartesian program illuminate each other, a question rarely treated in the existing literature. This collection will be a mandatory purchase for any serious student of or professional working in 17th-century philosophy, history of science, or history of ideas.

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Derrida - Writing and Difference

Jacques Derrida
Writing and Difference
Translated by Alan Bass. 362 p. 1978

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models.

The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Force and Signification
2. Cogito and the History of Madness
3. Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book
4. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas
5. "Genesis and Structure" and Phenomenology
6. La parole soufflée
7. Freud and the Scene of Writing
8. The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation
9. From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve
10. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
11. Ellipsis
Notes
Sources

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