René Descartes

Donald Cress

Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th Ed.

Gavin

Descartes teaches lots of things, but the most relevant is the terrible power of motivated reasoning to pervert someone - even if the reasoner is hugely intelligent. 

But not only. Catherine Wilson forced me to think of Descartes as more than a strong mathematician, incomplete scientist, bigoted apriorist and shoddy Analytic. Not least, she wrote this, maybe the brassiest passage I've ever seen in an academic journal:
if Descartes had written a Preface to the Meditations that was truthful, faithful to his firmest convictions, and philosophically consistent, the relevant section would have gone something like this:

I cannot demonstrate the immortality of the human soul, and probably no philosopher can. Immortality is not logically impossible, but it wouldn’t be what you are probably imagining it to be either. Perception, like sensation and emotion, is a registering by our minds of occurrences in our nerves and brain. If our minds endure after death, therefore, as far as the philosopher can tell, they will feel neither pain, nor pleasure, for they will no longerform a composite with our bodies. We will no longer see colours, touch objects, and hear sounds. We will not remember events ofour past lives. We will be numb and inert. Animals will be, as both Aristotle and Lucretius thought, nothing after death, and wehumans will be almost nothing - at most capable of imageless thought and intellectual memory. Of course, we can hope for more than this. Perhaps our bodies will be resurrected and reattached to our minds, so that we are restored to awareness of a world. But this is a matter of faith and cannot be philosophically demonstrated, whereas more important truths such as the excellence of our minds and bodies can be philosophically demonstrated. 

Be that as it may, we are not mere animals. Our language and rationality indicate that we are specially favoured by God. As to whether animals are conscious, I do not know. I avoid speculative philosophy. But everyone can appreciate that animalscannot carry on a conversation, and I seriously doubt that animals reason, for I can show how their behaviour is mediated by the brain to which their sensory organs report, without ascribing reasoning to them. 

The Fathers of the Church were wrong to scorn the human body asa source of moral corruption and to suggest that it is a shell that we will happily cast off. We use the cerebral representations it forms for purposes as exalted as mathematics, and if we could not understand and trust proofs about the triangle, how should we understand and feel confident about proofs about invisible objects such as God?...Admire God, who has given you a world to study, as well as to experience, and a mind equipped with language and reasoning powers, but leave off worrying about eternal rewards and punishments. 


Of course Descartes could not have published such a Preface, not in France and not under his own name. Yet it was to communicate this very different message that he offered, without his heart being in the task, to prove the immortality of the soul.



Charitable to say the least, but that's what we owe the very distant.

Michelle Xu

Again, not a philosophy buff, but rather a student taking an intro to philosophy course.

Of course, Descartes would be included in my intro class. Descartes time and time again has been called the father of modern philosophy.

One thing I enjoyed about his Meditations, is that he writes not as himself but as if he were the reader. The thought process flows (or rather, is supposed to flow) the the sense that it tracks one's train of thought.

That sounds great in theory, however, I had an incredibly difficult time following Descartes' arguments. I found the third meditation the most difficult to follow. His argument for God and the nature of God is full of circular arguments from his perceptions, his thoughts, and his being as a whole. 

To be completely honest, I'm not sure how to critique philosophy. While I enjoyed Descartes' thoughts and ideas, the writing and circularity of it convoluted the main points I wanted to obtain from his writing. Nothing solidified in my mind until after class discussion.

Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th Ed.

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