A Companion to Descartes

by Broughton, Janet; Carriero, John

• ISBN13: 9781405121545
• ISBN10: 1405121548
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-19
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

With more than 30 newly commissioned essays, A Companion to Descartes details in unparalleled depth the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. Alongside discussion of his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals, the volume provides in several essays a unique orientation to the intellectual, religious, and scientific contexts that were important to Descartesrs"s work. Concluding with discussions of the impact of Descartesrs"s work on subsequent generations of philosophers, the essays in this volume offer fresh and distinctive scholarly perspectives on this giant of the history of modern thought.

Author Biography

Janet Broughton is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Descartes’s Method of Doubt (2002).

John Carriero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published widely in early modern philosophy.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

The Intellectual Context

Life and Works

Aristotelian Natural Philosophy: Body, Cause, Nature

Descartes and Augustine

Descartes and the Legacy of Ancient Scepticism

Mathematics and Natural Philosophy

Descartes and Galileo: Copernicanism and the Metaphysical Foundations of Physics

Explanation as Confirmation in Descartes's Natural Philosophy

Descartes and Mathematics

Descartes's Optics: Light, The Eye, and Visual Perception

Epistemology and Metaphysics

Descartes's Method

Descartes's Use of Doubt

Self-knowledge

Descartes on True and False Ideas

Clear and Distinct Perception

Causation Without Intelligibility and Causation Without God in Descartes

Descartes on Substance

Descartes and the Metaphysics of Extension

The Role of God in Descartes's Philosophy

The Cartesian Circle and the Foundations of Knowledge

Innate Ideas

Descartes on the Will and Judgment

Omnipotence, Modality and Conceivability

Descartes's Dualism

The Union and Interaction of Mind and Body

Animals

How to Engineer a Human Being: Passions and Functional Explanation in Descartes

Descartes's Ethics

Descartes's Legacy

Descartes's Legacy in the Seventeenth Century: Problems and Polemic

Contemporary Reactions to Descartes's Philosophy of Mind

Descartes and the Phenomenological Tradition

Our Debt to Descartes

Index

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