This is an English translation of Descartes' seminal discourse, with an original essay by Richard Kennington. This text is designed to provide the student with a close translation, notes, and a glossary of key terms, facilitating access to ideas as they originally were presented and helping to make the translator's work transparent. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of (...) the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Decartes' immediate audience. The Focus Philosophical Library publishes clear, faithful editions enabling access for modern students to the essential ideas and wisdom of the world’s greatest thinkers. (shrink)

Richard Kennington, a professor for many years at Pennsylvania State University and the Catholic University of America, was renowned for his insight in reading and teaching early modern philosophy. Although he published articles and spoke widely, never before have his writings been collected in a book. On Modern Origins deftly shows how modern thinkers assessed the errors of the classical tradition and established in its place a philosophy that fuses a new meaning of nature and of theory with humanitarian goals. (...) This volume is an essential source for scholars seeking to understand the contemporary significance of the dawning of the modern era. (shrink)

This volume reflects a reawakened interest in the scientific writings of Descartes, at least partly inspired by recent research by historians and philosophers of science. The editor has gathered ten essays, all of which relate to what he believes is "perhaps Descartes' primary concern... the attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for mathematical physics". Three of the essays study Descartes' scientific writings, especially the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, with a view toward the later, metaphysical writings, which are (...) understood by the authors as theoretical justification for the mathematical science of nature. Stephen Gaukroger recognizes that in the Rules Descartes yokes mathematics to physics, and attempts to explain why this project to establish a mathematical science of nature failed. The author maintains that in order to establish such a science, Descartes unites the objects of mathematics and physics by means of a two-fold reduction. First, the procedures of the two sciences are joined and assimilated to the general reasoning procedure, the method, advocated in Rule IV. Unfortunately, Gaukroger makes sweeping and unsubstantiated claims here. He imports Descartes' distinction between analysis and synthesis as modes of proof and applies it to the more technical uses in algebra and geometry, the "analysis" of the "geometricians" referred to in Rule IV. This hybrid notion he then identifies with the method announced in Rule IV; but Gaukroger interprets this method on the model of resolution and composition in the logical tradition. The second step of the reduction takes place when Descartes identifies the objects of the two sciences through his account of imagination in Rules XII and XIV. According to these passages, the imagination has a double function: since it is a corporeal organ, it receives and embodies real extended magnitudes; but since it is also the locus for images, it can represent "pure extended magnitudes," i.e., the objects of mathematics. Gaukroger acknowledges his debt to Jacob Klein for these insights. He fails to appreciate Klein's central point, however, that through his doctrine of imagination Descartes, either mistakenly or by conscious design, identifies a first intention with a second intention, and that this identification is at the heart of the modern conception of number. In conclusion Gaukroger attributes the demise of the mathematical project to Descartes' "essentialism". Metaphysical considerations, e.g., that the essence of body is extension, determine the scope of inquiry so narrowly that properly physical properties of bodies, such as hardness, are excluded from science. This claim is not only trivial, it is erroneous. In Rules VIII-XII Descartes sets limits upon human inquiry prior to and independently of any metaphysical considerations or claims about essence. (shrink)

Prompted by contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind, the authors of this volume make a turn to the past, to Descartes and to two of his successors, Hume and Berkeley. The rationale for this turn lies in the authors’ view that philosophy is essentially problem solving and that Descartes is the inaugurator of a still-unsolved problem. Descartes’s primary epistemological concern—the problem he wants to solve—is “how we get information from and about the external world, given the new theories of science”. (...) The theory of ideas found especially in the Meditations is his attempt at a solution, an attempt that the Hausmans contend is useful today. Yet their historical turn has a nonhistorical core, for they contend that the problem itself has a logic that escapes the context of its origin. Guided by the “logic of the problem,” the authors select passages from the Meditations and from “Comments on a Certain Broadsheet” in order to put together an option neglected in current studies: a semantic doctrine of innate ideas. Thus the authors return to the origin of a problem not to understand the origin, but to work out a solution that is timely. They focus on portions of a text in abstraction from the whole writing in which they occur, an omission that is not so much of historical, as of philosophical consequence. They never question their understanding of philosophy, which is heir to that consciously founded by Descartes. (shrink)

This series was inaugurated last year, the year which marked the 350th anniversary of Rene Descartes' first published writing, the Discourse on Method and Essays. Like that writing, this important series, admirably edited by Willis Doney, is both the first of its kind, and a survey of all parts of Cartesian philosophy. It likewise promises to be tremendously beneficial to its readers: by making available valuable books and articles long out of print by a variety of interpreters and on virtually (...) every Cartesian writing, it invites us to reevaluate the state of Cartesian studies altogether. (shrink)