It is no surprise that the phenomenal qualities of our sensory experience pose recalcitrant philosophical problems for a physical materialist metaphysics. The colors of flowers as we experience them by sight, the taste of a ripe peach, and the smell of fresh-cut grass are undeniably part of the experienced world; yet in their phenomenal mode, they do not seem well-placed in the physicist's world of particles and energy fields. It seems, prima facie, that the metaphysical programs found in earlier (...) science and philosophy were better suited to accommodate these qualities: in the hylomorphic world of the Aristotelians, colors were "real qualities" existing as such in flowers; in the dualistic world of Descartes, colors were displaced from things like flowers to the immaterial mind of the perceiver. The dissertation argues that this intuition about our philosophical heritage is both philosophically confused and historically inaccurate. It betrays a misconception about phenomenal qualities and the problems they pose which results from a failure to distinguish phenomenal qualities from a special subset of sensible qualities that we have come to call "secondary" qualities. Disentangled from the primary-secondary quality distinction, phenomenal qualities include all sensible qualities insofar as they form the experiential contents of our sensory perceptions. So considered, phenomenal qualities invite difficult questions about the representational nature and ontological status of our sensory experience even within the Aristotelian and Cartesian metaphysics. By examining Descartes' and the Aristotelians' theories of sense perception with a focus on these questions we achieve a better understanding of "the problem" of phenomenal qualities, better interpretations of these historical theories of sense perception, and suggestions for reshaping the problem space within which we think philosophically about phenomenal qualities today. (shrink)

"Six Metaphysical Meditations" by René Descartes (translated by William Molyneux). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone (...) in a high-quality digital format. (shrink)

This article proposes and empirically tests a theoretical framework incorporating Reidenbach and Robin’s (J Bus Ethics 10(4):273–284, 1991 ) conceptual model of corporate moral development. The framework is used to examine the relation between governance and business ethics, as proxied by diversity management (DM), and financial reporting quality, as proxied by the magnitude of earnings management (EM). The level of DM and governance quality are measured in accordance with the ratings of Jantzi Research (JR), a leading provider of social and (...) governance research for institutional investors. This DM score is part of an index developed by JR that investment managers use to integrate DM criteria into their investment decisions. As expected, a negative relation between corporate DM development and financial reporting quality is found while controlling for other factors known in the literatures on governance and accounting choices to affect earnings quality. Despite some caveats presented in conclusion, this study contributes to the ethics, governance, and financial reporting literatures by studying the dynamics between governance and ethics in the prevention of EM. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The purpose of thisDescartes Dictionaryis to bring together as many as possible of the technical and special terms in Descartes writings with their definitions in Descartes own words. There are also implicit characterizations of the meanings of many words, and a handful of entries were included simply for their own sake because Descartes had something interesting to say about his life and world. All of the entries, or almost all of them, have been newly translated for this volume. There are (...) many reasons for preparing new translations: the language in the older translations is archaic and often inaccurate; many of Descartes most important works have never been translated into English; and modern translations vary in quality and style. What is most important, though, is that the old translations simply failed to pay attention to the technical language that Descartes used, and so blurred some of the most important distinctions that he made. (shrink)

Rene Descartes Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences by Rene Descartes The Discourse on the Method (French: Discours de la methode) is a philosophical and autobiographical treatise published by Rene Descartes in 1637. Its full name is Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (French title: Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verite dans les sciences). The (...) Discourse on The Method is best known as the source of the famous quotation "Je pense, donc je suis" ("I think, therefore I am"), which occurs in Part IV of the work. Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing truth from error, which is properly what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The seventeenth century witnesses the demise of two core doctrines in the theory of perception: naive realism about color, sound, and other sensible qualities and the empirical theory, drawn from Alhacen and Roger Bacon, which underwrote it. This created a problem for seventeenth century philosophers: how is that we use qualities such as color, feel, and sound to locate objects in the world, even though these qualities are not real? -/- Ejecting such sensible qualities from (...) the mind-independent world at once makes for a cleaner ontology, since bodies can now be understood in purely geometrical terms, and spawns a variety of fascinating complications for the philosophy of perception. If sensible qualities are not part of the mind-independent world, just what are they, and what role, if any, do they play in our cognitive economy? We seemingly have to use color to visually experience objects. Do we do so by inferring size, shape, and motion from color? Or is it a purely automatic operation, accomplished by divine decree? -/- This volume traces the debate over perceptual experience in early modern France, covering such figures as Antoine Arnauld, Robert Desgabets, and Pierre-Sylvain Regis alongside their better-known countrymen Rene Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche. (shrink)

Descartes spent over 30 years commenting on the phenomenon of gravity. His attempts to explain gravity in his early private notes, his early letters up to the writing of Le Monde are subject to a clear development. This development is not merely of interest in the history of science, but also promises to shed light on those reasons that led him to reject the scholastic terminology on which he had based his early explanations. This is especially true of the concept (...) of real quality, which is central in this context. It will be seen that Descartes justified his rejection of this concept at different times with quite different arguments. In doing so, I would like to correct a view that is sometimes suggested, if not explicitly put forward, in studies of Descartes' relationship to the scholastic vocabulary: Descartes rejected this vocabulary because of ontological reservations. This misinterpretation also seems to me to underlie Gilson's investigation. To illustrate the development of Descartes' attitude towards traditional ontological terminology, I will first consider the early statements in which Descartes conceives of gravity as a real quality. In a second step, I will examine the period around 1630, when Descartes arrived at a mechanistic conception of gravity. What were the reasons for Descartes abandoning his old conception? In a third step, I will look at the statements from the 1940s in which Descartes discusses gravity as an example of a real quality, a category that no longer has a place in his ontological considerations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Theory of MindEnrique Chávez-ArvizoDesmond M. Clarke. Descartes’s Theory of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 267. Cloth, $49.95.Desmond Clarke, commentator on Cartesian natural philosophy, has now published an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, a theme which can hardly be said to be underrepresented in the literature. The monograph is divided into nine chapters concerned with explanation, sensation, imagination and memory, the passions, the will, language, thought, (...) substance, and property dualism—yes, property dualism.The book pushes forward a reading of Descartes's theory of mind, made from a perspective which Clarke has adopted over the last three decades or so, that maintains that Descartes was primarily (and willingly) a scientist and incidentally (and reluctantly) a philosopher. From this viewpoint, according to Clarke, natural philosophy provides the paradigm for genuine explanation in Descartes's metaphysics. Furthermore, given that Descartes rejects Scholastic substantial forms and real qualities as explanatorily infertile and since substances are equally unfruitful, substances play no explanatory role in his system of philosophy. Substance dualism is not at the center of Descartes's philosophy of mind; his account of explanation is. This makes Descartes not a substance dualist; but a property dualist. So argues, in very broad strokes, Clarke. [End Page 116]Unlike us, Descartes did not draw a sharp distinction between philosophy and science. For him, these two realms of enquiry were part of a unified realm of knowledge, what he deemed scientia or philosophy in the wider sense. Hence his use of the instructive metaphor of philosophy as a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics, and the branches the other sciences which he reduces to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals (Letter Preface to Picot, French translation of the Principles of Philosophy, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery [Paris: Vrin, 1989], 14). However, Descartes did distinguish the roots from the trunk, that is, metaphysics (or "first philosophy") from physics (or "natural philosophy"). Commentators on Descartes's system of philosophy ignore his natural philosophy at their peril, for it does shed considerable light on his metaphysics. But, likewise, Descartes's philosophy greatly illuminates his science. It is for this reason that I want to cast doubt on Clarke's apparent scientific imperialism in which Descartes's methodological, epistemological, and metaphysical concerns are forced to play second fiddle to his scientific views. We cannot neatly fit Descartes's metaphysical views into Clarke's scientific mold, nor can we force them in, without incurring serious error. I do not think that one has to choose between one and the other as being primary, between the tree of knowledge and the inverted tree of knowledge. We need to keep in mind that in Descartes's system of philosophy, both science and philosophy are interconnected and that both parts elucidate each other.Clarke's attempt to eliminate substance from Descartes's account of mind is problematic. True, the term 'substance' is an extremely ambiguous one and Descartes's comments about it are often blurred and puzzling. On the one hand, one must concede that the concept of substance plays a small role in Descartes's natural philosophy, in which although the material universe is depicted in terms of extended substance or res extensa, physics is ultimately unwrapped by way of laws describing the behavior of particles in virtue of their size, shape, and motion. But, in contrast, substance plays a far more prominent role in his metaphysics, not to mention in his theology. This leads to a related point. Clarke overlooks the importance of theology for Descartes's philosophical project and the role of God in Cartesian natural philosophy.The level of argument drops considerably in the final chapter, where Clarke offers an uncritical and not very clear survey of naming and necessity, the identity theory, anomalous monism, and property dualism. This chapter seems in tension with his disapproval of anachronistic readings of Descartes (8-9) and contains some serious slips. Clarke's answer to his own question "Was Descartes, then, a substance dualist" is a mind boggling "Yes and no" (258), and his claim that Descartes was a property dualist, collapses under... (shrink)

This article argues that climate change puts excessive demands on the psyche. The omnipresent specter of climate change and global warming cannot be processed by individual psyches because there is little – if anything – that individual people can do to stop the devastation that hovers on the horizon. Unlike other disasters and calamities that have affected humans (war, genocide, nuclear destruction, pandemics, despotism) climate change presents unique challenges to the human psyche as it engages traumatic temporality on a global (...) scale. The inexorably real threat of climate change threatens the psyche’s ability to establish a rational relation to reality. The scale and speed of the catastrophic destruction underway calls for a reconsideration of the force and quality of the denial that accompanies it. Some of the most ‘wellmeaning’ forms of denial may turn out to be the most insidious as they attempt to rationalize, humanize and normalize actions and events that ought to force us to reckon with what we cannot bear to know. (shrink)

In Chapter One I present an interpretation of Descartes' theory of distinction. I argue that the best understanding of the notion of separate existence at stake in the real distinction between mind and body is not that each can exist without the other existing, nor that each can exist without a real union with the other, but that each can exist without the attributes of the other. However, the only notion of separate existence which can provide an adequate (...) acccount of all three kinds of distinction--real, modal, and of reason--is that of one thing existing without a real union with another thing. ;In Chapter Two I examine Descartes' claims about the dependence of created substances on God and their independence from other creatures. The pure substances, those which are not composed of parts, can be caused to come into existence and go out of existence only by God, and they can perish only by annihilation. These substances include individual created minds and the extended universe considered as a whole. In contrast, bodies and human beings, which are composed of parts, can be caused to go out of existence by other creatures, and they can perish without being annihilated. Nevertheless, I argue that Descartes thinks bodies and human beings are full-fledged substances. ;In Chapter Three I discuss the union of mind and body. I argue that Descartes thinks the human soul is the only substantial form and that it inheres in the body as form inheres in matter. I defend his account of how two substances can form a unity by comparing it with medieval accounts of the unity of composites. ;Chapter Four examines Descartes' arguments for rejecting substantial forms and the so-called real qualities. I argue that his earliest series of arguments, those from perception and scientific explanation, is the most successful. ;Finally, in Chapter Five, I consider Descartes' positive account of the status of those so-called real qualities which he asserts are merely sensations, for example, color, sound, and heat. I argue that he is best understood as holding that they are modes of both thought and extension which are property ascribed to the composite of mind and body. (shrink)

The main point for criticizing the Cartesians for Vico is the notion of method, interpreted as exceptionally discursive procedure, devoid of spontaneity and creative force which are necessary for discovering new truths. These qualities are embodied for Vico in the Latin term ingenium, loan translation of which is found in Italian (ingegno) and is absent in French. The criticism of Cartesianisn suggested by Vico does not consider the fundamental bilingualism of this philosophy and wide use of the term ingenium (...) in the corps of Descartes’ Latin works. The analysis of the latter proves that the early Descartes’ notion intuitus mentis, as well as the concept of natural light of mind are, in the end, based exactly on ingenium, but not on the discursive methodical procedures. Human soul, following Descartes, reveals its content in several hypostastes and each method of revelation corresponds to specific terminology. Soul as mens is not the same as soul as ingenium. But even the early Descartes’ study of soul is marked by peculiar nominalism, proclamation of the real existence of individual soul as a separate entity. Therefore later, stating his ego cogito, Descartes states exactly the individual substance, not thinking in general. The terminological couple ingenium/mens is not translatable already in the French texts of Descartes himself (both merge in the French esprit), however their Ukrainian translations do not consider neither this untranslatability nor obvious references of Descartes’ esprit to other Latin compliances which differ each time. The article also analyses frequency in usage of the terms ingenium and mens in early and late Descartes’ Latin works; it has been proved that the augmentation of the meaning of metaphysical problems gradually turned mens into the main subject of Descartes’ research and deactualised the problem of ingenium. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes’s Lettre Apologétique aux Magistrats d’Utrecht:New Facts and MaterialsErik-Jan BosThe lettre apologétique aux magistrats d’utrecht was Descartes’s final effort to obtain satisfaction from the Municipality or ‘Vroedschap’ of Utrecht. In 1643 the Vroedschap had condemned Descartes’s Epistola ad Dinetum and Epistola ad Voetium in defence of Descartes’s opponent Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), professor of Theology at the University of Utrecht.1 In the Lettre apologétique Descartes requests the Utrecht Vroedschap to (...) revoke their condemnation, to clear his name and to reconsider Voetius’s position.The Lettre apologétique receives little attention in modern editions of Descartes’s works. Adam and Tannery give both the French and the Latin version of the Lettre apologétique, but with scanty annotation and an unsatisfactory introduction (AT VIIIB).2 The only other edition of the Lettre apologétique is provided by Verbeek, in La Querelle d’Utrecht (1988), but it does not go beyond Adam and Tannery’s edition.3In 1992, however, Verbeek noted that the Lettre apologétique could not possibly date from 1645, which was the hypothesis of Adam and Tannery and still is the [End Page 415] prevailing view.4 This raises once again the question of the real date of the Lettre apologétique as well as of the history of the text. In this essay I propose a new date and a new account of the history of the text. I also draw attention to the Dutch version of the Lettre apologétique, which Descartes sent to the Utrecht Vroedschap in 1648, but first I will give a short survey of Descartes’s dispute with Voetius.1. THE UTRECHT QUARRELIf we are to believe Descartes in his Lettre apologétique, it was Voetius who started the quarrel in 1639 by accusing him of atheism in several disputations, an accusation to which Voetius stuck throughout the affair.5 Descartes admits he is not mentioned in the writings of the Utrecht theologian, but “[Voetius] counted among the characteristics of atheism everything he knew to be commonly attributed to me” (AT VIIIB 205). A few years later, in 1641, Voetius called the adherents of the New Philosophy atheists outright. In a reaction to Descartes’s champion in Utrecht, the professor of medicine Henricus Regius (1598–1679), who claimed Aristotelian philosophy to be of no use for explaining natural phenomena, Voetius warned that the rejection of traditional philosophy would lead to scepticism and eventually to disbelief. With Descartes’s help Regius furnished a reply, in which he insinuated that it was, instead, the obscurities in Neo-Scholastic thought which led to the denial of God.6 This answer elicited protest from the University Senate. On the Senate’s request the Utrecht Vroedschap confiscated Regius’s book and forbade the teaching of any ideas deviating from Aristotle. Regius having been silenced, Descartes proceeded in a personal capacity. He vehemently attacked Voetius, first in the Epistola adDinetum, then in an elaborate work, the Epistola ad Voetium. The latter was meant as a response to a book opposing Descartes published by the professor of philosophy in Groningen, Martin Schoock (1614–1669), a friend of Voetius.7 The Vroedschap then condemned the works and Descartes became [End Page 416] subject to criminal charges. Thanks to his influential friends, Descartes was never put on trial, yet he felt that his reputation had been badly damaged. Several times he demanded satisfaction from the Utrecht Vroedschap, but to no avail.Until recently, the texts published in the polemic between Descartes and Voetius were considered to be of no more than anecdotal value in Descartes’s biography. It is only for the past decade that their philosophical relevance has been recognized. From what seemed to be unpromising material, various scholars have presented new perspectives on both Voetius and Descartes.8 They have shown that the objections raised by Voetius and Schoock against Cartesian philosophy prove to be more fundamental and to the point than formerly believed. Although Descartes never made a serious attempt on his own to meet Voetius on philosophical grounds, his writings are interesting because he brings forward theoretical positions which before he had... (shrink)

Descartes's dualism, and his argument for it, are often understood in terms of the modal notion of separability. I argue that the central notions, substance and real distinction, should not be understood this way. Descartes's well-known argument for dualism relies implicitly on views he spells out in the Principles of Philosophy, where he explains that a substance has a nature that consists in a single attribute, and all its qualities are modes of that nature. The argument relies ultimately (...) on a deeply rationalistic view of substance. (shrink)

I examine Descartes's theory of cognition, taking as a starting point his account of how misperception is possible. In the Third Meditation Descartes introduces the hypothesis that there are ideas (such as the idea of cold) which seem to be of something real but which in fact represent nothing (if, for example, cold is a privation or absence of heat, rather than the presence of a positive quality). I argue, against Margaret Wilson, that Descartes does not think there are (...) any such ideas and that he introduces the hypothesis only in order to formulate an objection to his argument for the existence of God. I argue further that while he agrees with Arnauld in accepting the Aristotelian account of cognition according to which the very objects in the world that we perceive exist in the soul or its ideas objectively, he still has a satisfactory response to Arnauld's objection that since an idea can represent only what it appears to be of, all error must reside solely in our judgment. I claim that Arnauld's objection that an idea represents what it appears to be of is based on the assumption that an idea appears to be of what exists in it objectively. But Descartes makes room for the possibility of misrepresentation by distinguishing between what exists objectively in an idea and what that idea appears to be of. First, he thinks that it is at least coherent to suppose that an idea lacking objective reality could appear to be of something in virtue of its material reality. Since an idea lacking objective reality would not represent any thing that exists in the world, Descartes concedes that it would not misrepresent any actually existing thing, but it could still appear to be of some thing and in that way misrepresent the way the world is. Second, there is reason to claim that like some of his Aristotelian predecessors Descartes holds that what exists in the soul objectively can appear to be other than it is. This interpretation has the implication that Descartes's theory of ideas, in contrast to sense datum theories, is not driven by the motive of finding some entity which is exactly as it appears to serve as the object of immediate awareness. (shrink)

How does Descartes think causation operates? His definition of matter as mere geometrical extension, along with his rejection of the scholastic apparatus of substantial forms and real qualities, does not make it easy to see how there can be dynamic causal interactions in the universe. According to an influential reading, championed, for example, by Dan Garber in his Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics , Descartes “rejected the tiny souls of the schools only to replace them with one great soul, God, (...) who . . . manipulates the bodies of the inanimate world.” Tad Schmaltz’s aim, in this wonderfully detailed and intricately argued book, is to reject this tendency to move towards an occasionalist reading of Descartes, and to show how the Cartesian system permits things in the world to have a genuine, if derivative, kind of causal power: “Descartes’s intention is to allow for a physical world that has an internal source of activity”. (shrink)

Freedom is the least discussed thesis of Descartes' works. Two major issues are: (i) the Fourth Meditation is seen as an unfounded theodicy, an interlude, an interruption to the analytic order; (ii)some passages in Descartes' other works are seen as inconsistent with the Fourth Meditation. First, I argue that Descartes' treatment is philosophical, that freedom underlies his entire philosophical project, defending the indispensability of the Fourth to his metaphysics.I demonstrate that Descartes' conception of freedom differs from the mainstream conceptions, in (...) particular it admits of degrees of higher or lower quality or worth. The latter is connected with indifference, error and sin. The former with spontaneity, truth and goodness. I argue that autonomy and spontaneity are a sine qua non of freedom of highest grade. Secondly, I offer a solution to two problematic passages: Principles I 37, and the notorious letter to Mesland, drawing on Descartes' conception of freedom as the greatest good, on the internal relation between reason and freedom, and demonstrating that there is no inconsistency. Descartes' treatment and indispensability of freedom gives his conception a certain sublimity, and his conception of man a certain serenity: an autonomous rational human being irreducibly and substantially real. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Dualism by Marleen RozemondSteven J. WagnerMarleen Rozemond. Descartes’s Dualism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xx + 279. Cloth, $24.00.Rozemond gives particular attention to questions of mind-body distinctness vs. union and to the status of sensory ideas. Her historical emphasis, backed by impressive scholarship, is Descartes’s relation to the late scholastics. Rozemond is clear, alert to detail, and fair-minded. While the text is too long (esp. in (...) chapters 4–5), this study is indeed rich, its scope and architecture justified.Any good reading of a philosopher is defined—both enhanced and limited—by certain decisions. I have mentioned one of Rozemond’s: her account of Descartes’s dialogue with such predecessors as Suárez and Fonseca sheds important light. It makes one ask, further, whether standard histories are not just as wrong to ignore scholastic concerns in, say, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke. Yet Rozemond is less helpful with issues that make more sense when we read forward from the 1640s, not back. An historian also sets a level of philosophical engagement. One chooses between presenting a meaningful narrative, and struggling with the endless problems of detail that can both doom [End Page 678] a philosophical position and give it life. Rozemond inclines toward narrative, often stopping just short of hard questions. Yet she shows curiosity and intelligence throughout. As in the first case, another decision would not have been better or worse but simply yielded a different kind of history.Fundamental is a third choice. A philosopher’s thought may appear as an orderly structure; or as a mix of fixed points and shifting, inconsistent tendencies. Most of us are trained to the former style of representation (although we let philosophers “develop” over time). Rozemond’s Descartes, too, turns out this way. He occupies definite positions. Within each position he knows whether Ρ is a premise for Q, vice versa, or neither. This way of presenting a body of thought, i.e., as a determinate structure admitting logical assessment, is an indispensable tool for historians. Its value in any particular case is, however, a matter of judgment. Rozemond attacks textual problems with skill, often improving decisively on the competition, but the going looks smoother than it is. Sometimes she carries the privilege of selective reading too far. At other times, she overlooks the poor mutual fit of separately smooth solutions, or rests with an outcome that could not have satisfied Descartes. Some examples:1. There is an old question how far Descartes goes towards proving dualism in the Second Meditation, how much is left for the Sixth. Rozemond basically champions the Second Meditation. Although some texts favor this, she ignores important contrary passages. Her reconstruction of the “argument from separability” also fails completely to carry over to Descartes’s alternate proof (AT VII, 85–6) from the indivisibility of mind.2. Rozemond identifies (“pure”) intellection with thought or mind (56). This leaves a problem how sensation could be a mode of thought, given that for her sensations differ from pure thoughts in being ‘modes of the mind as united to the body’ (201, emphasis mine). She remarks that sensations are not ‘straightforward modes of the mind’; yet her earlier chapters have no place for obscure modal hybrids and indeed require the tidy metaphysical scheme that is now denied.3. Although Rozemond handles Descartes’s anti-empiricism well, the discussion of empty space (95–7) no sooner suggests than it drops a crucial question. Descartes traces belief in the void to a childhood prejudice according to which all bodies are perceptible; rejecting the prejudice is supposed to remove support for the hypothesis of the void. But can Descartes really pick up the doctrine of childhood prejudice, an anti-Aristotelian weapon, and turn it against the radically different atomist framework? Rozemond passes on the attendant philosophical and textual problems (cf. 133–7).4. Rozemond’s extensive treatment of sensory perceptions and qualities rewards study (particularly on the importance, for dualism, of problems about body). But she misses the chance for more. Her Descartes firmly “places sensory qualities in the mind.” The real one struggled repeatedly over whether sensory ideas can or must... (shrink)

This chapter finds two versions of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke. Although agreeing that primary qualities are physically basic properties of extended particles (including size, shape, position, and motion), these authors differed on whether secondary qualities such as color exist only in the mind as sensations or belong to bodies as powers to cause sensations. Kant was initially a metaphysical realist about primary qualities as spatialized forces (vs. bare (...) extended particles), before placing space among the appearances in his critical period. Space becomes the subjective form in which transcendently real forces and relations appear. Kant viewed color as a subjective sensation in the mind, whereas Helmholtz treated color as a power to cause sensations. Helmholtz was initially a realist about primary qualities as spatialized masses and forces, but he later adopted the epistemically modest view of space as the subjective form in which forces and relations appear. (shrink)

Locke denied that ideas of secondary qualities resemble their causes. It has been suggested that Locke denied this because he accepted a mechanical corpuscular hypothesis about the constitution of objects. This paper shows that this and other usual explanations of Locke's denial are mistaken. Further, it suggests an alternative relationship between the scientific account and Locke's philosophical views, and finally it provides Locke's real justification for his claim that ideas of secondary qualities do not resemble their causes.

The work of Thomas White represents a systematic attempt to combine the best of the new science of the seventeenth century with the best of Aristotelian tradition. This attempt earned him the criticism of Hobbes and the praise of Leibniz, but today, most of his attempts to navigate between traditions remain to be explored in detail. This paper does so for his ontology of accidents. It argues that his criticism of accidents in the category of location as entities over and (...) above substances was likely aimed at Francisco Suárez, and shows how White’s worries about the analysis of location were linked with his broader cosmological views. White rejects real qualities, but holds that the quantity of a substance is somehow distinct from its bearer. This reveals a common ground with some of his scholastic interlocutors, but lays bare a deep disagreement with thinkers like Descartes on the nature of matter. (shrink)

Are the categories used to study the social world and acting on it real or conventional ? An empirical answer to that question is given by an analysis of the debates about the quality of statistics produced by the European National Institues of statistics in the 1990s. Six criteria of quality were then specified: relevance, accuracy, timeliness, accessibility, comparability and coherence. How do statisticians and users of statistics deal with the tension produced by their objects being both real (...) (they exist before their measurement) and conventionally constructed (they are in a way, created by these conventions)? In particular, the technical and sociological distinction between the criteria of relevance and accuracy implies a realistic interpretation, desired by users, but that is nonetheless problematic. (shrink)

A dual-language edition presenting Descartes's original Latin text of his greatest work, with a facing-page authoritative English translation.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the different meanings of the word “reality” in the work of Descartes. As a methodological strategy, a comparison with the conceptualization of the real in the work of Francisco Suárez is made. It makes possible to find a paradoxical tension between two conceptions of the real, the objective and the existential, in the work of both authors. It is argued that this tension is a typical character of the metaphysics in (...) the baroque period, better resolved by Descartes than by Suárez thanks to the theological foundation of knowledge proposed by the first. This foundation ensures the correspondence of the true ideas, known a priori, with extramental reality and it hinders the phenomenological and pre-Kantian interpretation of the cartesian ontology in terms of reduction of reality to realitas objectiva. (shrink)

1. Consider a circle. It has both a radius and a circumference. There is obviously a real distinction between the properties having a radius and having a circumference. This is not because, when confining ourselves to circles,1 having a radius can ever exist apart from having a circumference. A real distinction does not depend on that. Descartes thought that a real distinction between x and y meant that x could exist without y or vice versa, if only (...) by the power of God. But Descartes was wrong. Separable existence is a sufficient but not necessary condition of there being a real distinction. The difference between a real and a conceptual distinction derives from medieval philosophy. Aquinas, for one, held that things can be really distinct even though not separable (the form and matter of a material substance or its essence and existence, for example).2 For a merely conceptual distinction between x and y to exist, it is necessary for the distinction to exist in thought only. There is only a conceptual distinction between an upward slope and a downward slope, or between a glass’s being half empty and half full. Not only are the members of such pairs inseparable (whether by God or in any other way), but there is no real distinction between them. There is no numerical distinctness between the entities or qualities between which there is only a conceptual distinction. To this extent alone is Galen Strawson (2008) correct.3 But when it comes to.. (shrink)

In the context of Ukraine’s membership in the WTO, the functioning of a free trade area with the EU, the opportunity for agricultural producers to obtain a larger share of the value added is primarily linked to the intensification of trade in domestic livestock products and their processing products. However, their production is one of the high-risk areas and requires a set of measures aimed at ensuring proper quality. Without effective solution of the problem of quality of livestock products it (...) is impossible to ensure its competitiveness in the world market, to guarantee the rational nutrition of the population of the country, the availability of the necessary components for the vital activity of the human body. The aim of the research is to determine the socio-economic factors for ensuring the quality of livestock products in Ukraine. The scientific and specific research methods were used to solve the tasks set in the work: the historical method; abstraction method; method of comparative analysis; system-structural method. The main producer of livestock products in Ukraine are households. They do not have the capabilities to implement technologies of keeping, feeding, veterinary services, programs prerequisites for guaranteeing the safety of products, adherence to the HACCP principles. In Ukraine, real technical, economic and organizational-economic prerequisites for ensuring the safety and quality of livestock products are created only in the poultry meat sector. During 2015-2017, the trends in production of almost all types of livestock products except poultry and honey were identified. One of the reasons for this situation was, firstly, decreasing in capital investment in the livestock sector, and secondly, the low profitability of production of livestock products in the context of accelerated growth in prices for resources. It is proved that insignificant market (price) incentives should be supplemented with instruments of state assistance to improve the quality parameters of products on the basis of specialized enterprises. The necessity of state support for the production of livestock products based on small and medium-sized enterprises is substantiated. This will effectively combine the processes of increasing the production of livestock products with the environmental friendliness of production and steady improvement of quality. It is shown that the low quality of certain livestock products in Ukraine is caused by insufficient living standards of the population and low incomes of the majority of households, which cause them to consume low quality products. It is determined that the problem of guaranteeing the quality of livestock products in Ukraine has deep roots cause due to the influence of socio-economic factors. Therefore, a comprehensive approach is needed to solve it, which is not limited to improving the efficiency of the state control system and successfully harmonizing of the Ukrainian technical regulation system with the European one. The problem of low quality and the danger of livestock production requires a systematic approach for its solution, which is not limited, in particular, by measures to improve the system of state control and ensure approximation of the domestic technical regulation system to the European one. In Ukraine, major high-quality animal products are economically inaccessible to a large part of households. The projected increase in safety parameters and a certain improvement in the quality of livestock products as a result of the implementation of regulations adopted in 2014-2017, will necessarily lead to an increase in its value, and therefore may lead to a decrease in market demand and even greater inaccessibility of these products to people. All this can only aggravate the situation with guaranteeing the food security of the country, forming the prerequisites for increasing the intellectual capacity of the nation. (shrink)

This article considers complications for the principle in Descartes that effects are similar to their causes that are connected to his own denial that terms apply "univocally" to God and the creatures He produces. Descartes suggested that there remains an "analogical" relation in virtue of which our mind can be said to be similar to God's. However, this suggestion is undermined by the implication of his doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths that God's will differs entirely from our (...) own. The disappearance of analogy is even more evident in Spinoza and Regis. Both linked Descartes's doctrine to the principle that an effect differs from its cause with respect to what it receives from that cause, and both argued from that principle to the conclusion that we differ from God in both essence and existence. (shrink)

One striking oddity about Democritus and Epicurus is that, even though Epicurus' theory of perception is largely the same as that of Democritus, Democritus and his followers draw skeptical conclusions from this theory of perception, whereas Epicurus declares that all perceptions are true or real. I believe that the dispute between Democritus and Epicurus stems from a question over what sort of ontological status should be assigned to sensible qualities. In this paper, I address three questions: 1) Why (...) were Democritus and his followers skeptical? 2) How did Epicurus modify Democritus' metaphysics in order to avoid these skeptical conclusions? and 3) How successful was he? -/- 1) I argue that Democritus allows only the intrinsic properties of atoms into his ontology, and then runs into skeptical difficulties because of the relativity of perception. 2) I propose that Epicurus modifies Democritus' ontology by allowing dispositional and relational properties as real properties of bodies. Sensible qualities are conceptualized as dispositional properties of bodies to cause certain experiences in percipients. 3) I argue that Epicurus does not run into the same problems as Democritus. Finally, I consider how my interpretation of Epicurus' ontology helps to make sense of his claim that all perceptions are alethes--'true' or 'real.'. (shrink)

The heuristics and strategies presented in Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations are well-known. However they hardly present the whole story as many authors have shown. In this paper a recent, rather spectacular, event in the history of mathematics is examined to gather evidence for two new strategies. The first heuristic concerns the expectations mathematicians have that a statement will be proved using given methods. The second heuristic tries to make sense of the mathematicians' notion of the quality of a proof.

I consider a somewhat obscure but important feature of Descartes’s physics that concerns the notion of the “force of rest.” Contrary to a prominent occasionalist interpretation of Descartes’s physics, I argue that Descartes himself attributes real forces to resting bodies. I also take his account of rest to conflict with the view that God conserves the world by “re-creating” it anew at each moment. I turn next to the role of rest in Malebranche. Malebranche takes Descartes to endorse his (...) own occasionalist version of physics. However, he nonetheless rejects Descartes’s account of rest by appealing to the fact that whereas God’s production of motion requires a power beyond the mere power to create, his production of rest requires only the latter power. It turns out that this argument in Malebranche is incompatible with the sort of “re-creationist” account of divine conservation that he is widely thought to have inherited from Descartes. (shrink)

The distinction between the mental operations of abstraction and exclusion is recognized as playing an important role in many of Descartes’ metaphysical arguments, at least after 1640. In this paper I first show that Descartes describes the distinction between abstraction and exclusion in the early Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in substantially the same way he does in the 1640s. Second, I show that Descartes makes the test for exclusion a major component of the method proposed in the (...) Rules. Third, I argue that in Rule 14 the exclusion-abstraction distinction is connected to a theory of distinctions, which includes a notion of real distinction as essentially tied to the imagination. This sheds light on Descartes’ development in and after the Rules. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Volumes I and II provided a completely new translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. Volume III contains 207 of Descartes' letters, over half of which have previously not been translated into English. It incorporates, in its entirety, Anthony Kenny's celebrated translation of selected philosophical letters, first published in 1970. In conjunction with Volumes I and II it is designed to meet the widespread demand for a comprehensive, authoritative and accurate edition (...) of Descartes' philosophical writings in clear and readable modern English. (shrink)

We all seem to have a sense of what good and bad arguments are, and there is a long history—focusing on fallacies—of trying to provide objective standards that would allow a clear separation of good and bad arguments. This contribution discusses the limits of attempts to determine the quality of arguments. It begins with defining bad arguments as those that deviate from an established standard of good arguments. Since there are different conceptualizations of “argument”—as controversy, as debate, and as justification—and (...) since arguments in each of these senses can be used for different purposes, a first problem is that we would need a large variety of standards for “good” arguments. After this, the contribution focuses in particular on proposals made in the literature on how to assess the quality of arguments in the sense of justification. It distinguishes three problems of assessment: How to determine whether reasons are acceptable, whether reasons are sufficient to justify the conclusion, and how to identify arguments in real-world speech acts and texts? It is argued that limitations of argument assessment result from unavoidable relativism: The assessment of many—if not most—arguments depends on the epistemic situation of the evaluator. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creativity and the Context of NoveltyPete A. Y. GunterAn article might have many virtues: breadth, novel perspective, conceptual background, to name a few. The strongest virtue of Professor Crosby's article is in the sharpening of arguments. In both his book, Novelty, and in the present article, he sharpens arguments which surround the concepts of determinism, novelty, and freedom. The end result is increased clarity; it is also, or so (...) it seems to this writer, the increased plausibility of arguments for novelty and indeterminism.I.It has often been argued that strict determinism (henceforth, determinism) has paradoxical implications. Thus William James protests that it leads inescapably to a "Block Universe": one in which everything is given at once—past, present, and future. In such a world, Crosby points out, nothing can happen at all. But Crosby adds to this a second, crucial point. If determinism is true, he insists, we must give up not only the belief that anything actually happens but also the commonsense belief that cause precedes effect. This result of strict determinism has not been stressed by either its opponents or its proponents.Quite probably, those who have argued for determinism have not reflected on the unpalatable idea that cause does not precede effect. Our ordinary experience exhibits the billiard ball falling into the side pocket after we have hit it with the cue stick. If we dive into a swimming pool, we enter the water dry and then become wet. And, the splash occurs after we separate ourselves from the board. Determinism, however useful in helping us to bring order out of our experience, radically conflicts with fundamental features in nature that lead us to think and examine cause and effect to begin with.There is another respect in which Crosby sharpens our assumptions. Ordinarily [End Page 60] we think of novelty and causality as contradictories. In fact, Crosby insists, they are correlatives. Neither is reducible to the other, nor is either alternative prior to the other. The two together constitute a primordial feature of the universe, such that where in some contexts indeterminism is reduced to a minimum, perhaps an infinitesimal, in others (presumably those in which creativity plays a major role) causality is reduced to a minimum and novelty predominates. Hence philosophy is not saddled with the task of trying to show how novelty can possibly find a place in an exclusively deterministic world. Novelty and determinism are, from the beginning, both present throughout.This viewpoint, if accepted, would obviate any attempt to graft indeterminism into a deterministic universe, so to speak, from without. It would also tend to dissolve the dualisms foisted on us by Descartes and, in another way, by Kant, which radically separate mind (or free will) from matter (or, in Kant's case, "phenomena") on the grounds that the former contains novelty and the latter does not. In Crosby's view some element of novelty is already present in matter. Equally, in his view, "mind" in many, perhaps most, contexts contains a strong element of determinism.There is still a further way of taking Crosby's arguments. It is this. Strict determinists must, he shows, hold that the universe is timeless. Past, present, and future coexist and, literally, nothing happens. It then follows that if one accepts the reality of motion, growth, and dissolution in the world, then in doing so one has decreed the falsehood of strict determinism. It does not (and on Crosby's grounds cannot) follow that there is no determinism in nature. There must, on his grounds, be degrees of causal determinism. But there must also be real novelty. One thus has a transcendental argument, beginning from the simple acceptance of real mobility in the world. That is, "If there is real transformation in the world, then strict determinism must be wrong. There is real transformation in the world. Therefore strict determinism must be wrong." This would make life very hard for the strict determinist, for whom the slightest lapse into a commonsense acceptance of the restless mobility of nature entails the denial of his or her basic thesis.A further argument of Crosby's, however, gives me difficulties. He argues that strict determinism... (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Hume has an insight into the heart of most of “new philosophy” when he claims that according to it, proper sensibles are not Real properties of material substance and Real bodies. I call this tenet “the Proper Sensibles Principle” (PSP). In the second part of the paper, I defend the interpretation - mainly against Don Garrett’s doubts - that the PSP is a rational tenet in Hume’s view and he thus endorses it. (...) Its rationality means that the PSP has a firm foundation in inductive-causal reasoning. (shrink)