Reading the Meditations, one readily sees that Descartes is concerned to go beyond the probable and seek the certain. And with other titles, such as Rules for the Direction of the Mind and Discourse on Method, one might think that Descartes is suggesting that the certain can be refined from the probable with the proper mental operations; that it is present in the probable, but clouded and distorted. M. Glouberman’s thesis is that this is the wrong way to read Descartes.

Reading the Meditations, one readily sees that Descartes is concerned to go beyond the probable and seek the certain. And with other titles, such as Rules for the Direction of the Mind and Discourse on Method, one might think that Descartes is suggesting that the certain can be refined from the probable with the proper mental operations; that it is present in the probable, but clouded and distorted. M. Glouberman’s thesis is that this is the wrong way to read Descartes.

Michael Luntley continues Dummett’s attack on realism and the validity of classical logic. For Luntley, realism is not equated with the claim that one must have a conception of the world which is characterized as being beyond the subject’s experience, but with whether the contents we grasp correspond to a determinate reality fixed beyond our investigation of it, i.e., with whether the contents have a recognition-transcendent truth value. The ojectivity-of-content issue has to do only with the kind of contents grasped (...) and, hence, misses the realist point. The realist thesis, as Luntley sees it, is Thesis R: “The contents we grasp have a determinate truth value independent of our knowledge of that value.”. (shrink)

Michael Luntley continues Dummett’s attack on realism and the validity of classical logic. For Luntley, realism is not equated with the claim that one must have a conception of the world which is characterized as being beyond the subject’s experience, but with whether the contents we grasp correspond to a determinate reality fixed beyond our investigation of it, i.e., with whether the contents have a recognition-transcendent truth value. The ojectivity-of-content issue has to do only with the kind of contents grasped (...) and, hence, misses the realist point. The realist thesis, as Luntley sees it, is Thesis R: “The contents we grasp have a determinate truth value independent of our knowledge of that value.”. (shrink)

Mr. Toms aims at resolving the idealist/materialist controversy and establishing the existence of “objective self-consciousness” as a “form of infinity which is positive, and not defined merely in terms of removal of limitation.” That he does not achieve his goals in fifty-six short pages is not surprising, despite the compressed geometrical format he employs.