(1997). What Descartes really told Elisabeth: Mind‐body union as a primitive notion. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 249-273. doi: 10.1080/09608789708570966.

It is a common view that Descartes' causal principle is to be understood in light of a similarity condition that accounts for how finite causes contribute to an explanation of their effects. This paper challenges this common view and offers a sui generis reading of Descartes' views on causation that has also the advantage of solving the two exegetical issues of whether Descartes thought of the body-to-mind relation in occasionalist or causal terms and of whether Descartes regarded sensory ideas innate (...) or caused by bodies. (shrink)

The question of our place in nature has long been with us. One answer lies in comparing humans with other animals , thereby highlighting the uniquely human. To this end, I examine the distinction between humans and brutes as delineated by Descartes, Kant, and the Chicago pragmatist George Mead. This selection not merely assures a wide-spectrum of opinion still alive today, it marks a general historical shift from the metaphysical dualism of Descartes' mechanical world and spiritual self, to the epistemic (...) dualism of Kant and his double sense of self, finally to Mead's naturalistic monism, in which consciousness emerges naturally from the non-conscious. Apart from illuminating issues current in the animal-rights literature, examining this single topic casts a new light on these figures, especially Kant and Mead . Descartes' dualism is understandable simply given his scientific commitments, and the chasm he found in the human/brute gap was as much a result of this scientific motivation as any religious or moral one. For Kant, brutes lack the power to judge, understand, or reason. But more importantly, they lack autonomy and are therefore without moral worth. The unbridgeable chasm, metaphysical for Descartes, became for Kant primarily moral. Brutes do have representations and desires, however, and, by virtue of being alive, an immaterial principle; Kant consequently rejected Descartes' animal-machine hypothesis. Darwin's account of the human/brute gap and Mead's Darwinistic psychology are discussed. Selfhood and consciousness are unique to humans, although brutes are conscious in another sense. Mead's different uses of 'consciousness' are separated in order to clarify this difference as well as the role of language in the emergence of mind. Mead argued that humans perceive social objects prior to physical objects while brutes perceive none of these, lacking the capacities of universalization and object-manipulation. Like Descartes and Kant, Mead minimized brute experience, thereby maintaining a wide gulf between humans and brutes despite his Darwinian naturalism. (shrink)

Humans' capacity to attain knowledge is central to Spinoza's philosophy because, in part, knowing things enables humans to deal properly with their affects. But it is not just any sort of knowledge that humans should attain. There are different types of knowledge, but only two of them–rational and intuitive knowledge–enable humans who attain them to know things clearly. Because rational knowledge attends to universals whereas intuitive knowledge attends to particulars, intuitive knowledge is better than rational knowledge at enabling humans to (...) deal with their affects. Most scholars recognize both the importance of knowledge to humans' dealing with their affects and the superiority of intuitive knowledge at enabling them to do this. But these points are particularly relevant to the affect that Spinoza calls "tristitia," which is usually translated as either "pain" or "sadness." I argue in this dissertation that attaining knowledge– especially intuitive knowledge–enables humans to deal properly with their experiences of pain. This ability that humans acquire by knowing things is what I call "active suffering." A person suffers passively when she merely reacts to her pain, in this way allowing an external force to control her. She suffers actively when she uses knowledge to respond to her pain, in this way being in control of herself. This knowledge she uses to deal actively with her pain bears a relation to Spinoza's theory of freedom, since it entails a realization that all events (such as a person's experience of pain) happen necessarily and that embracing this necessity is the same as being free. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the role that the imagination plays in the later philosophy of René Descartes. The thesis will look at two related questions: the status of the imagination as a mode of thought dependent on the body; the role of the imagination in object-perception. Throughout, the traditional view of Descartes as a Cartesian Dualist is rejected and a more holistic approach is taken towards the relationship between mind and body, in which Descartes’ claims that (...) the two make up a “substantial union” are taken seriously. Part One deals with the relationship between mind and body. I argue that Cartesian Dualism cannot account for the faculties of sensation and imagination, because they have a corporeal basis. However, the ‘union of mind and body’, Descartes’ device for explaining their interaction, can. I end Part One by identifying a problem with the paradigm case of mind-body interaction, object-perception. To determine the object of an idea there needs to be a mechanism to marry the two ingredients of perception: the innate ideas of geometry in the intellect, and ‘adventitious’ ideas of the object delivered by the senses. Otherwise we have no explanation for how the essentially ‘inward-looking’ intellect can apply its ideas to the essentially passive sensations. Part Two focuses on the imagination and the question of object-perception raised in Part One. I argue against the largely-held view in the secondary literature that, with the advent of the cogito, the imagination’s cognitive profile declined sharply. I argue that, in fact, the corporeal basis of the imagination places it beautifully to bridge the gap in object-perception, and that this is part of its role in all Descartes’ discussions on the topic. The other, related, role of the imagination is to conjure fictions and hypotheses, suiting it for scientific and epistemological endeavours. The fact that the imagination is not tied to what is present to the senses, even though it receives its original content from them, means that it can manipulate ideas of corporeal things; including the innate notions of extension, shape and motion so key to gaining a clear and distinct idea of matter. (shrink)