The 17th century author François Poulain de la Barre was an important contributor to a pivotal moment in the history of feminist thought. Poulain borrows from many of Descartes’s doctrines, including his dualism, distrust of epistemic authority, accounts of imagination, and passion, and at least some aspects of his doxastic voluntarism; here I examine how he uses a Cartesian notion of prejudice for an anti-essentializing philosophy of women’s education and the formation of the tastes, talents and interests of individuals. ‘Prejudice’ (...) remains Descartes’s notion of an entrenched, yet self-imposed doxastic commitment, but also takes on the sense of social-political group bias, founded on custom, transmitted through education, serving interests, and forming social expectations. Poulain also expands on the Cartesian notion and themes by emphasizing widespread, yet unjustified social opinions in favor of the status quo in both epistemic practices and epistemic authorities, while considering how biased beliefs about sexual difference and gender identity can be internalized even by those who suffer most from them. At the same time, he shows how powerful Cartesian concepts can be for feminist methodology, even though they might also be put to problematic uses (as Malebranche did). (shrink)

1. Introduction: 1.1 Difficulties of Approach; 1.2 Philosophical Background. 2. The Context of Early Modern Theories of the Passions: 2.1 Changing Vocabulary; 2.2 Taxonomies; 2.3 Philosophical Issues in Theories of the Emotions. SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS: Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Theories of the Emotions; Descartes; Hobbes; Malebranche; Spinoza; Shaftsbury; Hutcheson; Hume.

This chapter examines the views of seventeenth-century British philosophers on passions and affections. It explains that about 8,000 books published during this period mentioned passion and that it started with Thomas Wright's Passions of the Mind in General. The chapter also explores the intellectual basis of the writers who wrote about passion – which includes Augustinianism, Aristotelianism, stoicism, Epicureanism, and medicine – and furthermore, analyzes the relevant works of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and Lord Shaftesbury.

This chapter contains section titled: The Rejection of Teleology and Its Limits Reconciling God's Goodness with Misjudgment and Misperception The Clock Analogy and Engineering the Body The Special Place of the Passions The Structure of the Passions of the Soul The Need for a General Remedy Notes References and Further Reading.

Taxonomy and terminology might seem like dull topics. But the diverse ways that eighteenth-century philosophers identified and classified the emotions crucially shaped the approaches they took. This chapter traces the sources available to eighteenth-century British philosophers for naming and ordering the passions, lays out the main vocabulary and concepts used for description and analysis, including the notions of “reflection” and “sympathy,” and outlines the principles that organized explanation, such as the division of the passions into the pleasurable or painful, and (...) the selfish or social, as well as the role of “master passions.”. (shrink)

This paper argues that Descartes conceives of theoretical reason in terms derived from practical reason, particularly in the role he gives to the passions. That the passions serve — under normal circumstances — to preserve the union of mind and body is a well-known feature of Descartes's defense of our native make-up. But they are equally important in our more purely theoretical endeavors. Some passions, most notably wonder, provide a crucial source of motivation in the search after truth, and also (...) serve to reinforce memory. Our cognitive successes and failure scan also be tracked by passions and trains of passions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 399-424 [Access article in PDF] Representation and the Body of Power in French Academic Painting Amy M. Schmitter [Figures] Reputation of power, is Power... Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. I, ch. x Introduction It seems natural, even obvious, to distinguish between representations and what they are representations of. A picture of a dog is no more a dog than the word "dog" is (...) a furry, tail-wagging mammal. Nor are properties belonging to the object of a representation necessarily properties of the representation: a picture of a big dog need not be big, a picture of a dog that resembles Fido need not resemble Fido; even a picture of brown Fido need not be brown. And no number of pictures of Fido will sympathetically induce changes in Fido or any other dog. But however clear-cut this distinction may be when what is in question are pictorial references to ordinary, middle-sized material particulars such as dogs, it is much less clear in other cases. It is no violation of common-sense to consider "representations" of such things as gender norms or national identities or selves as non-neutral in the face of what they represent. The representations of gender norms, for example, can extend and enforce them, can change or undermine them, and may well lend a hand in constituting them in the first place.My theme here is a form of pictorial representation, one found in the theory and practice of that strain of French Academic painting under Louis XIV associated with Charles LeBrun. LeBrun held the titles of First Painter to the King and Director of the French Royal Academy of Painting, and the works I will examine were devoted to the royal power. That one effect of royal power is the ability to command resources and to cause the proliferation of representations, especially flattering representations, is no surprise. But I intend to suggest something stronger: not only did these Academic representations present an expenditure [End Page 399] of royal power, they were meant to embody and therefore extend royal power—even to constitute royal power. The view under examination does not simply collapse the common-sense distinction between signifying properties and what is signified; indeed those relations play an important role in one concept of representation modeled on language and written texts. But to this the academicians added another, more robust concept, one that does not distinguish clearly between the representation and its object.Implausible as this view may seem at first blush, I think it can prove genuinely explanatory: explanatory for thinking about pictorial representation, about how it can operate (on both its object and its viewer), and about its relation to power. But to see its explanatory value demands considering the nature and needs of state power. For unlike middle-sized material particulars, state power requires recognition to exist. Although that recognition need not be explicit, conscious, or voluntary, it must be widespread, and pictorial representations can be a powerful device for eliciting such recognition. Yet state power in general— or at least the particular form in question here—may demand that the constitutive role of recognition be disguised. Indeed many of the views and concepts of pictorial representation developed by the Academy reverse the dependence of power on recognition; they function in an ideology of representation. Nonetheless, I think that certain "formal," or structural, features of LeBrun's works can be explained in terms of how they elicit recognition and constitute this particular form of royal power. I make no claim that LeBrun's works must be explained so: for one, the royal power represented by LeBrun's works is long gone, and his representations do not now have any miraculous power to raise the dead. For any representations actually to operate as I suggest requires the support of a whole complex of institutions and activities committed to the care and feeding of state power. It is only because such a complex did exist that LeBrun's representations could have a recognizable object, i... (shrink)

The new editorial team, Ann Levey, Karl Schafer and Amy Schmitter, are very pleased to present this special double-issue of Hume Studies. It contains a wide variety of articles on subjects old and new, as well as an assortment of book reviews, commissioned by the new book review editor, David Landy of San Francisco State University. We are grateful to the many people who have helped us get this volume and our tenure as editors underway, including the preceding editors-in-chief, Angela (...) Coventry and Peter Kail, and preceding book review editor, Annemarie Butler, as well as the previous editors-in-chief Corliss Swain and Saul Traiger, who offered invaluable advice about procedures, practices, and technological issues.... (shrink)

This volume of Hume Studies is a special double-issue devoted to discussions of four recent books on Hume: Hume: an Intellectual Biography, by James Harris; Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects, by Stefanie Rocknak; Hume's True Scepticism, by Donald Ainslie; and Reflecting Subjects: Passion, Sympathy, and Society in Hume's Philosophy, by Jacqueline Taylor. The latter three discussions began as Author-Meets-Critics sessions at the 43rd International Hume Conference in Sydney, Australia, and the present volume keeps the AMC format: each discussion starts (...) with a short précis of the book from the author, followed by comments from three respondents, and concludes with the author's reply. The selection of books... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Editor's Prologue Descartes John Locke John Stuart Mill.

A very welcome addition to the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, this new edition of Shepherd’s 1827 book comprises the lengthy ‘Essay on the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy’ and fourteen shor...

Many contemporary social epistemologists take themselves to be combatting an individualist approach to knowledge typified by Descartes. Although I agree that Descartes presents an individualist picture of scientific knowledge, he does allow some practical roles for reliance on the testimony and beliefs of others. More importantly, however, his reasons for committing to individualism raise important issues for social epistemology, particularly about how reliance on mere testimony can propagate prejudices and inhibit genuine understanding. The implications of his views are worked out (...) more fully by some of his immediate successors; I examine how François Poulain de la Barre, and (briefly) Mary Astell analyze the social conditions for epistemic agency in a Cartesian vein. (shrink)

Is Descartes the most misunderstood philosopher in the history of philosophy? To many of us in the business of Descartes scholarship, it certainly seems so. Time and time again, we find ourselves faced with pronouncements about one or another of Descartes's 'errors' — whether the shortcomings of the theater model of consciousness, or the pernicious after-effects of a foundationalism devoted to the transparency of the mental, or the shocking vilification of the body and emotions. Typically these pronouncements are paired with (...) exhortations to overcome the Cartesian X, where 'X' stands for whatever item crucial to enlightenment is currently most misunderstood. That X is some term rarely used and drastically .. (shrink)

While Descartes's status as a "representationalist" is often a subject of vehement debate, what exactly he means by "representation" is not. I look to Descartes's early work to show that he first conceives of representation through signification, in which the sign and the signified are isomorphic; on this view, relations of representation can be arbitrary and are to be distinguished from relations of resemblance. I then examine images to show the possibility of an image constructing a relation to its viewer, (...) or "subject-position," in which that subject-position fails to display the attributes of extended things. Such a construction might be applied to the "I" of the Meditations--distinct from all extended substances, it nonetheless has direct access to them through its non-objectified sense-ideas. On this basis, I propose a "model" of representation for ideas: an idea represents its object O to a subject-position S through a vehicle of representation X under some relation R. I argue that this model can explain the uses Descartes makes of "represent," particularly for ideas. But it must be understood properly: Descartes comes to conceive of the vehicle of representation simply as the form taken by the direct interaction of the mind and the things objectively present to it--but a form that can take on a life of its own, giving rise to the possibilities of clarity and distinctness or of confusion in ideas. But what is truly novel about Descartes's conception is the mind's ability to form higher-order representations that represent the conditions of representation itself, thereby achieving certainty for some mental representations without starting from any incorrigible, immediate perceptions. This possibility is realized most clearly in the understanding of my nature as a thinking and representing being, where I can represent myself as the subject-position distinct from all extended things, but also can represent myself as joyfully and representatively united with a body all my own. (shrink)

Whatever may be its other sins, the history of philosophy cannot be faulted for the fleetingness of its memory: "modern" philosophy, after all, is supposed to begin with a figure born 400 years ago, René Descartes. Indeed, even the view that it began then can trace its ancestry back to Descartes. But it would be historically naïve simply to agree with Descartes's self-congratulatory myth of creating a new philosophy ex nihilo. His achievement was a tremendous one, rightfully seen as provoking (...) a sea-change in the history of philosophy, but it was accomplished as much by reflecting on what had gone before as by any other means. One area where Descartes induced the philosophical seas to change can be found in the understanding of causation, and there Descartes clearly took issue with his predecessors, particularly his scholastic predecessors. His quarrel with scholastic natural philosophy over the place of final causes is already well-known, but Descartes took aim just as frequently at the scholastic theory of species, a theory that is a response primarily to questions about "formal" causation in perception and conception. This is in spite of the use Descartes himself sometimes made of 'form': both in such mysterious notions as formal reality and in such supposedly de-mystified ones as the mathematically describable shape of parts of extension. But he did expressly reject the theory of species, and much of the metaphysics that went with it, thereby putting the role and importance of formal causation up for grabs, and changing the nature and range of acceptable explanation in many areas. (shrink)

Method may be second only to substance-dualism as the best-known among Descartes's enthusiasms. But knowing that Descartes wants to promote good method is one thing; knowing what exactly he wants to promote is another. Two views seem fairly widespread. The first rests on the claim that Descartes endorses a purely procedural picture of reason, so that right reasoning is a matter of proprieties of operation, rather than respect for its objects. On this view, a method for regulating our reason would (...) offer general rules of procedure, abstracted as much as possible from the content of particular problems. Second is the view that Descartes maintains what we might call an ‘intellectualist’ approach to method, one that restricts right reasoning to operations internal to the mind, and allows the use of external bodily resources only as initial inputs or as helpful props— convenient, but marginal to the procedure and readily eliminated from it. (shrink)

Method may be second only to substance-dualism as the best-known among Descartes's enthusiasms. But knowing that Descartes wants to promote good method is one thing; knowing what exactly he wants to promote is another. Two views seem fairly widespread. The first rests on the claim that Descartes endorses a purely procedural picture of reason, so that right reasoning is a matter of proprieties of operation, rather than respect for its objects. On this view, a method for regulating our reason would (...) offer general rules of procedure, abstracted as much as possible from the content of particular problems. Second is the view that Descartes maintains what we might call an ‘intellectualist’ approach to method, one that restricts right reasoning to operations internal to the mind, and allows the use of external bodily resources only as initial inputs or as helpful props— convenient, but marginal to the procedure and readily eliminated from it. (shrink)

Translation of "Picturing Power: Representation and Las Meninas" (2006).

THAT DESCARTES WAS INTERESTED from the very start of his philosophic career in developing a method for problem-solving that could be applied generally to the solution of "unknowns" is well known. Also well known is the further development of the method by the introduction of the technique of hyperbolic doubt in his mature, metaphysical works, especially in the Meditations. Perhaps less widely appreciated is the important role that accounts of systems of signs played in the development of his early accounts (...) of a method; it is crucial to the method that the elements of problems be identified and signified by simple and convenient signs that can then be arranged to display the relations among the known elements and the unknown solution. Commentators such as Michel Foucault have brought this interest in signification to our attention and shown the widespread importance of such projects in the seventeenth century. Few, however, have examined the relation between the early projects of signification and the later, metaphysical works. I suggest that one way to understand Descartes' metaphysical turn in his mature work is as an attempt to ground the accounts he has offered of signification in something further: representation, particularly mental representation. From the start, Descartes explains signification by reference to mental representation: a word, figure, or symbol signifies its objects by prompting the mind to think of those objects. Although Descartes offers detailed and comprehensive accounts in works such as the Rules for the Direction of the Mind of what constitutes effective and convenient systems of signification by way of the relations between signifying element, system, and the objects signified thereby, the mental operations that allow signification to operate, especially that of the "intuition of simple natures," is never fully explained. It remains to the mature phase of Descartes' career to crack open the basic operations of our thought by developing the full-fledged doctrine of ideas--a doctrine that makes explicit how an object is represented to a subject. (shrink)

Review Essay of Keith Moxey, The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History.

1996 marks the 400th anniversary of Descartes' birth, and it seems only appropriate that it should bring a reevaluation of Descartes' thought and his place in the history of philosophy. Dennis Sepper's new book on the role of the imagination offers such a rethinking, proposing that--contrary to popular rumor--Descartes' entire corpus was centrally concerned with the proper uses of imagination, a concern initially informed by medieval doctrines of the internal senses and imagination. Sepper argues that Descartes' earliest work, especially the (...) Cogitatione Privatae, places enormous confidence in the power and scope of imagination, a confidence based on a view of the cosmos as a network of resemblances and analogous relations, providing an unproblematic fit between mind and world. The role of imagination here is not to construct objects wholesale, but to allow understanding through figures, figures that stand in analogical and symbolic relations to the objects of conception so that they can be grasped under a particular aspect. Sepper calls this a "biplanar" model of understanding, whereby an object present to cognition is imaginatively configured in another "plane," allowing us both to focus and shift attention. (shrink)

In David Lodge's novel Changing Places, the protagonist Morris Zapp recalls his plan for a series of commentaries examining Jane Austen's novels under every possible rubric, from the historical to the structuralist, the mythical to the Marxist--all in order so to monopolize interpretation as to exhaust it altogether. I take it that Michael Krausz would find Zapp's ambition both unpalatable and impracticable, although he does not actually rule it out of court. Krausz's topic is interpretive ideals, and his target is (...) the "singularist" who holds that any object of interpretation is in principle open to only one "right" interpretation. To this view, Krausz opposes his own "multiplism," which claims that "the range of ideally admissible interpretations in some practices should be multiple". (shrink)