This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology.

This paper aims to offer a comprehensive overview of René Girard’s reflections on the issue of modern jihadism. It addresses three key aspects of his reasoning: (I) the rise of Islamic terrorism in the context of a globalization of resentment; (II) modern jihadism understood as an “event internal to the development of technology;” (III) the hypothesis that modern jihadism “is both linked to Islam and different from it.”.

This paper will address René Girard’s critique of the “humanization of nothingness” in modern Western philosophy. I will first explain how the “desire for death” is related to a phenomenon that Girard refers to as “obstacle addiction.” Second, I will point out how mankind’s desire for death and illusory will to self-divinization gradually tend to converge within the history of modern Western humanism. In particular, I will show how this convergence between self-destruction and self-divinization gradually takes shape through the (...) evolution of the concept of “the negative” from Hegel to Kojève, Sartre and Camus. Finally, we shall come to see that in Girard’s view “the negative” has tended to become an ever-preoccupying and unacknowledged symptom of mankind’s addiction to “model/obstacles” of desire. (shrink)

Die „Meditationen“ sind ohne Zweifel ein Meilenstein und ein Meisterwerk des abendländischen Denkens. Durch sie wurde Descartes zum,Vater der modernen Philosophie‘ – und die Erkenntnistheorie auf Jahrhunderte zu deren Fundamentaldisziplin. Bis heute eignet sich kaum ein anderes epochemachendes Werk besser dazu, in der Auseinandersetzung mit den Argumentationsgängen eines Klassikers selbst zu erfahren, was philosophisches Denken ist – und wie es geht. Die neun Kapitel dieses Kommentars sind Originalbeiträge. Sie sollen Studierende und Dozenten bei der Lektüre begleiten und dazu beitragen, das (...) intellektuelle Vergnügen an der Tiefe der „Meditationen“ noch zu steigern. Mit Beiträgen von: Lilli Alanen, Gary Hatfield, Andreas Hüttemann, Andreas Kemmerling, Tobias Rosefeldt, Andreas Schmidt und Hans-Peter Schütt. (shrink)

This paper will analyze the evolution and the key aspects of René Girard’s critique of the Hegelian “struggle for recognition” and the master-slave dialectic. Through a discussion of Girard’s views on Identity, Difference, Violence, Desire and Negativity, the study will aim to highlight the philosophical uniqueness of the mimetic theory in respect to French Hegelianism and postHegelianism.

What was René Girard’s attitude towards philosophy? What philosophers influenced him? What stance did he take in the philosophical debates of his time? What are the philosophical questions raised by René Girard’s anthropology? In this interview, Paul Dumouchel sheds light on these issues.

KultOrte: Mythen, Wissenschaft und Alltag in den Tempeln Ägyptens. Edited by DanieL von Recklinghausen and Martin Andreas Stadler. Berlin: Manetho Verlag, 2011. Pp 255, illus..€39.80.

In this article, I provide a historical and bibliographical exploration of the handwritten, dictated commentaries (dictata) of Johannes de Raey (1620/1622–1702) on the texts of René Descartes (1596–1650), shedding light on their structure, development, and on their relations with the academic commentaries of Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665) and Christoph Wittich (1625–1687). The study of these commentaries, which are extant as class notes, is important because they conveyed one of the first systematic teachings of Descartes’s ideas and constituted a vehicle for (...) their further dissemination across northern Europe. (shrink)

I discuss Descartes’ metaphysics of selfhood, and relevant parts of contemporary philosophy regarding the first person. My two main concerns are the controversy that surrounds Descartes’ conception of conscientia, mistranslated as ‘consciousness’, and his conception of selfhood and its essential connection to conscientia. ‘I’-thoughts give rise to the most challenging philosophical questions. An answer to the questions concerning the peculiarities of the first person, self-identification and self-ascription, is to be found in Descartes’ notion of conscientia. His conception of selfhood insightfully (...) informs his conception of personhood. I offer a unified account of selfhood, conscientia, the first person, and personhood anchored in the self’s authority of reason and autonomy of freedom. (shrink)

For a number of years, those interested in recovering women's thought have known about Princess Elisabeth, a seventeenth-century correspondent and friend of Descartes whose questions provoked the philosopher to think more seriously about ethics and the passions. Up to now, only a few of her letters have found their way into print. This volume includes translations of all of Elisabeth's extant letters to Descartes, as well as of other materials relevant to understanding her philosophical perspective and her life. Nye has (...) supplemented the translations with a running commentary on the historical, biographical, and intellectual context of the letters. (shrink)

How did the relations between philosophy and science evolve during the 17th and the 18th century? This book analyzes this issue by considering the history of Cartesianism in Dutch universities, as well as its legacy in the 18th century. It takes into account the ways in which the disciplines of logic and metaphysics became functional to the justification and reflection on the conceptual premises and the methods of natural philosophy, changing their traditional roles as art of reasoning and as science (...) of being. This transformation took place as a result of two factors. First, logic and metaphysics were used to grant the status of indubitable knowledge of natural philosophy. Second, the debates internal to Cartesianism, as well as the emergence of alternative philosophical world-views progressively deprived such disciplines of their foundational function, and they started to become forms of reflection over given scientific practices, either Cartesian, experimental, or Newtonian. (shrink)

The search for an agreement between Aristotle’s and Descartes’ philosophy was aimed at making Cartesian physics acceptable in the Dutch universities by showing its consistency with Aristotelian thought. Their agreement is defended by Johannes De Raey in the Clavis philosophiae naturalis (1654), where he interprets the Corpus Aristotelicum from a Cartesian standpoint. Those Aristotelian positions which are inconsistent with Descartes’ are treated as erroneous. The Scholastic positions, moreover, are considered as distant from the true Aristotelian philosophy rediscovered by Descartes.

In this article I discuss a particular aspect of the Dutch reception of the ideas of René Descartes, namely the use of his Traité de l’homme by Henricus Regius. I analyze the use that Regius made of the theory of the movement of muscles, passions, hunger, and more generally of the neurophysiology expounded by Descartes in his book (not printed until 1662–1664). In my analysis, I reconstruct the internal evolution of Regius’s neurophysiology, I illustrate its sources beyond Descartes (i.e., (...) Jean Fernel and Santorio Santorio), and I show that he was certainly acquainted with some of its contents as early as 1641 (when he used it with the mediation of Descartes), before relying on it—as variously discussed in secondary literature—in his Fundamenta physices (1646), when he appropriated from it without Descartes’s authorization. (shrink)

Consciousness is connected with the fact that a subject is aware and open to the manifestation of whatever appears. Existence, by contrast, is used to express the fact that something is given in experience, is present, or is real. Usually, the two notions are taken to be somehow related. This chapter suggests that existence is at best introduced as a metaphysical (or meta-experiential) concept that inevitably escapes the domain of conscious experience. In order to illustrate this claim, two case studies (...) are considered. The first case is provided by Descartes’s famous treatment of consciousness and existence in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The second case is meant to contrast the Cartesian approach by taking the opposite route, as delineated by Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) in his ‘fundamental ontology’. (shrink)

This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a constant, lively dialogue with other thinkers, both in its internal evolution as well as in its reception, re-use, and assumption as a starting point in addressing past and present philosophical problems. In doing so, it focuses on a feature that is crucially emerging in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science, namely the complexity in the (...) production of knowledge. The book explores the applicability of this approach to a long-considered armchair philosopher, namely René Descartes, who is now more and more understood as a full-blown scientist, networker, and intellectual éminence grise rather than as the mere philosopher of the cogito, as well as the originator of different ‘Cartesianisms’ which encompassed many ideas and approaches for long captured by dichotomic historiographical categories as rationalism and empiricism, or speculative and experimental philosophy. The essays gathered in the volume aim to address the ways in which Descartes’s philosophy evolved and was progressively understood by scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from different contexts and eras, either by considering direct interlocutors of Descartes such as Isaac Beeckman and Elisabeth of Bohemia, early modern thinkers who developed upon his ideas and on particular topics as Nicolas Malebranche or Thomas Willis, those who adapted his overall methodology in developing new systems of knowledge as Johannes Clauberg and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, and contemporary thinkers from continental and analytic traditions like Emanuele Severino and Peter Strawson. (shrink)

The philosopher René Descartes is usually associated with cold reason rather than with feeling, to the extent that Rousseau charged his philosophy had "slashed poetry's throat." Andrea Gadberry argues, on the contrary, that Descartes' thought was crucially enabled by early modern poetry and rhetoric. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of disembodied reason, Gadberry points to Descartes's own impassioned and poetic negotiations with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Gadberry's approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions (...) urgent for the twenty-first: What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Her book reveals an implicit poetics in Descartes' texts, from the puzzling forms of riddle, emblem, and anagram to the antecedents of more familiar, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry in love lyric and elegy. Gadberry's argument is grounded in the rich poetic culture of Descartes' time, even as it traces a biography of thinking. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic shape. This book will be the first volume published in the new Thinking Literature series edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian. (shrink)

The French jurist and courtier Géraud de Cordemoy (1622-1684) was one of the leading exponents of early Cartesianism. Although he felt closely connected to René Descartes' philosophy, he corrected it in some central points. Thus he advocates an atomistic phsics and a theory of causation known as Occasionalism, which Leibniz calls the System of Occasional Causes in the "New System". The volume contains selected central passages from Cordemoy's main philosophical writings, which are made accessible here for the first time (...) in a bilingual study edition. These are excerpts from the "Six Discussions on the Difference and Union of Body and Soul" from 1666, and a "Metaphysical Treatise" that appeared posthumously in 1691. (shrink)

The fifth chapter is a study of the emergence of ‘radical Cartesianism’ as an actor’s category in 1660s and 1670s, which prompted a further development of foundationalism as a reflection on the limits and proper method of philosophy. The key figure in this double process was De Raey, who in the late 1660s started to develop a new logic or metaphysics, intended to counter, on the one hand, the uses of Descartes outside natural philosophy and metaphysics itself, and on the (...) other, the erosion of Descartes’s metaphysical tenets. His writings thus turn out to be relevant as he offers a mapping of the interpretations of Cartesianism covering its uses in theology (as by Meijer and Spinoza) and the spreading of Hobbes’s materialist philosophy in the Low Countries. Moreover, his logical-metaphysical theories embody a novelty in determining the aim of these disciplines, both with respect to the Cartesian tradition (i.e. to Clauberg and Geulincx) and to the Scholastic one, and start to assume a reflective role as they assess the limits of scientific knowledge. In his hands, logic and metaphysics become one discipline, as they have the same function, i.e. the definition of the principles of scientific knowledge (viz. the notions of physical and mental realities), and of its scope and applications. On the one hand, therefore, he can overcome the reduplication of metaphysics and ontology of Clauberg, and the introductory or didactic function that logic played both in Clauberg’s and Geulincx’s philosophy. On the other, his logical and metaphysical systematisation can be read as the result of a long-standing debate over the objects of these disciplines (either mere concepts, or entities existing outside mind), in which De Raey places himself by dealing with the theories of Burgersdijk and Ramus. This chapter thus works as a junction in the account of the establishment of Cartesianism as the philosophy of the university, and its challenges by emerging, alternative worldviews, interpretations and uses. Together, these converging theoretical and historical factors shaped a new, reflective function for logic and metaphysics. (shrink)

The third chapter gives an account of the debates over Cartesianism outlined below, which shifted from the University of Utrecht to Leiden, where the new philosophy was introduced by Adriaan Heereboord in the early 1640s, and was carried on by Johannes de Raey at the end of the decade. In Leiden, the quarrels over Cartesianism were prompted by the intervention of the theologian Jacob Revius, criticising Descartes’s philosophy as a source of Pelagianism in 1647. This gave rise to a series (...) of attacks, replies, and counter-replies which would dominate Dutch Cartesianism well into the 1650s: Revius’s Methodi cartesianae consideratio theologica (1648), Statera philosophiae cartesianae (1650), and Cyriacus Lentulus’s Nova Renati Descartes sapientia (1651) offered a full-blown critique of Descartes’s philosophy, focusing on his metaphysics, method and on their uses in academia. Such critiques are analysed in this chapter as they brought about the first foundation of Cartesian philosophy after Descartes himself, namely, the development of a ‘Cartesian Scholastic’ by Johannes Clauberg, professor at Herborn and Duisburg. In fact, Clauberg’s defence and foundation of a Cartesian academic philosophy was not the effort of one philosopher, but was coordinated with De Raey and with other members of the Cartesian network in the Netherlands and in Germany (including Abraham Heidanus, Tobias Andreae and Christopher Wittich), as a means to avoid the bans on Cartesianism and to provide a decisive answer to the theologians. This coordinated strategy of defence is revealed by two letters of De Raey to Clauberg: their contents shed light on the background of Clauberg’s foundation, which constitutes the first, Cartesian reworking of the academic curriculum. In his works, indeed, Clauberg maintained a metaphysical foundation embodying rational-theological arguments, while providing at the same time a logical theory of the method for natural philosophy, as well as for law, theology and medicine. Yet, his concerns with the traditional structure of the curriculum led him to develop, besides a Cartesian first philosophy, also an ontosophia, whose object is being as such. This is considered by Clauberg not only in the light of the ‘first notions’ of mind and body, but also of those abstracted from concrete realities, as ‘unity’, ‘goodness’, ‘truth’, and so on. This ultimately results in the reduplication of metaphysics, which will be reduced by Clauberg’s followers – dealt with in the next chapters. (shrink)

The fourth chapter analyses the establishment of Cartesianism at the University of Leiden in 1650s and 1660s. This was carried out by De Raey, who provided a defence and teaching of Descartes’s physics in his Clavis philosophiae naturalis (1654), although not based on Descartes’s metaphysics: physical principles, indeed, are presented by De Raey as self-evident truths, and consistent with Aristotle’s theory of scientia or universal and necessary knowledge. This was not the only peculiar characteristic of Leiden Cartesianism, as De Raey (...) also provided a differentiation between philosophical and practical knowledge (including medicine and revealed theology), as these are based on different sources of knowledge, namely, intellect and sensory experience. In the hands of Christopher Wittich, the separation thesis became the standard in conceiving the place of Cartesianism in the university, which was confined to natural philosophy in 1650s and strictly secluded from revealed theology. At the same time, the need to develop a moral philosophy consistent with the Reformed creed became the centre of the debate between Revius and Heidanus, a Reformed theologian who saw in Cartesianism a philosophy more consistent with Calvinism than Scholasticism. Accordingly, he was eager to support the appointment in Leiden of Arnold Geulincx, who was developing a philosophical ethics independent of revealed theology but consistent with the Reformed creed. For this purpose, besides the relation of body, soul and world, Geulincx considered those relations of man, world, and God from which moral duties follow. Accordingly, he provided his ethics with a foundation in rational theology. In turn, this foundation entails a reflection on the type of knowledge that constitutes physics and determines its very method. Given the inscrutability of God’s reasons in creating the world, Geulincx could claim that physics has to proceed by hypotheses based on experience rather than by a deduction of natural laws from metaphysical principles. In this way, the epistemic consequences of his foundational theory refuelled a reflection on the method of natural philosophy itself, making his foundation a sample of the transformation of Cartesian foundationalism – dominated by Descartes’s metaphysical physics – into a reflection on physics itself. In other words, Geulincx provided, together with De Raey, a de-metaphysicisation of physics. (shrink)

“René Girard’s thoughts on the connection between religion and violence are just now becoming known in Germany,” wrote the philosopher Eckhard Nordhofen at the beginning of 1995 in the influential German weekly Die Zeit.1 Was Nordhofen correct with this assessment back then, or was he rather mistaken? Had not a first phase of reception of Girard’s works in the German-speaking world already begun in the late 1970s, or at the latest by the mid 1980s? One must note, though, that (...) Girard was never in fashion during the 1970s or 1980s and that these first attempts to incorporate his works into academic discussion came from individual scholars such as the Swiss Jesuit Raymund Schwager; Konrad Thomas, a sociologist based .. (shrink)

The sixth chapter focuses on the evolution of Cartesianism in the last quarter of the seventeenth century in Leiden and Amsterdam, against the background of the emergence of alternative views in natural philosophy capable of replacing it as a dominant paradigm, namely, the experimental philosophy of Robert Boyle and the mathematical-experimental approach of Huygens and Newton. The last evolution of Cartesianism is reconstructed in this chapter by considering the ‘Cartesian empiricism’ of Burchard de Volder, and the reflections on the language (...) of philosophy and practical disciplines by De Raey in Amsterdam, where he moved in 1669. In 1675 De Volder established the Leiden Theatrum physicum. There he performed experiments in order to teach the principles of a mechanical philosophy largely inspired by Descartes but open to the use of experimental and mathematical evidences in the formulation of natural laws. A similar approach was in fact assumed in the same years by Wolferd Senguerd, who used the Theatrum to perform experiments in pneumatics to teach some of the principles of his eclectic worldview, encompassing some Cartesian principles (such as that of the circularity of movement), but also rejecting the vortex theory. Yet, only De Volder developed a foundational theory for the basic principles of mechanicism, namely, the assumption that every phenomenon can be explained by the notions of matter and movement alone. This was the result of a movement internal to Cartesianism, as De Volder not only reacted (positively) to the emergence of an experimental-mathematical natural philosophy, but was also involved in the defence of Cartesianism against the Censura philosophiae cartesianae of PierreDaniel Huet (1689), in which Descartes’s metaphysics is rejected as inconsistent given its very foundation on doubt and cogito. The intermingling of these different issues resulted, in De Volder’s hands, in a further de-metaphysicisation of physics – as metaphysics cannot provide a justification for the laws of motion – and in the narrowing of the scope of foundationalism, which can only sanction the psychological character of clarity and distinction as a criterion for internal truth, defined in terms of indubitability only. Accordingly, for De Volder metaphysics cannot demonstrate, on a Cartesian basis, that phenomena are actually ruled by the principles of mechanism: insofar as, for him, metaphysics has a prominent reflective role, and loses its status as justification of the absolute truth of scientific statements. This process can be labelled as the transition from foundationalism to philosophy of science and does not characterise only his ‘Cartesian empiricism’. In Amsterdam, De Raey was, over the same years, developing his Cogitata de interpretatione (1692), embodying one of the first, self-standing philosophical considerations of language. Still maintaining his separation thesis, and attacking Hobbes and the radical Cartesians, in this text he aimed to clarify how words meaning sensory data and abstract notions (such as those of mathematics) can be used in philosophy. Rather than setting a method for how to use mental faculties, De Raey aimed, at the end of his career, to provide an updating of the linguistic meanings of scientific vocabulary, namely, a reflection rather than a justification of science. (shrink)

Through a consideration of the philosophical debates occurring in the Dutch and Dutch-related intellectual framework in the early modern period, in the present study some alternatives in the foundation of philosophy and science have been highlighted and analysed. In conclusion, it is time to assess them in a more systematic manner. Each alternative entails a different view on foundational arguments, which may be grouped into theological, metaphysical, and logical ones. This research reveals the essential features of a philosophical milieu created (...) by Descartes and constituting the framework for the dissemination of Newtonian science in Europe, leading to the birth of a philosophy of science as the study of the foundations, assumptions, methods, and limits of the study of natural realms. In fact, one can recognise several reasons for such foundation: on a general level, the need of providing philosophy with a secure foundation against the ‘sceptical crisis’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries highlighted by Richard Popkin. More specifically, however, the foundation of Cartesian and Newtonian philosophy and science served to defend the conceptual premises of new ways of thinking in an academic context, demonstrating the validity of such new ways and rejecting the commonsensical and non-explanatory assumptions of Scholastic philosophy, and, in the case of ’s Gravesande, the speculative character of Descartes’s physics itself. (shrink)

When was philosophy of science born? And why? This book aims to answer these questions. Simply put, philosophy of science was born in seventeenth-century Dutch universities, where the introduction of Cartesian ideas called for philosophical reflection upon the validity, method, and concepts of natural philosophy. The disciplines which fulfilled this role were metaphysics and logic. The process was neither short nor straightforward, nor – admittedly – easily grasped through such a generalisation. As a matter of fact, philosophy of science has (...) existed since antiquity, or for as long as philosophers have provided reflections on such topics. On the other hand, the institutional fragmentation of philosophical and scientific disciplines in the modern era has made it increasingly easy to distinguish between ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’, and for philosophers to provide reflections on the natural sciences. This book stands at the crossroads: namely, it disentangles the ways in which metaphysics and logic became functional for such reflection, and, forthwith, they began to be detached from what was labelled ‘natural philosophy’. This is the reason why this book offers a study of Dutch Cartesianism. Dutch universities were the first where Descartes’s ideas became official matter of teaching and came to reshape the function of metaphysics and logic. So that one can meaningfully ascribe the role of ‘philosophy of science’ to them, and to see this role at work in lectures, disputations, treatises. Again, this is a simplification. Philosophy of science did not appear abruptly, nor was it related only to a transformation of metaphysics, logic, and natural philosophy: its emergence coincided with a rethinking of the foundations of all philosophical disciplines. Philosophy of science appeared, first, as a reflection on philosophy itself, carried out in different disciplines. More precisely, it emerged as a renewed foundation of all philosophical disciplines, serving to guarantee the reliability of their methodologies and concepts, namely, to grant their status as indubitable scientiae. (shrink)

The seventh chapter focuses on the aftermath of the decline of Cartesianism as a leading force in the Dutch academic context. After De Volder and De Raey, indeed, only Ruardus Andala in Franeker carried on the teaching of Cartesian physics (which he taught by commenting upon Descartes’s Principia) and metaphysics, mainly for the sake of contrasting Spinozism and other forms of radical Cartesianism. Thus, Descartes’s philosophy came a dead end on the eve of the eighteenth century. Yet, Leiden Cartesianism and (...) the Leiden experimental tradition (which could include, after De Volder and Senguerd, the activities of Herman Boerhaave), favoured the introduction of Newtonianism as the standard in teaching natural philosophy. This was carried out by ’s Gravesande, who used logic and metaphysics (including rational theology), that is, the chief foundational disciplines in the Cartesian tradition, to introduce students to and justify the assumptions (methodological and ontological) of a Newtonian approach in natural philosophy. This had two outcomes. On the one hand, his arguments in metaphysics (i.e. ontology) have the function of clarifying which objects natural philosophy can investigate. These are natural laws, whose ultimate source in substances or modes cannot be ascertained by intellect alone, as they depend on the power of God. On the other, given the fact that experience is our only means of grasping such laws (which are then mathematically handled) he provides a rational-theological justification of experiential evidence, as capable of providing us with a degree of certainty equal to mathematical evidence. As for the Cartesians, this is still the paradigm of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, with the introduction of Newtonianism foundational disciplines such as logic and metaphysics (including rational theology) served as a justification for and a reflection on a given scientific methodology. Thus, philosophy started to be actually detached from the natural sciences, and to assume a subservient role with respect to them, as once it was the ancilla theologiae. (shrink)

The second chapter is devoted to the analysis of the first introduction of and quarrels over Cartesianism at the University of Utrecht, as determined by the teaching of a Cartesian natural philosophy and physiology by Henricus Regius. First, it is shown how his teaching gave rise to the querelle d’Utrecht (1641), in which two main issues were debated: the rejection of substantial forms, and the characterisation of man as ens per accidens. During the quarrel, questions were raised about the consistency (...) of the new philosophy with theology and – insofar as it raised the problem of the individuation of bodies and species by substantial forms – of the unity of man. Secondly, it is shown how Regius’s peculiar approach to natural philosophy (and physiology) led him to quarrel with Descartes himself in 1645–1648, with regard to two main questions: the nature of mind, and the method of natural philosophy, which Regius interprets in both cases from an empirical standpoint, as he maintains that the nature of mind may consist in matter (according to medical evidence), and that all knowledge has a sensory origin. Accordingly, he paved the way for ‘radical’ interpretations of Descartes which rejected his metaphysics, but also for an approach to a natural philosophy more open to the use of experience. In this chapter, I scrutinise the reasons behind Regius’s approach to physics and metaphysics by paying attention, on the one hand, to his quarrel with Descartes, and on the other to the sources of his methodology, which he largely borrows from medical authors. In conclusion, I show that Cartesianism, in the hands of Regius, might serve as the basis for medicine but could not yet become a full-fledged alternative to Aristotelianism. (shrink)

Since the 1960s the integration of the history of science and the philosophy of science has been substantiated by the presence of university departments offering a curriculum of studies catering to both disciplines. At Princeton University, Charles Gillespie established the first curriculum of studies in the history and philosophy of science – henceforth HPS – in 1960, with the purpose of attracting students to the study of the history of science. In Princeton, history of science was taught by John E. (...) Murdoch, while Hilary Putnam gave courses in philosophy of science. At Indiana University it was a historian of philosophy, Norwood Russell Hanson, who established the first department of HPS, hosting the teaching of historian of science Alfred Rupert Hall. Eventually, the actual integration of history and philosophy of science was brought about by the appearance of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which, drawing attention to the notion of paradigm in scientific theories, favoured the marriage between historical and philosophical analysis of science. Since 1960s, HPS has flourished, and nowadays at least five universities in the United Kingdom and sixteen in the United States offer degrees in HPS (Mauskopf/Schmaltz 2012, pp. 1–10). More recently, kindred approaches have emerged, such as the ‘integrated HPS’ (&HPS), endorsed in some international conferences, which aims at merging the two disciplines rather than offering philosophical insights into the history of science and vice versa. (shrink)

The paper discusses in what sense Descartes' Meditations contain the foundation of his physics.

There is a relationship between time and technology which has been obvious since the classical philosophies of time. Even telling the time necessitates technologies relating to measuring and counting. Technological developments have changed the temporal state of our reality. Key terms such as deceleration, synchronisation, prevention and de-temporalisation point to relevant problem areas in this respect. This yearbook, whose thematic focus is 2021, endeavours to reveal new technological and philosophical perspectives on the temporal conditions in which we think, communicate, work (...) and live. With contributions by Cornelius Borck, Stefan Böschen, Christopher Coenen, Olivier Del Fabbro, Andreas Folkers, Yvonne Förster, Alexander Friedrich, Steve Fuller, Gabriele Gramelsberger, Thilo Hagendorff, Thomas Hilgers, Dirk Hommrich, Erich Hörl, Sebastian Lederle, Janne Mende, Jürgen Meutgens, Carl Mitcham, Oliver Müller, Alfred Nordmann, Tom Poljanšek, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludger Schwarte, Astrid Schwarz, René von Schomberg, René Umlauf, Sarine Waltenspül, Bastian Weiß, Langdon Winner and Yongmou Liu. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene DescartesRichard A. WatsonAndrea Nye. The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene Descartes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xiii + 187. Cloth, $57.95. Paper, $18.95.Princess Elisabeth was an acute, persistent critic of Descartes's philosophy. Because he liked her and she was a princess, Descartes did not dismiss her (...) criticisms as he did those of Gassendi and Hobbes. How can an immaterial mind interact with a material body? How can God determine all our actions and yet give us free will? Elisabeth was dissatisfied with Descartes's answer that an all-powerful God can do anything even if we cannot understand how.Andrea Nye analyzes the correspondence between Elisabeth and Descartes to support the thesis that Elisabeth developed and defended a worldly philosophy of life in opposition to the unworldly rules Descartes offered for living a tranquil and happy life. Descartes said she should focus on the separation of the mind from the body to avoid disturbing the intellect with sensory matters. Think positively about such nice things as birds and flowers and not of bad things that happen to one. Descartes told Elisabeth that "there are no events so dreadful, nor so absolutely bad in the judgments of people, that a person of spirit cannot look on them with a bias that makes them appear favorable" (48). If we do our best to find out the right course of action and act accordingly, then even if the results are bad, we have no reason for remorse or recrimination, but can be happy that we have done the best we can. Descartes even says that a person who follows his rules can view everything that happens to him, even the worst, as though these events were taking place in a theatre, for in the end they do not impinge upon the ultimate happiness of one's immortal soul.Elisabeth, earnestly. sardonically, and sometimes with annoyance responds that this is perhaps possible for a single man of independent means with few civil and personal relationships, but for someone engaged in family affairs, royal politics, and social interaction with other human beings, Descartes's philosophy of life is both impossible and wrong. One never knows what is best; even if one did know, it is difficult to carry it out; and finally, if the results are bad, then one is after all responsible. One would be inhuman to deny fault, monstrous to deny moral responsibility. Above all, Elisabeth says, one should not view one's own life as theatre. One must be responsible for oneself and others.Nye casts this as a difference between Descartes's abstract and Elisabeth's particularist approaches to life, but also as a contrast between those who can live a disengaged life and those who cannot. Some of the amusement in Nye's perceptive discussions comes from her showing how Descartes's passions often run away with him, and how Elisabeth gently turns his own rules back onto him. [End Page 277]Nye's analyses of the correspondence are excellent, but she makes some mistakes about the lives of Descartes and Elisabeth. Nye explains Descartes's coolness by his having suffered from a "motherless infancy" (129), even speaking of "the mother's milk denied him as a child" and calling him an "orphan" (156), which he was not. His mother died thirteen months after his birth, but he had a wet nurse. Descartes may never have tasted his own mother's milk, but he was never deprived of nursing. Children were often sent to live with wet nurses for as long as four years, although Descartes is traditionally said to have been raised by his grandmother. In any event, such psychoanalyzing is off the mark.Nye also says that Descartes was asked by Queen Christina to write a ballet. She cites the wrong ballet and attributes a verse from the right ballet incorrectly, but beyond that, there is no evidence either that Descartes wrote verses for a ballet or that Christina asked him to.Then Nye speaks of Descartes's daughter Francine... (shrink)

"How can human beings, who are liable to error, possess knowledge, since the grounds on which we believe do not rule out that we are wrong? Andrea Kern argues that we can disarm this skeptical doubt by conceiving knowledge as an act of a rational capacity. In this book, she develops a metaphysics of the mind as existing through knowledge of itself."--Provided by publisher.

This paper explores an idea of Stoic descent that is largely neglected nowadays, the idea that an argument is valid when the conditional formed by the conjunction of its premises as antecedent and its conclusion as consequent is true. As it will be argued, once some basic features of our naıve understanding of validity are properly spelled out, and a suitable account of conditionals is adopted, the equivalence between valid arguments and true conditionals makes perfect sense. The account of validity (...) outlined here, which displays one coherent way to articulate the Stoic intuition, accords with standard formal treatments of deductive validity and encompasses an independently grounded characterization of inductive validity. (shrink)