"A work of major importance for the interpretation of Descartes's development and for the understanding of the function of the imagination in Descartes's early works. Descartes's Imagination will be a must in Descartes and imagination studies. It is long overdue."--Eva T. H. Brann, author of The World of Imagination: Sum and Substance "A significant contribution to our understanding of the development of Descartes's philosophy."--William R. Shea, author of The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of Rene Descartes.

This book explains the background and rationale of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's notorious attack on Isaac Newton's classic theory of white light and colors. Though the merits of Goethe's color science, as advanced in his massive Zur Farbenlehre, have often been acknowledged, it has been almost unanimously proclaimed invalid as physics. How could Goethe have been so mistaken? In his book, Dennis Sepper shows that the condemnation of Goethe's attacks on Newton has been based on erroneous assumptions (...) about the history of Newton's theory and the methods and goals of Goethe's color science. By illuminating the historical background and the experimental, methodological, and philosophical aspects of Goethe's work, the author shows that his color theory is in an important sense genuinely physical and that, as simultaneously poet, scientist, historian, and philosopher, Goethe managed to anticipate important twentieth-century research not only in the history and philosophy of science, but even in color science itself. (shrink)

This book discusses that imagination is as important to thinking and reasoning as it is to making and acting. By reexamining our philosophical and psychological heritage, it traces a framework, a conceptual topology, that underlies the most disparate theories: a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances. It shows how this framework was progressively developed by thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, and how it is reflected in more recent developments in theorists as different as (...) Peirce, Saussure, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Bachelard. The conceptual topology of imagination incorporates logic, mathematics, and science as well as production, play, and art. Recognizing this topology can move us past the confusions to a unifying view of imagination for the future. (shrink)

In January 1641 Marin Mersenne forwarded to René Descartes a set of objections to the latter’s Meditations that Mersenne had solicited from “an Englishman.” This, along with some optical papers that Descartes may not have known were from the same person, was apparently his first philosophical encounter with Thomas Hobbes. The surviving correspondence and the Meditations’s third set of “Objections and Replies” show that the antipathy between these two otherwise excellent minds was virtually instantaneous. The irony has often been remarked (...) that these men, who were both engaged in constructing a system of mechanical science and whose views were so similar on many major issues, should have become such bitter opponents. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed review of Filosofi italiani contemporanei, a book that presents overviews of seven contemporary Italian philosophers and philosopher/theologians—Luigi Pareyson, Emanuele Severino, Italo Mancini, Gianni Vattimo, Vincenzo Vitiello, Massimo Cacciari, and theologian Bruno Forte. Not intended as a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Italian philosophical scene, the book presents thinkers influential during the last three decades who have focused on tradition, post-metaphysical conceptions of being, origin, and principle, and the openness of philosophy to religion. Although eccentric by (...) Anglo-American standards, the selection does not misrepresent recent Italian philosophizing, which has been more thoroughgoingly shaped by neo-scholasticism, idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and nihilism than most English-language work. Open to international philosophy as well as to its own traditions, Italian thinkers work within a complex ethos that has produced significant recent philosophizing and holds great promise for the future. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed review of Filosofi italiani contemporanei, a book that presents overviews of seven contemporary Italian philosophers and philosopher/theologians—Luigi Pareyson, Emanuele Severino, Italo Mancini, Gianni Vattimo, Vincenzo Vitiello, Massimo Cacciari, and theologian Bruno Forte. Not intended as a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Italian philosophical scene, the book presents thinkers influential during the last three decades who have focused on tradition, post-metaphysical conceptions of being, origin, and principle, and the openness of philosophy to religion. Although eccentric by (...) Anglo-American standards, the selection does not misrepresent recent Italian philosophizing, which has been more thoroughgoingly shaped by neo-scholasticism, idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and nihilism than most English-language work. Open to international philosophy as well as to its own traditions, Italian thinkers work within a complex ethos that has produced significant recent philosophizing and holds great promise for the future. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Status of the Rationalist Image The Deeper Background Descartes: The Directed Imagination of Mathematics, and Passions as Nascent Images Malebranche Conclusion.

In Representative Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson presented Goethe as the prototype of the writer elected by nature, and he identified Goethe's specific genius as "putting ever a thing for a word." But Goethe's talents as writer and poet have long seemed to scientific readers to undermine his efforts to be a scientist, and to talk of his, or any, poetics of science would involve a category mistake. But putting things to words—that is, filling and structuring what we say about the (...) world with the content of experience—is what Goethe's investigations of nature aimed at. Considered as a philosophy of science, his method gives robust meaning and contemporary relevance to the term "poetics of science.". (shrink)

This chapter proposes to take the first few steps toward understanding the problematics of imagination in Descartes. It aims to show that in writings preceding the Regulae, Descartes conceived imagination as the chief faculty in the work of cognition, indeed the chief faculty for unifying knowledge. In this light the Regulae appears not simply as an early formulation of the principles of method, but as the tension-filled outcome of an attempt to think through the heuristic and cognitive competencies of imagination (...) on the basis of a human psychology strongly correlated with human physiology. Although the inadequacies of this attempt ultimately led to the cognitive demotion of imagination, there are nevertheless reasons for thinking that the early framework, shaped by the primacy of imagination, was not so much rejected as transformed in Descartes' mature work. The chapter further explains that imagination is the foundation of physics and mathematics and that it is both corporeal and spiritual. In addition imagination also serves as agent of all intelligent perception and the chief faculty for rising to higher level of spiritual truths. It further explains phantasia, a crucial organ of the brain where images occur, either derived from the senses, memory or from the intellect. (shrink)

Using the example of Newton's Opticks, the author develops the concept of 'classic' as applied to landmark works in the history of the sciences. A discussion of themes drawn from H.-G. Gadamer and T. Kuhn is followed by an introduction of the notions of the texture and contexture of scientific works, conceived as the result of an author's weaving together foreground and background concerns. These notions assist in understanding how certain works can exercise a continuing appeal to both specialists and (...) nonspecialists. The essay concludes with reflections on the pedagogical purpose of using classic scientific texts in university education. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Spinoza and the Passionate Imagination Leibniz and the Logic of Imagination Wolff and the Scholasticism of Imagination Conclusion.

The natural sciences, born of philosophy, have always influenced philosophical debate. It is not surprising, then, that the books under review take at least part of their impulse from twentieth-century scientific work on color.

For more than two decades the philosopher of science David Hull has been involved with the community of biologists engaged in questions of taxonomical classification and evolution. In this book Hull uses this perspective to good advantage. By narrating the disputes, enmities, and alliances he has witnessed, he develops a theory of scientific change as a process operating according to a kind of natural selection of concepts.

The foci of this penetrating study are Euclid's geometry and Descartes' mathematics. It is a contribution to the history of mathematics, but it is much more, for the differing approaches to mathematics in the ancient and the modern worlds is shown to have deep consequences for both doing and knowing. The investigation is centered on the nature of geometrical construction in ancient and modern mathematics, and, by extension, the crucial importance of construction to the reality and self-understanding of modernity.