This edition contains Donald Cress's completely revised translation of the Meditations (from the corrected Latin edition) and recent corrections to Discourse on Method, bringing this version even closer to Descartes's original, while maintaining the clear and accessible style of a classic teaching edition.

While common sense and rationality often have been viewed as two distinct features in a unitifed cognitive map, this this volume offers novel, even paradoxical views of the relationship. Touching on various disciplines, it considers what constitutes human rationality, behavior, and intelligence.

Compiles the essays of Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher who rejected Greek and medieval scholasticism.

Our lives are increasingly intertwined with the digital realm, and with new technology, new ethical problems emerge. The academic field that addresses these problems—which we tentatively call ‘digital ethics’—can be an important intellectual resource for policy making and regulation. This is why it is important to understand how the new ethical challenges of a digital society are being met by academic research. We have undertaken a scientometric analysis to arrive at a better understanding of the nature, scope and dynamics of (...) the field of digital ethics. Our approach in this paper shows how the field of digital ethics is distributed over various academic disciplines. By first having experts select a collection of keywords central to digital ethics, we have generated a dataset of articles discussing these issues. This approach allows us to generate a scientometric visualisation of the field of digital ethics, without being constrained by any preconceived definitions of academic disciplines. We have first of all found that the number of publications pertaining to digital ethics is exponentially increasing. We furthermore established that whereas one may expect digital ethics to be a species of ethics, we in fact found that the various questions pertaining to digital ethics are predominantly being discussed in computer science, law and biomedical science. It is in these fields, more than in the independent field of ethics, that ethical discourse is being developed around concrete and often technical issues. Moreover, it appears that some important ethical values are very prominent in one field (e.g., autonomy in medical science), while being almost absent in others. We conclude that to get a thorough understanding of, and grip on, all the hard ethical questions of a digital society, ethicists, policy makers and legal scholars will need to familiarize themselves with the concrete and practical work that is being done across a range of different scientific fields to deal with these questions. (shrink)

This is the first book in which contemporary scientists and mystics share with us-in their own words-their views on space, time, matter, energy, life, consciousness, creation and on our place in the scheme of things. The book is also the story of an American philosopher who-with these dialogues-ventures into ground-breaking territory, and of her search in America, Europe, India and Nepal for people whose work is at the center of our understanding of reality.

'I concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature resides only in thinking, and which, in order to exist, has no need of place and is not dependent on any material thing.' Descartes's A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences marks a watershed in European thought; in it, the author provides an informal intellectual autobiography in the vernacular for a non-specialist readership, sweeps away all previous philosophical traditions, and (...) sets out in brief his radical new philosophy, which begins with a proof of the existence of the self, next deduces from it the existence and nature of God, and ends by offering a radical new account of the physical world and of human and animal nature. This new translation is accompanied by a substantial introductory essay which draws on Descartes's correspondence to examine his motivation and the impact of his great work on his contemporaries. Detailed notes explain his philosophical terminology and ideas. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

'Those most capable of being moved by passion are those capable of tasting the most sweetness in this life.'Descartes is most often thought of as introducing a total separation of mind and body. But he also acknowledged the intimate union between them, and in his later writings he concentrated on understanding this aspect of human nature. The Passions of the Soul is his greatest contribution to this debate. It contains a profound discussion of the workings of the emotions and of (...) their place in human life - a subject that increasingly engages the interest of philosophers and intellectual and cultural historians. It also sets out a view of ethics that has been seen as a radical reorientation of moral philosophy.This volume also includes both sides of the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, one of Descartes's keenest disciples and shrewdest critics, which played a crucial role in the genesis of The Passions, as well as the first part of The Principles of Philosophy, which sets out the key positions of Descartes's philosophical system.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

This work was originally published anonymously.

Even if it is indeed impossible to consider Pasolin’s « Salo » as an illustration of Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, we should not treat the film as merely a schematization or a betrayal of the book, as one often hears. Pasolini uses the « reference » to Sade as a « tool, » in all its ambiguity, with which to demonstrate and dismantle the consequences of the paradoxical logic of the Enlightenment, i. e. its utilitarian and (...) hedonistic ethics. Sexuality considered as pure consumption becomes the device and the instrument of power and destruction. Salô’s target is not fascism in its historical form, but rather its derivative, still invisible form in consumer society, which leads to the collapsing of the body and eros in the language of communication and the integral transparency of affects. (shrink)

Die Neuausgabe der "Meditationen" über die Erste Philosophie bietet das Hauptwerk Descartes' in einer durchgängig neuen deutschen Übersetzung. Sie erhebt erstmals die Einheitlichkeit der Terminologie zum leitenden Kriterium und erfüllt damit ein echtes Desiderat für den anspruchsvollen Leser. In den "Meditationes de prima philosophia" (1642) geht es Descartes um eine neue Grundlegung der Metaphysik. Dieser Neuanfang in der Philosophie, den Descartes wie wohl kaum ein anderer propagiert und durchführt, hat jedoch einen konservativen Zug: Gerade Descartes besteht darauf, daß seine Philosophie (...) die älteste ist, die es überhaupt geben kann, und diese Aussage hat nur Sinn, wenn Metaphysik als Rekonstruktion der ursprünglichen Fragen verstanden wird, die anfänglich das philosophische und insbesondere metaphysische Geschäft ins Rollen gebracht hatten. Mit Descartes beginnt deshalb nicht etwa nur jenes systematische Philosophieren, dem es um die Beantwortung der Fragen selbst geht, sondern auch ein Philosophieren, das die Behandlung der Fragen selbst in der Auseinandersetzung und mit dem Material jener Positionen vollzieht, die es zu überwinden versucht. Die zentrale Innovation der Meditationen liegt also weder in der bloß scheinbaren Unabhängigkeit von aller vorherigen Metaphysik, noch in einer neuen Terminologie, sondern in einer völligen Neuordnung des vorhandenen Materials. Descartes agiert souverän in der Terminologie des Aristoteles und der scholastischen Metaphysik, greift nicht weniger souverän die Themen dieser Tradition auf und fügt sie zu einem völlig neuen Gebäude zusammen. Das Neue an Descartes' Metaphysik ist, daß er mit der hergebrachten Metaphysik agiert, nicht in ihr. (shrink)

So simple and imperfect as it may appear this book has made use of knowledge on invention and discovery accumu lated during a lifetime. Those persons who would be tempted to emphasize only its imperfections should read the correspondence exchanged between Cantor and Dedekind at the end of the nineteenth century; they would then realize how difficult it was, even for an outstanding man, the creator of the set theory, to propose impeccable results in a completely new field. The field (...) I have chosen here is plausibility. I have proposed an intuitive, some would say a naive, presentation as I want to reach as large an audience as possible and because I personally believe that it is easier to axiomatize a mathematical theory precisely than to dis cover it and enunciate its key theorems. Professor Polya said: "The truly creative mathematician is a good guesser first and a good prover afterward. " For centuries a formalized generalized logic was found necessary and many attempts have been made to build it. vi Preface Mine is based on plausibility which covers with precision a wider field than probability and makes the formalization of analogy and generalization possible. As Laplace said: "Even in the mathematical sciences, our principal instru ments to discover the truth are induction and analogy. "* The examples of application I have chosen are not des cribed in detail. (shrink)

On the background of the later opposition between realism and anti-realism, and with special attention to the overlapping of reality and logos, an examination of Aristotle’s way of answering to the...

On pense souvent l’éthique comme un fait strictement humain : les hommes et eux seuls auraient des préoccupations éthiques ; seuls les comportements humains auraient à obéir à des règles éthiques; les règles en question concerneraient au premier chef, pour ne pas dire exclusivement, la relation des agents humains entre eux. La même chose peut être répétée, mutatis mutandis, au sujet du droit. Dans cette perspective, traditionnelle, les animaux sont au mieux des exclus : ni agents éthiques, ni bénéficiaires sinon (...) marginalement (quand, par exemple, le respect des droits du propriétaire leur assure une protection contre certains mauvais traitements) ; ils jouent le rôle de faire-valoir : si les humains sont des agents éthiques, ou si l’éthique les protège vis-à-vis de certains agissements, c’est précisément en vertu du fait qu’ils ne sont pas de simples animaux ; en vertu de ce qui les différencie des « bêtes » ou des animaux non-humains. La valeur que reconnaît l’éthique, peu ou prou, s’identifie à la part de la non-animalité de la « personne » humaine. (shrink)