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One of the most significant studies of Descartes in recent times. It concentrates on the Meditations to show Descartes' philosophy in the context of his overall scientific objectives, not all of them fully explicit in the texts.
List of contents
Preface A Note on Descartes’s Life and Works I General Doubt 1 Cartesian doubt and Cartesian revolution 2 The ‘I’ of the Meditations 3 Assumptions and aims of methodic doubt 4 Attacking the foundations: ‘these familiar things’ 5 Attacking the foundations: ‘simple and universal things’ 6 The Dreaming Argument: a reconstruction 7 The opinion of a God who can do anything 8 ‘Principles’ 9 Real doubts II Knowledge of Self and Bodies 1 The concerns of Meditation II 2 Ego existo 3 But what then am I? 4 This wax 5 Intellectual inspection 6 Mind ‘better known’ than body III Some Perspectives on the Third Meditation 1 Introduction 2 Material falsity and objective reality 3 A God who can do anything 14 Circularity 5 Physics and the eternal truths: a speculation 6 The proof of an all-perfect God IV Judgment, Ideas and Thought 1 Regulating assent 2 Consciousness V True and Immutable Natures 1 Res extensa 2 Immutable natures and fictitious ideas: a critique 3 Immutable natures and the ontological argument VI Mind, Body and Things Outside Us 1 Introduction 2 Cartesian dualism 3 The Epistemological Argument 4 Sensation and the Epistemological Argument 5 The evidence of the senses 6 The body which by a certain special right I call mine
About the author
Margaret Dauler Wilson, Series Editor-Ted Honderich
Summary
Concentrates on the Meditations to show Descartes' philosophy in the context of his overall scientific objectives, not all of them fully explicit in the texts.
