Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Cartesian Philosophy and the Flesh PDF full book. Access full book title Cartesian Philosophy and the Flesh by Frances Gray. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: George Lakoff Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 9780465056743 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 644
Book Description
What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions-that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal-that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that:Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observe them in any simple way.Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and in the other a spatial dimension we move along.Mind is embodied. Thought requires a body-not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.Most of the central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosopy all do not exist.Then what does?Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosopy responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.
Author: Jean-Luc Marion, Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022619261X Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
On Descartes’ Passive Thought is the culmination of a life-long reflection on the philosophy of Descartes by one of the most important living French philosophers. In it, Jean-Luc Marion examines anew some of the questions left unresolved in his previous books about Descartes, with a particular focus on Descartes’s theory of morals and the passions. Descartes has long been associated with mind-body dualism, but Marion argues here that this is a historical misattribution, popularized by Malebranche and popular ever since both within the academy and with the general public. Actually, Marion shows, Descartes held a holistic conception of body and mind. He called it the meum corpus, a passive mode of thinking, which implies far more than just pure mind—rather, it signifies a mind directly connected to the body: the human being that I am. Understood in this new light, the Descartes Marion uncovers through close readings of works such as Passions of the Soul resists prominent criticisms leveled at him by twentieth-century figures like Husserl and Heidegger, and even anticipates the non-dualistic, phenomenological concepts of human being discussed today. This is a momentous book that no serious historian of philosophy will be able to ignore.
Author: Harold J. Cook Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022654009X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
René Descartes is best known as the man who coined the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” But though he is remembered most as a thinker, Descartes, the man, was no disembodied mind, theorizing at great remove from the worldly affairs and concerns of his time. Far from it. As a young nobleman, Descartes was a soldier and courtier who took part in some of the greatest events of his generation—a man who would not seem out of place in the pages of The Three Musketeers. In The Young Descartes, Harold J. Cook tells the story of a man who did not set out to become an author or philosopher—Descartes began publishing only after the age of forty. Rather, for years he traveled throughout Europe in diplomacy and at war. He was present at the opening events of the Thirty Years' War in Central Europe and Northern Italy, and was also later involved in struggles within France. Enduring exile, scandals, and courtly intrigue, on his journeys Descartes associated with many of the most innovative free thinkers and poets of his day, as well as great noblemen, noblewomen, and charismatic religious reformers. In his personal life, he expressed love for men as well as women and was accused of libertinism by his adversaries. These early years on the move, in touch with powerful people and great events, and his experiences with military engineering and philosophical materialism all shaped the thinker and philosopher Descartes became in exile, where he would begin to write and publish, with purpose. But though it is these writings that made ultimately made him famous, The Young Descartes shows that this story of his early life and the tumultuous times that molded him is sure to spark a reappraisal of his philosophy and legacy.
Author: Jacob Rogozinski Publisher: Cultural Memory in the Present ISBN: 9780804759885 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book criticizes theories, dominant today, that reduce the self to a simple illusion, proposing a new theory of the ego that allows us to better understand our existence and our relations with others.
Author: René Descartes Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300067736 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
Descartes' ideas not only changed the course of Western philosophy but also led to or transformed the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, physics and mathematics, political theory and ethics, psychoanalysis, and literature and the arts. This book reprints Descartes' major works, Discourse on Method and Meditations, and presents essays by leading scholars that explore his contributions in each of those fields and place his ideas in the context of his time and our own. There are chapters by David Weissman on metaphysics and psychoanalysis, John Post on epistemology, Lou Massa on physics and mathematics, William T. Bluhm on politics and ethics, and Thomas Pavel on literature and art. These essays are accompanied by others by David Weissman and by Stephen Toulmin that introduce the idea of intellectual lineages, discuss the period in which Descartes wrote, and reexamine the premises of his philosophy in light of contemporary philosophical, political, and social thinking.
Author: Mark Johnson Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 0816657971 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. "We are," says Mark Johnson, "in the midst of metaphormania." The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in metaphor as a vehicle for exploring the relations between language and thought. While a number of recent books have dealt with metaphor from the standpoints of several disciplines, there is no collection that shows the best of the work that has been done in the field of philosophy. Mark Johnson has brought together essays that define the central issues of the discussion in this field. His introductory essay offers a critical survey of historically influential treatments of figurative language (including those of Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Nietzsche) and sets forth the nature of various issues that have been of interest to philosophers. Thus, it provides a context in which to understand the motivations, influences, and significance of the collected essays. An annotated bibliography serves as a catalog of all relevant literature. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor provides an entry point into the philosophical exploration of metaphor for students, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, artists, critics, or anyone interested in language and its relation to understanding and experience.
Author: Richard A. Watson Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
It was Descartes (1596-1650), says Watson (philosophy, Washington U., St. Louis), who established (or perhaps discovered) the rules of Reason, the foundation on which science and philosophy have been constructed since his time. He explores the life of the mathematician and philosopher, for readers who have no background in either field, but would l
Author: Christian Gilliam Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474417906 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire. He argues that here, in this 'life', is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately comes to outline and justify the conceptual importance and necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of 'pure' immanence are either apolitical and/or politically incoherent.
Author: Frances Gray
Author: Frances Gray
Author: George Lakoff
Author: Jean-Luc Marion,
Author: Felix Ensslin
Author: Harold J. Cook
Author: Jacob Rogozinski
Author: René Descartes
Author: Mark Johnson
Author: Richard A. Watson
Author: Christian Gilliam