A friend commented, privately, upon my comment a few days back on Descartes and Spinoza and how they made their livings. I said that Spinoza's living as a lens grinder does have a bearing on his philosophy and briefly explained why. Lenses made possible both the infinite and the infinitesimal, through both the telescope and the microscope. The world made possible by such instruments and the sciences they enable could indeed be deified. My friend found this unsatisfying. But ... there is no accounting for taste. What is a tad more biting ... he noted accurately that I had offered no explanation at all of how the material circumstances of Descartes' life had any connection tohis philosophy. Here, then, is that explanation. Descartes sold real estate, which he appears to have inherited, and to have used the proceeds to buy bonds, supporting himself thereafter as a coupon clipper. Consider those two sorts of asset: real estate and bonds. Real estate...
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One of the usual jests about the study of philosophy is that you need a "day job," that philosophy doesn't undergird any remunerative employment. I recently saw a post on QUORA that constitutes a species of this genus. Someone asked, "What kind of jobs did philosophers like Rene Descartes and Spinoza do when they weren't philosophizing?" What was their day job? Descartes was well born, and at one point in his life he sold real estate, presumably inherited, and invested it in bonds, which allowed him to be comfortable for years thereafter. In later years, when he was famous for his philosophy, he supplemented his bond income with tutoring and, apparently, some military engineering. Spinoza was not as fortunate in his birth. He made a living grinding lenses. But it is worth noting that this activity was not unrelated to his philosophizing. Lenses, the microscope and the telescope, were at the time opening new worlds. A lens grinder was at a critical jun...
The bullet-point presentation of Cartesian philosophy. I have in earlier posts sought to summarize others of the Great Thinkers of the philosophical canon in five tenets per head. Today we take on Rene Descartes. In some respects, this may seem an idiosyncratic take on Descartes, and it is a take I would be prepared to modify in the face of appropriate contrary explanations, but it is honestly and painstakingly arrived at. That said: Rene D was trying to tell us .. 1. That if we try to doubt everything that can be doubted we will end up forced to a choice between accepting the existence of a benevolent God (a postulate that can guarantee the reliability of our senses and our reason), OR accepting solipsism. 2. Having accepted God for this purpose, we don't really have much day-to-day use for Him. The physical world is a mechanism, just matter in motion where objects push each other around and can be exhaustively understood in those ...
New book. May be of interest to some of those who follow this blog. The Cartesian Brain , a collection of essays edited by Denis Kamboucher, Damien Lacroux, Tad Schmalz and Ruidan She, has just been published by Routledge. It looks at Cartesian writings far beyond the Meditations . One might get from the Meditations the impression that Descartes didn't care all that much about the brain, and nascent neuroscience. After all, the "I think" is accomplished by an incorporeal spirit. Actually, it turns out, he did care about the particulars of the human brain. and not just the pineal gland either. One fascinating tidbit I get from the review of this book recently posted in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is the applicability of the "law of the conservation of motion" to the action of mind on brain. I put the phrase in quotes because in Newtonian and post-Newtonian physics, our physics, there is no such law. There is a law of the conservation of momentum: but tha...
Descartes is not ordinarily understood as an ethical philosopher. He is notorious for various epistemological and metaphysical positions, and with the a prior cosmology to which they led him. But ethics? ... his views on the subject barely rate a mention in the textbooks. This may change, and a new book may be a harbinger of that change, Descartes' Moral Perfectionism by Frans Svenson seeks to tease a full ethical theory out of Descartes scattered remarks on the subject, some in letters rather than in his books. Svenson, who works at the University of Gothenburg, says that for Descartes the central ethical question is: why ought we be virtuous? The answer is: because by doing so we promote our degree of perfection. What does it mean to be virtuous? that is, to be morally more perfect? It means to attend to certain facts about one's self and the world in which one lives and, in that context, to be generous. Generosity is THE key virtue, the key human bridge to perfec...
The relationship is complicated. Let us take four points. First. both were path-breaking mathematicians. Descartes’ invention of analytic geometry made possible, a generation later, Newton’s (and Leibniz') development of calculus. Second, they had very different ideas about matter and how different chunks of matter interact. Descartes wanted to get rid of the idea of “occult” causes and effects, or what some call teleology. To speak very roughly, mechanistic explanations involve pushing and teleological ones involve pulling. For Descartes, everything that happens in the material world had to be explained by things pushing each other around. There could be no “action at a distance,” no pull, just as things didn't happen because inanimate objects (or non-human animals!) wanted them to happen. So the Cartesians of the following generation argued against Newton’s law of gravity — in their eyes Newton was trying to bring back those occult causes, pulling at each other across vast d...
I wrote something brilliant recently that was cut from the piece of which it was a part. The piece as a whole concerned a certain blockchain named Cartesi and the related token, known as CRTA. One of the distinctive things about Cartesi is that it allows programmers to do some of their work "off blockchain," that is, in a way that will be opaque to other programmers working on the same system. Developers of "smart contracts" on Ethereum use "on chain" virtual machines. But developers on Cartesi generally use Linux to create the contracts rather than using blockchain-specific VMs. So: what about the name? The term "Cartesi" pays honor to the philosopher Rene Descartes, founder of modern philosophy. This much was covered in the story that I wrote recently for Breaking Daily News. What was cut was a bit in which I believe I identified specifically WHY Descartes received this honor. Yes, the nerdish types who invent refinements to Ethereum's ...
A new book by Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore offers us a view of Descartes' philosophy of the material world, the hypothetical PHYSICS within his metaphysics, that is more sympathetic than many of the other recent takes on it. Here's a link to a review by John Carriero, of UCLA. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/descartes-and-the-ontology-of-everyday-life/ Carriero starts by discussing the Cartesian view of everyday objects. Since extension is the essence of matter, space and matter are one and the same. But for Descartes types of matter differentiate themselves by size. Some are very small, and here Descartes allows for such microscopic realities as may in the course of time be discovered, though he didn't accept atomism -- the idea that there is an absolutely bottom rung of the ladder of scale. Some objects, those of everyday life, are medium size, large globules, and these include the bodies from within which your soul and mine look out at the world. Some objects...
I've decided I don't believe in Descartes' presentation. In less kind language: he was a phony. He marketed as someone who went through a skeptical dark night of the soul, took seriously arguments about the malevolent demon and dreams, thought himself out to the other aside of such arguments, (by finding God), and so was able to provide us with a distinctive view of the world. The dark-night-of-the-soul stuff has so come to dominate the collective imagination that it overshadows the distinct view of the world that Descartes eventually offered. What he offered was this: 1. There are three substances: God, mind, and matter. We need God chiefly as the guarantor of our knowledge about matter: "we" are manifestation of mind. 2. How does mind interact with matter? Descartes left that as a mystery -- but he minimized the extent of the mystery a bit by telling us that other animals are mindless: the issue only arises for humans. 2. Matter is in essence the s...
Rene Descartes wrote a treatise on music. It was in fact the earliest thing he is known to have written and which survives for us. Perhaps it is wrong to pay too much attention to it. Some historians of philosophy write it off as juvenalia. But it does show us that Descartes was on his way to becoming ... Descartes. He treats music as a sensory instantiation of mathematics. If the proportions are right, the mathematical problem has been solved properly, and the musical work has to be judged to be good. We have nothing from Descartes about other arts. But I suspect he would have expressed a low opinion of the literary arts if pressed. He would have said that words are for communication, and that we should take no sensory pleasure from communication, since such pleasure can only be distracting. As for other arts: painting, architecture, etc., he might have said roughly what he said about music. Insofar as they create forms, they are mathematical. And, since they are mathem...
I don't know off hand whether I've ever had reason before to mention Nicolas Malebranche, a great though idiosyncratic post-Cartesian French philosopher, in this blog. I think I may have mentioned him once, in connection with theodicy, i.e. his efforts to make the case for God's goodness despite the evil in the world God created. But today I've like to say something about a more fundamental issue in Malebranche's thinking: the nature of causation. Malebranche said (1) that material things can't be the cause of themselves (they can't be fundamental), (2) minds are composed of ideas, raising the question of whether ideas can be fundamental, but (3) finite minds such as our own cannot account for the operation of physical laws in the world they quite imperfectly observe. Therefore (4) only an infinite mind, God's mind, can ground causal relations such as physical laws. All laws are only generalizations of the actions of God's mind, and for ...
Again, I'm looking at Fiona Cowie's book on innatism, past and present. My last post on this book discussed Descartes in connection with what Cowie calls the "special faculties" hypothesis in innatism, the view that certain features of our mind are modular, so that learning X is an qualitatively different thing from learning Y. Cowie distinguishes this from what she calls the "mystery" hypothesis in innatism, aka rationalism. Rationalists, like empiricists for that matter, "understand that both experience and our innate endowment play critical roles" in our development, learning, etc. The first issue that divides them, as we have seen, is whether the innate endowment is to be understood in a unitary or in a modular manner. The second issue that divides them is the idea of mystery, the idea prominent in the writings of the classical rationalists that there is no natural explanation of these special faculties, that they resist empirical invest...
I'm working my way carefully through Fiona Cowie's book, WHAT'S WITHIN? NATIVISM RECONSIDERED (1999), a book I've only skimmed until now. I believe I've mentioned it here a time or two on the basis of the skimming and its reviews. The book, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, is a look at Fodor and Chomsky in particular, and their revival of elements of classical rationalism, especially with regard to a priori ideas. Today I'll focus on an early point, within Cowie's historical discussion. She asks: what exactly was the classical debate, the one featuring Descartes and Leibniz on one side, figures such as Hobbes and Locke on the other, really about? It is not easy to pin in down. The empiricists sometimes wrote as if the rationalists were saying that a baby comes into the world already knowing, say, what a triangle is, or what constitutes a prime number. Babies clearly don't. And the old rationalists denied this is what they meant. D...
Here's a link to an article by Dean Zimmerman defending the intuitive (or "A-Theory") view of time. http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/zimmerman/PrivilegedPresent.pdf The intuitive view is that there is such a thing as the present, the "moving now," that at this present is ontologically privileged. Privileged? Sounds like a bad thing to modern sensibilities. "Check your privilege, nowness!" At any rate, we intuitively feel confident the now is real, whereas the past is uncertain and the future is promised to no one. Descartes' "cogito" is in the present tense. The certainty is "I think" not "I thought" or "I will think." From this epistemological privilege we infer an ontological one -- the intuition is that the now is more real, which is one reason self-help authors always urge us to "live here now." Zimmerman believes, roughly, that the inference is a sound one and the self-help auth...
Last week, in two posts on the "tracking theory of knowledge," we reached the following point: 1) The tracking theory seems to capture many of our intuitions about what it means to know something, 2) It resolves the Gettier problems, 3) But it creates a glitch of its own -- it isn't epistemically closed. It generates circumstances in which I know p, and I know that p implies q, but I can't be said to know that q. Nozick, though, thought of the non-closure as a good thing: a feature, not a bug, because it allowed him to address global skepticism hypotheses. Suppose we concede that I don't know that I am not a brain in a vat, or that I don't know that I am not the victim of a joke by a malicious demon. Should this bother us? Specifically, should we infer from ignorance on this point that we don't know anything at all? Well, we would have to if we thought knowledge was epistemically closed. I know (we want to say) that I am now sitting in a gre...
One issue raised by the tracking theory of knowledge discussed in yesterday's post is "epistemic closure." Epistemic closure is a property of belief systems that is generally considered a good thing. Specifically, a belief system is said to be "closed" if and only if we can say that whenever a subject (S) knows a proposition (p), and S also knows that P implies q, then S knows q. If I know that today is Sunday, and I know that this implies that yesterday was Saturday, then I know that yesterday was Saturday. In examples like yesterday-was-Saturday, closure is strongly intuitive. But the standard view of the consequences of the tracking theory is that accepting it entails the abandonment of closure as a premise. Consider the "fake barns" scenario. I'm driving through a neighborhood where some of the locals delight in creating fake paper mache barns that look quite realistic from the road. I don't know about the local custom and, when I...