Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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 ...

I'm continuing my discussion of Satlow's book, from yesterday's blog entry. "The father of Hellenistic ethnography was Hecataeus of Abdera. A Greek working for Alexander's general and successor, Ptolemy I Soter (367-283 BCE), Hecataeus wrote a comprehensive account of the Egyptians....Hecataeus's Aegyptiaca influenced generations of later Greek ethnographers. Aegyptiaca contains an excursus on the Judeans, whom he identified as a distinct polity centered in Jerusalem ("Hieroslyma") and ruled primarily by priests." Hecataeus was interested in the "politeia" of the Judeans. This Greek word, sometimes transliterated "politics" or translated "constitution" is wider than either of those terms. It means, "the social system" or "the laws" if that term is quite broadly understood. A little later, Satlow tells us that Hecataeus was "aware of, and maybe consulted, a written source that he...