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Title: Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes, Stanley Tweyman ISBN: 0-88206-104-6 Publisher: Academic Resources Corp Pub. Date: 01 February, 2002 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $50.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Cogito Ergo Sum - The Matrix?
Comment: As a former student of philospohy amid the dreaming spires and an avid movie fan, my delight at seeing a modern rendition of a classic theory, instead of just seeing Shakespeare 'done teen' (10 things i hate about you...etc.) was clear to all.
The Matrix also did me a favour, because, to my mind, the key to unlocking philosophical concepts is always in the useful analogy or visualisation and here was a 2-hour visualisation with Keanu and special fx.
Anyway, Descartes' best-known piece is probably my favourite among the classic theories; accessible, easy to understand and easy to take a view on, as opposed to, say, Kant's theory of moral obligation...
All Descartes really does is walk you through a series of logical thought processes that he took himself through in order to clarify his views on God and existence. The classic sceptics, for example, believed that we could not know anything, whereas Descartes shows us his reasoning that God is all the proof we need.
For example, Descartes takes us through such questions as, how can i know the dream from the waking? how do i know that i am not a brain in a vat being manipulated by some devil? Since all philosophers seem to agree that logic is an acceptable proof, we then follow Descartes' attempts to reason his existence and he reasons 'Cogito Ergo Sum' (NOT Cotigo Ergo Sum as one of the other reviews suggests) or, 'I think therefore I am'. Go ahead and make up your own mind, it sounds ridiculous, but it becomes quite fun when you realise the difficulties in proving your own existence...! Enjoy.
By the way, this edition is fantastic and has all you need to lead you on to further reading, should you wish.
Rating: 5
Summary: Cotigo Ergo Sum
Comment: The most important work in modern philosophy(and my favorite). But also, don't take philosophy too seriously all the time. Even philosophy can't escape brilliant lampooning of Alessandro Manzoni in his The Betrothed. Coincidentally, that book gives you a good look at life during the very same thirty years War in which Descartes fought(and thus the atmosphere in which he wrote).
Rating: 5
Summary: Modern Philosophy Starts Here
Comment: Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy has had an incalculable influence on the history of subsequent philosophical thinking. Indeed, according to nearly every history of philosophy you're likely to come across, this work is where modern philosophy begins. It's not that any of Descartes's arguments are startlingly original--many of them have historical precedents--but that Descartes's work was compelling enough to initiate two research programs in philosophy, namely British empiricism and continental rationalism, and to place certain issues (e.g. the mind-body problem, the plausibility of and responses to skepticism, the ontological argument for the existence of God, etc.) on the philosophical agenda for a long time to come. Moreover, Descartes was capable of posing questions of great intrinsic interest in prose accessible to everyone. So the Meditations is a work of value to both newcomers to philosophy and to those with a great deal of philosophical background.
This is an excellent edition of the Meditations for students for a number of reasons. First, it's the same translation of the Meditations (and of the relevant passages from the Objections and Replies) that appears in the Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch three-volume edition of the philosophical works of Descartes, which is quickly gaining wide acceptance as the best edition of Descartes's work in English. Second, it includes a selection of important passages from the objections and replies to Descartes's Meditations. So this volume allows you to see some of the most serious objections to Descartes's work that were made by his contemporaries along with his responses to those objections. Finally, this edition includes some helpful introductory material. It includes two different introductions: one by Bernard Williams that focuses on Descartes's method and the most important lines of argument in the Meditations; the other by John Cottingham, the translator and editor of this edition, focusing on the place of the Meditations within Descartes's philosophical corpus.
That said, it's time to talk about the content of the Meditations. The first, and most famous, of the Meditations is Descartes's implementation of his method of doubt. Descartes's aim here is to systematically doubt everything he believes that seems dubitable in any way and thereby to arrive at something that is absolutely certain and indubitable. Whatever he can discover to be certain in this way, he thinks, will provide him with a firm foundation for the remainder of his knowledge. Here Descartes formulates two very famous skeptical arguments: the dreaming argument and the evil demon argument. The dreaming arguments calls into question my current beliefs about the world by drawing attention to the possibility that I might be dreaming now. Can I know right now that I'm not dreaming? If not, doesn't it seem that I don't know much of anything? The evil demon argument is even more radical in that it focuses my attention on the possibility that almost my entire conception of reality is based on a very general delusion. What if my every experience and all my reasoning results from constant deception by some being with God-like powers? What, if anything, would I know if this were the case? These worries, Descartes thinks, allow him to doubt nearly all his beliefs, and it indeed they may preclude his having any certain knowledge at all.
If these are real possibilities, how can he know anything? The rest of the Meditations is Descartes's attempt to answer this question. Famously, he begins by claiming that he can be certain of his own existence. Even if he is dreaming or being deceived by an all-powerful evil demon, he can be sure that he exists. For he couldn't dream or be deceived unless he existed. But even if he can be certain of his own existence, how can Descartes move beyond this to knowledge of a world outside his own mind?
Descartes thinks he can get outside his own mind by appealing to the existence of God. He provides two distinct proofs for the existence of God: one a variant of the ontological argument, which attempts to prove God's existence from an appeal to the content of the concept of God, and one a type of cosmological argument, which attempts to prove God's existence by appealing to a phenomenon whose only possible cause is God. Both these arguments, Descartes claims, prove that the world includes an absolutely perfect God. And it is the perfection of God along with God's role as his role as a creator that allows Descartes to be confident that he can know things beyond his own mind. For God, as a wholly perfect being, wouldn't provide Descartes with intellectual faculties that allow him to go wrong when he uses him as they were intended to be used. Consequently, Descartes can be sure that his beliefs are generally correct, provided that he has used his intellectual faculties in the way God intended. Thus, he can be sure that, in general, his views about the world around him are correct.
This work also includes a statement of the sort of mind-body dualism with which Descartes is widely associated. Although his arguments for dualism are obscure here, it is fairly easy to explain the central idea. According to Descartes, mind and body are wholly distinct kinds of substance that interact with one another. Mental states aren't a part of the natural world revealed by the sciences, and so, for instance, they are not reducible to certain things going on in a brain. Instead, they're a wholly different type of thing--though a type of thing that is somehow causally connected to a brain.
All of this is material, and a lot more, is covered in roughly sixty pages of text, and it is presented in some of the clearest, most straightforward philosophical prose ever written. Plus, the reader needn't have mastered any arcane jargon or previous work in philosophy to understand Descartes's views. And because it is written as a series of meditations in which Descartes leads us through something like his own process of through about these issues, it makes for relatively easy reading.
This is required reading for anyone interested in philosophy or its history, and honestly I don't see how this work can be ignored by anyone interested in the history of ideas. It's also a work that I'd recommend to anyone who wants to be introduced to philosophy by reading the work of a great philosopher.
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Title: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford Philosophical Texts) by David Hume, Tom L. Beauchamp ISBN: 0198752482 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (Oxford Philosophical Texts) by David Hume, David Fate Norton, Mary J. Norton ISBN: 0198751729 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Leviathan (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Hobbes, T. Hobbs, C. B. MacPherson ISBN: 0140431950 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: June, 1982 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Great Books in Philosophy) by John Locke ISBN: 0879759178 Publisher: Prometheus Books Pub. Date: December, 1994 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Pensees and Other Writings by Blaise Pascal, Honor Levi ISBN: 0192836552 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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