JOHN COTTINGHAM ON DESCARTES PART 1
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ส.ค. 2024
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Cottingham and Bernard WillIams helped me immensely with understanding Descartes. I have their copy of Descartes Meditations and Replies, and the first volume of Descartes collected works that Cottingham edited. An old beautiful copy! When they made books beautiful. I find Descartes fascinating especially when looking at the time he was in and how far he went with so little (in today’s standards). No smart phone, no computer. Just manuscripts and his amazing thought/dialogue with those around him.
I could listen to John Cottingham all day.
I personally think that the period Descartes was living in, did effect his philosophy to a considerable extent, as it did with for example Hobbes who lived through the English revolution, and developed a philosophy based on a need for a powerful government and the need to secure peace and order in society. I mean Descartes felt the need to give God an important role in his philosophy, in accordance with Galileos death. Galileio was eventually forced to recant his heliocentrism, and spend his last years under house arrest. He was later found guilty of heresy. With this in mind I do not think that Descartes wanted to evoke any misbelief because he knew what was likely to happen if he did.
Dear @Tho Paine. What i meant with my contribution to this discussion was to offer a more reflective approach to the subject of Rene Descartes philosophical dogma. And I will not have you lecturing me with the use of rhetorical questions formulated with the belief that philosophy is full of definite answers, for I will tell you as much as this: it is most certainly not. I will not form a counterargument, although I am more than familiar with your supposed great historical discovery, this because I only took one philosophy course during my time at university and only then because it was obligatory. My knowledge on the subject is not what it once was so I'll spear you more, frustration. I appreciate your dedication to the subject itself and take with gratitude your "well-formed" argument.
Tho Paine
Thank-you, I appreciate and praise the clarity.
Brilliant introductory lecture on Descartes….will gladly pay for more… thank you.
I once emailed John because he got a reference wrong in one of his book
He's so lovely
He was fascinating in his byzantine endeavours of "extreme" doubt and philosophical machinations nearly solely constructed in order to avoid doubting God. He is known as a "doubter", but he basically fabricated his dualism so that God would have a cardinal seat in his philosophy and thusly Descartes himself a seat with him, not necessarily the human soul, which can exist outside a reality that contains God or any other deity for that matter. I find a lot of his thoughts fun to play around with and several elements of his systems resonate with my own, but I would have loved to see this type of mind flourish in an age where defying God would have been easier. In that sense alone he was a prisoner of the times. One box he could not think himself out of.
I'd like to see the rest of this video, please.
Good Evening, Ive been interested in Descartes as I felt(not emotionally) learning co ordinates and algebra that to cut it short the digital revolution so to speak the power of this deductive and logical thinking. I have learnt to distinguish between Reason and empiricism. I think that the scientific method can be followed without understanding philosophy. My point is that the culture that results from reason is different from the empirical view. Here he is the father of science. I feel there are different influences at work in the world through history not one narrative.
In fact, the equivalent is if I don't exist, I don't think.
Thank you for this video.
Decarte would have benefited from encountering Nargarjuna.
I think, I will have another drink.
You actually don't have a concept of infinity. You can imagine that one *could* simply keep counting without stopping, you can imagine that you could keep dividing something into smaller sections without stopping, but try as you might, you cannot conceive of infinity, only of large amounts or of an amount that hasn't stopped increasing yet. And there's nothing extraordinary about that. It makes perfect sense the brain would evolve concepts like that since it appears you could just keep walking in one direction forever, and looks like you could always break something into smaller and smaller pieces, and there are large amounts of things all around us. Once again, the argument for God ends up being a failure to keep thinking rationally.
Xander Patten You can only deny infinity if you deny deduction. To deny deduction is to deny reason altogether. Would you entertain that there is any number to which you cannot add 1? The only reasonable answer is no. The same goes for all the deductive arguments for the existence of God, they are just as simple and just as undeniably true by pure reason. Mind you, I don't intend to argue. This response is more so for others than for yourself, rarely do people escape the kind of mental trap evident in your response , metaphysical reasoning becomes a vestigial cognitive function. But if you find it useful then God bless. Have a nice day.
Ibraheem Mohammed God I hope you're a troll and someone this pants on head stupid doesn't actually exist. I never denied infinities could exist. I said you don't actually have a concept of infinity, but only of large amounts or amounts that haven't stopped increasing yet. Adding one to an amount no matter how large does not make the new sum infinite all of the sudden, so how is that in any way relevant?
It makes perfect sense those two concepts would evolve, as I explained they are common in our everyday environment. No magic required at all.
1 I said undeniable. not could exist. We are at odds.
2 There is a difference between conception and perception. You can conceive of infinity as a real and stable logical concept, even though you cannot perceive it.
3 There is also a difference between reason and rationality. Reason is super-ordinate to rationality. Infinity is not rationally proven, but known by reason. Infinity itself is not a quantity, it is a quality.
4 Don't confuse metaphysical explanations for physical ones. They are not substitutes, in philosophy they are complementary. Bringing up evolution as a countervailing explanation, and referring to magic in jest, suggests you have no awareness of the topic.
5. Descartes addresses this in the beginning of his meditations There are countless other references, see Husserl for one.
6. A materialist ontology collapses on itself. Science is justified by reason, not by science. Reason is not a material thing, but it is real. By your logic it can't be. Of course some scientists have denied the reality of logic and reason, but I personally consider this a perception-fixated mental illness.
To find meaning and purpose in an intelligible order, you have to look beyond physical explanations. If you are content with physical explanations, that is your prerogative - but they do not approach an answer to the questions and issues discussed in the presentation above.
"Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved" - Goethe
Magic is a perfectly good word to describe what you're trying to say: that which is not subject to the laws of physics and inexplicable in terms of physics. If you find that ridiculous, stop believing it, no one's stopping you.
I would still say you cannot even conceive of infinity. Go try and conceive of how big Graham's number is and then come back and try to tell me you an conceive of infinity. You certainly cannot.
I agree we can *grant the quality* of infinity onto some large but non-infinite amount, but without actually coherently conceiving of what infinity is. This is the same as how we can *grant the quality* of square circle onto some shape but without actually coherently conceiving of what that means, as that would be logically impossible. Seemingly by your definition it's possible to "conceive" of a square circle the same as it's possible to conceive of infinity; that's why I stay away from even saying we can conceive of infinity. Tomato tomato. In any of those cases, no magic is required.
I'm glad we agree evolution explains this phenomenon, but far as you've demonstrated, evolution requires no complimentary explanation. Occam's razor.
Rationality, what you seem to be calling reason, is a general method of unbiased quest for justified beliefs along with rejection of unjustified beliefs. No one is saying only material exists--rather, it seems to be the case only the fundamental particles and the various relations between them are known to exist. Meaning itself comes from relations between concepts, which themselves derive from relations between particles (e.g. a rock or red light or a taste, visual experiences like shapes, etc.)
Until someone can coherently explain to me one thing that is not already accounted for by physics, how could I rationally believe in magic on top of physics? All aspects of consciousness people bring up, for instance, appear to be fully explained by modern physics without any need for magic anywhere.
goo goo ga ga someone cut my hand off
Denying the antecedant.
Here from my Philosophy class