Descartes

Margaret Dauler Wilson, Series Editor-Ted Honderich

Concentrates on the Meditations to show Descartes' philosophy in the context of his overall scientific objectives, not all of them fully explicit in the texts.

Preface A Note on Descartes's Life and Works I General Doubt 1 Cartesian doubt and Cartesian revolution 2 The 'I' of the Meditations 3 Assumptions and aims of methodic doubt 4 Attacking the foundations: 'these familiar things' 5 Attacking the foundations: 'simple and universal things' 6 The Dreaming Argument: a reconstruction 7 The opinion of a God who can do anything 8 'Principles' 9 Real doubts II Knowledge of Self and Bodies 1 The concerns of Meditation II 2 Ego existo 3 But what then am I? 4 This wax 5 Intellectual inspection 6 Mind 'better known' than body III Some Perspectives on the Third Meditation 1 Introduction 2 Material falsity and objective reality 3 A God who can do anything 14 Circularity 5 Physics and the eternal truths: a speculation 6 The proof of an all-perfect God IV Judgment, Ideas and Thought 1 Regulating assent 2 Consciousness V True and Immutable Natures 1 Res extensa 2 Immutable natures and fictitious ideas: a critique 3 Immutable natures and the ontological argument VI Mind, Body and Things Outside Us 1 Introduction 2 Cartesian dualism 3 The Epistemological Argument 4 Sensation and the Epistemological Argument 5 The evidence of the senses 6 The body which by a certain special right I call mine