philosophy stuff (possibly)

"When I was a child I loved a little girl of my own age who had a slight squint. The impression made by sight in my brain when I looked at her not-quite-focussed eyes became so closely connected to the simultaneous impression that aroused in me the passion of love that for a long time afterwards when I saw persons with a squint I felt a special inclination to love them simply because they had that defect; and I didn’t know that that was why. But as soon as I reflected on it and saw that it was a defect, I was no longer affected by it. So, when we’re led to love someone without knowing why, we may conjecture that it’s because he has some similarity to someone we loved earlier, even if we can’t say what the similarity is. What attracts our love in this way is more often a perfection than a defect, but it can be a defect—as in the case of my youthful self—so a wise man won’t altogether yield to such a passion without first considering the worth of the person to whom he feels drawn. But because we can’t love equally all those whom we observe to be equally worthy, I think that our only obligation is to esteem them equally; and since the chief good of life is friendship, we have reason to prefer those to whom we are joined by our secret inclinations, provided we also see worth in them. And when these secret inclinations are aroused by something in the mind, not in the body, I think they should always be followed. How are we to know which is which? Mainly by this: the inclinations that come from the mind are reciprocated, whereas the others usually aren’t..." Letter from René Descartes to Hector Chanut (June 6th, 1647)

Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80) and René Descartes (1596–1650) exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their correspondence contains the only known extant philosophical writings by Elisabeth, revealing her mastery of metaphysics, analytic geometry, and moral philosophy, as well as her keen interest in natural philosophy. The letters are essential reading for anyone interested in Descartes’s philosophy, in particular his account of the human being as a union of mind and body, as well as his ethics. They also provide a unique insight into the character of their authors and the way ideas develop through intellectual collaboration.

Descartes's Method develops an ontological interpretation of Descartes's method as a dynamic and, within limits, differentiable problem-solving cognitive disposition or habitus, which can be actualized or applied to different problems in various ways, depending on the nature of the problem. Parts I-II develop the foundations of an habitual interpretation of Descartes's method, while Parts III-V demonstrate the fruits of such an interpretation in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and mathematics. The first book to draw on the recently discovered Cambridge manuscript of Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes's Method concretely demonstrates the efficacy of Descartes's method in the sciences and the underlying unity of Descartes's method from Rules for the Direction of the Mind to Principles of Philosophy (1644).

Between Two Worlds is an authoritative commentary on—and powerful reinterpretation of—the founding work of modern philosophy, Descartes’s Meditations. Philosophers have tended to read Descartes’s seminal work in an occasional way, examining its treatment of individual topics while ignoring other parts of the text. In contrast, John Carriero provides a sustained, systematic reading of the whole text, giving a detailed account of the positions against which Descartes was reacting, and revealing anew the unity, meaning, and originality of the Meditations. Carriero finds in the Meditations a nearly continuous argument against Thomistic Aristotelian ways of thinking about cognition, and shows more clearly than ever before how Descartes bridged the old world of scholasticism and the new one of mechanistic naturalism. Rather than casting Descartes’s project primarily in terms of skepticism, knowledge, and certainty, Carriero focuses on fundamental disagreements between Descartes and the scholastics over the nature of understanding, the relation between the senses and the intellect, the nature of the human being, and how and to what extent God is cognized by human beings. Against this background, Carriero shows, Descartes developed his own conceptions of mind, body, and the relation between them, creating a coherent, philosophically rich project in the Meditationsand setting the agenda for a century of rationalist metaphysics.