display all the ideas for this combination of texts
30 ideas
| 20190 | Belief is not an intellectual state or act, because propositions are affirmed or denied by the will [Descartes, by Zagzebski] |
| Full Idea: Descartes claimed that belief is not purely an intellectual state or act, since it is not the intellect that affirms or denies a proposition proposed for its consideration, but the will. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], IV) by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski - Virtues of the Mind 4.2 | |
| A reaction: This is the canonical idea of 'doxastic voluntarism' - that we choose what to believe or not believe. In modern times this view has become deeply unfashionable. I don't we should wholly reject the possibility of choosing to believe something. |
| 1585 | Descartes tried to model reason on maths instead of 'logos' [Roochnik on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes rejects logos because it does not achieve the certainty he craves. He replaces it with his own model of rationality, one modelled essentially on mathematics. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.76 |
| 1582 | Labelling slightly doubtful things as false is irrational [Roochnik on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: To declare that which is the least bit dubious as absolutely false is to declare war on logos. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §1.17) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.72 |
| 2256 | Maybe there is only one certain fact, which is that nothing is certain [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: If I suppose that everything I see is false. Nothing I remember actually existed. I have no senses, and body, shape, extension, movement and place are all chimeras. What then is true? Perhaps just the single fact that nothing is certain. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.24) |
| 6914 | Descartes transformed 'God is thinkable, so he exists' into 'I think, so I exist' [Descartes, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Descartes transformed the proposition 'because God is thinkable, therefore he exists' into the proposition 'I think, therefore I am'. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §18 | |
| A reaction: This implies that Descartes' foundation is the Ontological Argument rather than the Cogito. It certainly shows how a priori synthetic thinking is basic in Descartes - that views of existence derive from pure thought. Was Descartes an idealist? |
| 4641 | In the Meditations version of the Cogito he says "I am; I exist", which avoids presenting it as an argument [Descartes, by Baggini /Fosl] |
| Full Idea: Descartes may have been aware of the danger of begging the question (in claiming "I think therefore I am") because in 'Meditations' he says "I am; I exist", which is not presented in the form of an argument. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by J Baggini / PS Fosl - The Philosopher's Toolkit §3.22 | |
| A reaction: Certainly the word 'therefore' cries out for a strict analysis of what is being inferred from what, but presenting the Cogito as a self-evident intuition for the 'natural light' has its own problems. |
| 6929 | Modern philosophy set the self-conscious ego in place of God [Descartes, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Modern philosophy set the thinking being, the ego, and the self-conscious mind in the place of the merely ideated being, in place of God. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §37 | |
| A reaction: Descartes would be shocked by this interpretation, but God comes third in his logical priorities, after the existence of his ego, and its reliance on what is clear and distinct. |
| 3849 | "I think therefore I am" is the absolute truth of consciousness [Sartre on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: "I think therefore I am" is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2) by Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism and Humanism p.44 |
| 2258 | I must even exist if I am being deceived by something [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Doubtless I exist if I persuade myself of something. But there is some powerful and cunning deceiver who is deliberately deceiving me. Then too there is no doubt that I exist, if he is deceiving me. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.25) |
| 2259 | "I am, I exist" is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: "I am, I exist" is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.25) |
| 3160 | The Cogito is a transcendental argument, not a piece of a priori knowledge [Rey on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The Cogito is a transcendental argument; Descartes doesn't claim that it is a priori that he exists, but that any doubt or denial that he exists would presuppose his existence. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Georges Rey - Contemporary Philosophy of Mind 3.2.1 |
| 2260 | If I don't think, there is no reason to think that I exist [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It could be that if I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist. …I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is, a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.27) |
| 1117 | The Cogito proves subjective experience is basic, but makes false claims about the Self [Russell on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The Cogito argument proves that subjective experience is the most reliable, but it makes unjustified claims about the certainty of the Self. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Bertrand Russell - Problems of Philosophy Ch 2 |
| 2873 | Maybe 'I' am not the thinker, but something produced by thought [Nietzsche on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In the past one said 'I' is the condition, 'think' is the predicate and conditioned - thinking is an activity which the subject causes; but maybe the reverse is true - and 'I' is only a synthesis produced by thinking. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil §54 |
| 3623 | The Cogito only works if you already understand what thought and existence are [Mersenne on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In order to be certain that you are thinking you must know what thought or thinking is, and what your existence is; but since you do not yet know what these things are, how can you know that you are thinking or that you exist? | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Marin Mersenne - Objections to 'Meditations' (Sixth) 413 |
| 1369 | It is a precondition of the use of the word 'I' that I exist [Ayer on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In the Cogito the work is all done by the demonstrative word 'I', because it is a precondition of the use of such a word that the thing to which it points has to exist. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by A.J. Ayer - The Problem of Knowledge Ch 2 (iii) |
| 5360 | The thing which experiences may be momentary, and change with the next experience [Russell on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It might be that the something which sees a brown colour is quite momentary, and not the same thing which has some different experience the next moment. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Bertrand Russell - Problems of Philosophy Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This has become one of the standard objections to the Cogito. Note that Descartes himself was aware of the problem (Idea 1400). Sometimes experiences make no sense if there isn't something connecting them to previous experiences. |
| 2870 | 'I think' assumes I exist, that thinking is known and caused, and that I am doing it [Nietzsche on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The sentence "I think" contains a series of unprovable assertions; for example, it is I who think, that it must be something at all which thinks, that thinking is by an entity thought of as a cause, that an 'I' exists, and that I know what thinking is. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil §16 |
| 5188 | A thought doesn't imply other thoughts, or enough thoughts to make up a self [Ayer on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not entail that any other thought has occurred at any other moment, still less that there has occurred a series of thoughts sufficient to constitute a single self. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by A.J. Ayer - Language,Truth and Logic Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the main objection to the Cogito. It doesn't refute it, but simply recommends cautious restraint in what is being claimed as its conclusion. I can't make much sense of a thought which has no thinker at all. |
| 3624 | That I perform an activity (thinking) doesn't prove what type of thing I am [Hobbes on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: From the fact that I am thinking it follows that I exist, since that which thinks is not nothing. But when he adds 'that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect', a doubt arises. ..You might as well say 'I am walking, therefore I am a walk'. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Thomas Hobbes - Objections to 'Meditations' (Third) 172 |
| 3120 | Autistic children seem to use the 'I' concept without seeing themselves as thinkers [Segal on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It really does not seem (as a result of research into autism) that when one thinks of oneself with one's 'I' concept, one must thereby represent oneself as a thinker. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Gabriel M.A. Segal - A Slim Book about Narrow Content 4.2 |
| 4526 | The Cogito assumes a priori the existence of substance, when actually it is a grammatical custom [Nietzsche on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' Cogito posits as 'true a priori' our belief in the concept of substance, but the idea that when there is a thought there has to be something 'that thinks' is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Friedrich Nietzsche - The Will to Power (notebooks) §484 | |
| A reaction: This anticipates the sort of thing Ayer and the logical positivists said. It is not clear that Descartes does think the mind is a substance, but this pinpoints a possible presupposition in Descartes. |
| 5579 | How can we infer that all thinking involves self-consciousness, just from my own case? [Kant on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It seems strange that the condition under which I think is to be valid for everything that thinks, and that on an empirical-seeming proposition we can presume to ground a universal judgement, that everything that thinks has self-consciousness. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason A346 | |
| A reaction: Kant is not bothered by this, and says we know it a priori. If it is indeed an empirical proposition, it becomes an induction with one instance, which is the notorious weakness of the 'argument from analogy' to other minds. The Cogito is not empirical. |
| 5580 | My self is not an inference from 'I think', but a presupposition of it [Kant on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The simplicity of my self is not inferred from the proposition "I think", but rather the former lies in every thought. 'I am simple' is an immediate apperception, just as the Cogito is tautological, since 'cogito' immediately asserts the reality. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason A355 | |
| A reaction: This is why Kant thinks the self is the result of a transcendental deduction, rather than of a direct observation of the self-evident. Personally I side with Descartes. I do not 'observe' my self, but I am acutely aware of its presence and actions. |
| 5587 | We cannot give any information a priori about the nature of the 'thing that thinks' [Kant on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: If anyone asks me: What is the constitution of a thing that thinks? I do not know how to answer a priori, because the answer ought to be synthetic (for an analytic answer explains thinking, but gives no cognition of that on which thinking rests). | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason A398 | |
| A reaction: This has always seemed a problem with Descartes' very thin account of his 'res cogitans', but then what exactly does Kant want to know? Is it a metaphysical disaster if we think of the self as having no more identity than a geometrical point? |
| 5588 | The fact that I am a subject is not enough evidence to show that I am a substantial object [Kant on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The fact that I am a subject ..does not signify that as object I am a self-subsisting being or substance; the latter goes too far, and hence demands data that are not encountered at all in thinking. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.26) by Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason B407 | |
| A reaction: This is a key problem with the Cogito - that so little can be said about the 'I' of which the existence has been proved that it is not clear that anything has been proved at all - certainly not that there is a continuous and stable Ego. |
| 13923 | Descartes' claim to know his existence before his essence is misleading or absurd [Descartes, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Descartes claimed to know that he existed before he knew what he was - before he grasped his own essence. This is either disingenuous or intended non-literally, if it is not to be dismissed as incomprehensible. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by E.J. Lowe - Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence 2 n32 | |
| A reaction: If something comes at you from the mist, you can know that it exists before you know what it is. How could you understand the essence of something if you hadn't first encountered its existence? Lowe has it the wrong way round. |
| 6930 | Modern self-consciousness is a doubtful abstraction; only senses and feelings are certain [Feuerbach on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The self-consciousness of modern philosophy is only a being ideated and mediated through abstraction and thus a doubtful being; certain and immediately assured is only that which is an object of the senses, perception and feeling. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §37 | |
| A reaction: This seems to agree with Hume's empirical doubts about the self (Idea 1316). The comment that 'abstraction' is involved in the Cogito argument is interesting. Descartes said the Cogito was a 'simply intuition of the mind' (Idea 3622). |
| 2261 | My perceiving of things may be false, but my seeming to perceive them cannot be false [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I now see a light, I hear a noise, I feel heat. Perhaps these things are false, since I am asleep. Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear, and feel warmth. This cannot be false. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.29) |
| 2257 | I myself could be the author of all these self-delusions [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I myself could be the author of all these self-delusions. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §2.24) |