All tagged Descartes
It can with little exaggeration be said that, with the works of Descartes, the modern philosophy of the self was born. Where for the Medievals, the self had first and foremost been a metaphysically conceived entity, Descartes would invert this primacy, outlining instead a self whose basic structure is epistemic in nature.
With his total privileging of the concept of Being, Heidegger radically changed the way we conceptualise selfhood. The self went from being an epistemic entity, as it had been for centuries under Descartes and Kant, to a largely ontological one. This paper attempts to shed light of aspects of this paradigmatic shift in the philosophy of the self.
What is the self? Is it a unity or a chimera? Can there be said to be a ‘self’ at all? Of all Enlightenment philosophers, it is perhaps Immanuel Kant who gave, to these questions, the most startlingly original answers.
In this paper, I attempt to explore he idea that Kant ‘killed’ god – and I will do so chiefly by applying Kant’s refutations of the ontological proof to some of its most prominent instantiations through history, those of Anselm, Descartes and Spinoza.
With his Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes turned on their head certain basic assumptions that had dominated the Medieval mindset, and ushered in a new era of philosophical inquiry.
By what means does knowledge enter our awareness? How can we be certain of the truth of the ideas we possess? It would be the task of the Enlightenment to address these queries; to dissect man’s inner spark, understand it, and give it its proper name: Reason.
