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IntroductionIn Frans Svensson & Martina Reuter (eds.), Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza, Routledge. 2019.
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A Cartesian Distinction in Virtue: Moral and PerfectIn Frans Svensson & Martina Reuter (eds.), Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza, Routledge. 2019.
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52Descartes on the Highest GoodAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 93 (4): 701-721. 2019.What is the highest good? In the ethics of René Descartes, we can distinguish between at least seven different answers to this question: God; the sum of all the different goods that “we either possess... or have the power to acquire” ; free will; virtue; love of God; wisdom; and supernatural beatitude. In this paper, I argue that each of these answers, in Descartes’s view, provides the correct particular conception, relative to a distinct sense or concept of the highest good. Just as there are s…Read more
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56Descartes as an Ethical PerfectionistJournal of Modern Philosophy 2 (1): 3. 2020.My main concern in this paper is to develop and defend an account of why we ought to devote our lives to virtue—of the ground or reason for why we ought to do so—according to René Descartes. On my account, the answer is that we thereby, and indeed only thereby, do everything in our power to promote our own degree of intrinsic perfection or goodness. Descartes’s moral philosophy, as I understand it, thus constitutes a form of ethical perfectionism. While I am not the first to interpret Descartes …Read more
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Descartes On How We Should Feel About DeathIn Erin A. Dolgoy, Kimberly Hurd Hale & Bruce Garen Peabody (eds.), Political Theory on Death and Dying : Key Thinkers, Routledge. 2021.According to Rene Descartes, in order for people to live well, or as they, on the whole, ought to do, it is necessary that they do not fear death. However, people must not desire or long for it either. In this chapter, the author examines Descartes’s arguments for these two theses. Descartes in fact never wrote a treatise devoted exclusively to ethics. But in his later works, including the Meditations on First Philosophy, The Principles of Philosophy, and The Passions of the Soul, important part…Read more
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Objectivism, Hybridism, and Subjectivism about Meaning in lifeIn Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life, Oxford University Press. 2022.This chapter is an opinionated survey of three main views about meaning in life: objectivism, on which a component of a person’s life can contribute meaning to it even if she in no way cares about the component; pure subjectivism, on which the person’s caring about the component in some suitable way is all it takes for the component to contribute meaning to her life; and hybridism, on which whether a component of someone’s life contributes meaning to it depends both on her caring about the compo…Read more
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20Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza (edited book)Routledge. 2019.The turn of the millennium has been marked by new developments in the study of early modern philosophy. In particular, the philosophy of René Descartes has been reinterpreted in a number of important and exciting ways, specifically concerning his work on the mind-body union, the connection between objective and formal reality, and his status as a moral philosopher. These fresh interpretations have coincided with a renewed interest in overlooked parts of the Cartesian corpus and a sustained focus…Read more
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5Descartes's Moral PerfectionismRoutledge. 2024.This book offers a novel and comprehensive interpretation of Descartes’s moral philosophy. In contrast to other influential interpretations, the book argues that the central tenet of his ethical thought is that each person ought to live in the way that is most conducive to their degree of overall perfection. While Descartes’s ethical thought has attracted only a very modest amount of attention among scholars, this book demonstrates that it constitutes an important and integral component of his p…Read more
Uppsala University
PhD, 2006
Gothenburg, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |