Oleg Khoma

The article proves that the term “Descartes’ medicine” is appropriate to denote a “useful science” that had to be created. During his lifetime, Descartes never began to create it. Therefore, none of his works (both published and drafts) can be called “medical texts” in an indirect sense. I argue with the thesis of Fabrizio Baldassarri, who calls the treatises L’Homme and La Description du corps humain such texts. I criticize contemporary works on Descartes’ “medicine” or “medical philosophy” (interpreted as independent branches of Descartes’ research) for their methodological unsoundness. Based on Descartes’ classification of sciences and on his “order” of 1647 research program, I argue that there is no reason to speak of Descartes’ properly “medical” explorations. Descartes’ studies of anatomy and physiology are a legitimate part of his “physics,” not “medicine,” although they are referred to the latter. I also identify three meanings of the term “medicine” in Descartes’ texts, arguing that none of them gives grounds for considering L’Homme and La Description du corps humain as “medical texts” in the Cartesian sense.

The article criticizes reductionist approaches in contemporary historico-philosophical studies of Cartesian brain physiology. The author states that in general these studies one can divide into two directions. The difference between these directions lies in the attitude towards Cartesian metaphysics. Representatives of the first of them are focused on filling research gaps within the complex relationship between Cartesian metaphysics and physiology. Representatives of the second seek various kinds of “reexaminations of traditional approaches” in order to recognize the “central” place of brain physiology in Cartesianism. I qualify the second of these approaches as reductionist. Its main shortcomings are a significant distortion of the structure of Cartesian philosophy and the predominance of prejudices over objective analysis. The results of such an approach are usually a pretentious proof of something long proven as something new. I also demonstrate that this type of reductionism has ideological reasons and is a direct continuation of a tradition that categorically fails to accept the Cartesian concept of the mind as a thinking thing.

Oleksiy Panych put forward two theses: (1) irrelevance of the concept of national philosophical tradition in the analysis of modern philosophical processes; (2) impossibility of building such a tradition in contemporary Ukraine, since this tradition is incompatible with the “internal polyglossiaˮ essential for Ukrainian philosophizing. I prove that the essential features of the national philosophical tradition highlighted by O. Panych do not take into account contemporary clarifications of this concept. Developing Serhiy Yosypenkoʼs idea about the institutional level of this tradition, I propose to understand it as a two-level social mechanism of self-reproduction of the national philosophical community within the limits of modern philosophical institutions. At the first level, this tradition appears as a result of the purely civil self-identification of each individual philosopher (it ensures the very existence and stability of the tradition), at the second one, multiple reflections are carried out regarding what this tradition is and where it comes from. The products of these levels do not reduce to each other and perform separate functions. This approach allows solving a number of complex theoretical problems, in particular the problem of the incompleteness of the criteria for defining the national philosophical tradition.

The text fragments that make up Blaise Pascal's “Penséesˮ are traditionally published in different sequences, according to the difference in the conceptual positions of the editors. So, the problem of correlating different editions is very difficult. Translations of “Penséesˮ reflecting several numbering systems are currently available to Ukrainian readers. The author offers two comparative tables for these numberings. In Table 1, the numberings of Louis Lafuma, Jacques Chevalier and Michel Le Guerne are expressed through the numbering of Leon Brunschvicg, which is currently the most common in Ukraine. In Table 2, Brunschvicg's numbering is correlated with the First Copy of the manuscript, the Port-Royal edition of 1670, as well as editions by Bossuet, Lafuma, Chevalier, Le Guerne, Tournier-Anzieu, and Dolgov.

The paper aims to prove the hypothesis that Sextus Empiricus’ Neo-Pyrrhonism is significantly influenced by the Cartesian meditation as a genre of philosophizing. It refutes theses about (1) the non-predicativity of Sextus’ language and about (2) Sextus’ epochê as an automatic result of the action of opposite things or statements, and it argues that both Sextus and Descartes distinguish between (a) internal (forced) agreement with clarity and (b) the personal acceptance of this agreement which depends on a volitional decision. Sextus’ recognition of the clarity of appearance as appearance gives Descartes the only chance to refute the skepticism of Sextus, which is invulnerable to external criticism. Therefore, Descartes developed meditation as a special model of purely immanent criticism (the very word “skepticism” is never mentioned in the Meditations), focused on dealing with states of clarity and evidence. The author’s hypothesis is that the key elements to which this model appeals are the “history of a skeptic” set out in Outlines of Pyrrhonism and the conception of skeptical expressions. This hypothesis can be tested further by proving or disproving the thesis that the discourse of I, II, and at least partially of III Meditations is based on the pattern of skeptical expressions, focused on the internal states of the speaker, and not on clarifying the “objective” state of affairs (i.e. not on dogmatic inferences).

The paper determines the status of the “Oral History of Philosophy” within the history of philosophy as a discipline. The author formulates his theses as answers to the fundamental questions Serhii Yosypenko asked in 2019. The latter subjected the first attempts to comprehend the then-new concept of “Oral History of Philosophy” to fruitful criticism. It is in response to his criticisms that the former gives now his answers which can be summarized in six points: (1) Oral History of Philosophy is fundamentally different from Oral History and is not limited to the application of the interview method; (2) it is a set of dialogical methods of producing new information in the field of the history of philosophy, that is, a new methodology that can be used in any historical-philosophical research; (3) the main difference is the orientation of the Oral History of Philosophy not to personal testimony, but to joint reflection; (4) this focus on reflection determines all the methods of Oral History of Philosophy; (5) the name “Oral History of Philosophy” is due to the specifics of the situation that gave rise to this methodology rather than a conscious conceptual reflection; (6) this methodology can be given a more exact name: “Dialogical forms of historical-philosophical reflection”, while the name “Oral history of philosophy” can be used for those dialogical forms that rely on oral speech.

The author argues that according to Sextus Empiricus, (a) the "sensual" nature of the phenomenon is a metaphorical notion, since it is indistinguishably extended both to sensuality and thinking; (b) the phenomenon manifest itself with irresistible force of impact, through a wide range of passive states of mind; (c) the impact of phenomena is always mediated by our ego, because all skeptic expressions are strongly correlated with the first person singular. The article proves that Descartes could not refute the “excess” of skeptical doubt and make an immanent critique of skepticism without borrowing the aforementioned statements of Sextus. Such borrowing (1) has created a common ground for discussion between Descartes and skeptics; (2) made it possible for the meditator to give persuasiveness to careful observation of his own internal experience. Descartes' search for certainty in "Meditations" is entirely based on [а] evidence of "phenomena", "states of mind", "passions"; [b] refusal to agree with the "non-evident" proclaimed by Sextus Empiricus.