Mark Glouberman

Did Descartes make a revolutionary contribution to philosophy? Given the widespread application to him of the title ‘father of modem philosophy,’ the standard affirmative proves surprisingly difficult to justify. ln this paper I locate Descartes’s epoch-making philosophical shift. Descartes contributed a very strong idea of realism, an idea modelled in his cogito-argument. To grasp the contribution aright, it is however necessary to de-emphasise what is usually identified as his key contribution---an epistemological one. AIso, the theoretical connection between Descartes’s core philosophical activity and the scientific revolution of his time has to be appreciated. ln the course of the discussion I explain, in a more philosophical vein, how the influence of Kant clouds the abiIity of post-Kantians to see what Descartes did. A route to an understanding of Descartes’s realism is an inconsistency in Kant’s modal views. The antirealism of Kant’s view---his transcendental idealism---yields up some of its mystery once the dialectical interplay with Cartesian realism is elicited.

To what extent is conceptual analysis under strict semantic control? In an effort to show that conceptual structure transcends the linguistic dimension proper, the tensions within, and between, several current treatments of the concept red are revealed and explored. It is argued that certain extra-semantic factors — factors, broadly speaking, which concern the manner in which a concept applier interacts with the world as an extralinguistic agent - provide a backdrop against which conceptual analysis guided by language in a strict sense must be deepened and tested.

SummaryLeft wing interpreters of Kant's transcendental idealism argue that the doctrine must be excised in order to disclose the viable philosophical content of the first Critique. For right wing interpreters, this leaves a Hamlet without the prince. I chart and defend a middle path. Transcendental idealism, while essential to Kant's position, renders that position philosophically indefensible. Constant misinterpretation of the doctrine results from a failure to appreciate the inter‐theoretic relations between Kant's conceptualisation of sense‐involving experience and the output of ‘Cartesian theory of error'

The notion of individuation has both a semantic and an ontological face. More exactly, the claim can be defended that individuation has a proprietary linguistic or conceptual aspect as distinct from an ontological one. Ontologists such as W. V. Quine would credit neither the possibility of such a divergence nor the intelligibility of its proposal. The ontology of a language, for Quine, is inseparable from its individuative resources, mechanisms such as identity, pluralization, pronouns, and so forth. I aim here to pick apart the ontological from the semantic aspect of individuation at one place where they interact, thereby to show that the distinction, far from being a mere abstraction lacking explanatory leverage, is vital for achieving an adequate characterization of the representational powers of language. I begin by attempting to put the issue into some kind of perspective, a didactic move prudent in virtue of the brassiness of the subsequent tacks.

In a recent 5‐to‐4 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada denied to Harvard University a patent on a genetically modified mouse. In their reasoning, the majority Justices, concerned obviously about the implications of granting the patent for the human case, argue that higher organisms (mammals) are not “compositions of matter” in the sense intended by the Canadian Patent Act. But if a mouse is not a composition of matter, what—indeed, what on earth—is it? As the minority Justices complain, the majority decision smacks of dubious metaphysics and theology. Appealing to a quite unlikely source, the Bible, I show that the distinction between mice and men can be defended without introducing problematic metaphysical and question‐begging theological materials. I also show, en route, that the biblical position on the special status of men and women is not inconsistent with evolutionary theory. Granting a patent on the mouse (as was done in the U.S.A.) is compatible with denying it to human organisms.

The first "Critique", Kant states inaugurates a perfectly new science'. But this transcendental philosophy', for dealing in possibilities, not actualities, does not qualify as philosophy in the traditional sense. What Kant dubs transcendental idealism' "is" however an (ontological) doctrine about things. Kant's doctrinal stand is thus inconsistent with his description of transcendental enquiry. Since transcendental idealism gets its meaning from the contrast with Cartesian realism, it follows that Kant must implicitly be granting that in some measure at least the earlier metaphysicians did what they said they were doing. Indeed, Kant must be relying on some part of what they did. It follows that if there is a "via media" between traditional Cartesian metaphysics and Hume's backgammon, Kant does not locate it

For placing the contrast of certainty and uncertainty at the philosophical center, Descartes is charged with Michael Dummett with mistakenly subordinating the study of language and meaning to epistemology. But Dummett's knowledge-theoretic reading of the certainty/uncertainty duality is as erroneous as the tradition it inherits is long. The Cartesian demand for certainty and critique of uncertainty in mature writings like the Meditations has a definite semantic character. Cartesian uncertainty, construed aright, anticipates Dummett's putatively original idea of a non-reductive yet non-realist semantics for standard factual claims asserted on the basis of sense-evidence. There is an internal relation, in Descartes' philosophy, between a repudiation of uncertainty and a repudiation of a non-realist conception of the world.