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351RésuméLa critique kantienne de la psychologie rationnelle est une expérience de pensée visant ni un individu ni une école, mais une tendance de la raison humaine à « hypostasier » la condition intellectuelle suprême d'une connaissance quelconque (le « Je pense ») en connaissance du « moi ». Cette tendance implique une circularité qui est également la cible des critiques transcendantales bien plus familières qui visent Locke et Hume. De même qu'un nouveau type de cercle (dit « de niveau »), cet a…Read more
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325Kant’s ‘Five Ways’: Transcendental Idealism in ContextDialogue 57 (1): 137-161. 2018.In 1772, Kant outlined the new problem of his critical period in terms of four possible “ways” of understanding the agreement of knowledge with its object. This study expands Kant’s terse descriptions of these ways, examining why he rejected them. Apart from clarifying the historical context in which Kant saw his own achievement (the Fifth Way), the chief benefits of exploring the historical background of Way Two, in particular, are that it (1) explains the puzzling intuitus originarius/intellec…Read more
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126Analytic Method, the Cogito, and Descartes’s Argument for the Innateness of the Idea of GodEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (2): 289-320. 2010.The analytic method by which Descartes discovered the first principle of his philosophy—cogito, ergo sum—is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and nonlogical inference. It differs markedly from inductive as well as deductive procedures, but also from older models of the direct noetic apprehension of first principles, notably those of Plato and Aristotle. However, a critical examination of Descartes’s argument for the innateness of the idea of God shows that there are serious obstacles …Read more
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103Against those commentators who consider Kant’s explicit reference to Copernicus’s heliocentric reversal either grossly misleading or simply irrelevant to the revolution in philosophy carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason, it is argued in this paper that Kant’s transcendental idealist inversion of the familiar standpoint of realism and sound common sense fully justifies the talk of a ‘Copernican revolution,’ even if Kant himself never used the expression. It is not just the dominant ‘moving …Read more
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77Review of: Leibniz et la méthode de la science, by Francois Duchesneau (review)The Leibniz Review 3 2-7. 1993.This is a very impressive piece of philosophical scholarship, in the best tradition of French-language studies in the history of philosophy and science in the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. Its theme is Leibniz’s philosophy of science, which, François Duchesneau contends, is at bottom a doctrine of method in the seventeenth-century manner of Descartes. Leibniz’s philosophy of science, however, is as antithetical to the principles of Cartesian science as to those of the “experimental philos…Read more
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68Leibniz on Apperception and Animal SoulsDialogue 33 (4): 701-. 1994.InLeibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought, Robert McRae alleges a flat “contradiction” at the heart of Leibniz's doctrine of three grades of monads: bare entelechies characterized by perception; animal souls capable both of perception and of sensation; and rational souls, minds or spirits endowed not only with capacities for perception and sensation but also with consciousness of self or what Leibniz calls “apperception.” Apperception is a necessary condition of those distinctively human …Read more
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65Connaissance de Dieu et conscience de soi chez DescartesDialogue 49 (1): 1-24. 2010.ABSTRACT: The analytic method by which Descartes established the first principle of his philosophy is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and non-logical inference that differs markedly from the deductive model of noetic apprehension long associated with seventeenth-century rationalism. In this paper, it is shown that the same analytic process is at work in the Third Meditation proof of the innateness of the idea of God, where, however, there are serious doubts about its legitimacy
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37Descartes' Mechanicism and the Medieval Doctrine of Causes, Qualities, and FormsModern Schoolman 65 (2): 97-117. 1988.
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34The Three Faces of the Cogito: Descartes (and Aristotle) on Knowledge of First PrinciplesRoczniki Filozoficzne 68 (2): 63-86. 2020.With the systematic aim of clarifying the phenomenon sometimes described as “the intellectual apprehension of first principles,” Descartes’ first principle par excellence is interpreted before the historical backcloth of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. To begin with, three “faces” of the cogito are distinguished: (1) the proto-cogito (“I think”), (2) the cogito proper (“I think, therefore I am”), and (3) the cogito principle (“Whatever thinks, is”). There follows a detailed (though inevitably s…Read more
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33Fundamental Ontology and Existential Analysis in Heidegger’s Being and TimeInternational Philosophical Quarterly 34 (3): 349-359. 1994.
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29Insight and inference: Descartes's founding principle and modern philosophyUniversity of Toronto Press. 1999.Descartes's achievement is a radical reversal of the order of knowing, a subjectivism that places knowledge of the mind ahead of knowledge of material things, ...
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23Psycho-Physical Union: The Problem of the Person in DescartesDialogue 22 (1): 23-46. 1983.The problem of the person may be described as the crux of Descartes' philosophy in the fairly obvious literal sense that it is the point of intersection of the two chief axes of the system, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind. The actual, if not professed aim of the former is the ousting of the occult powers and faculties of Scholastic-Aristotelian physics by the mechanical concept of force or action-by-contact. The chief tenet of the latter is that mind, whose essence is thinkin…Read more
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22McRae on Innate Ideas: A RejoinderDialogue 27 (1): 29-. 1988.In two separate studies, published some four years apart, Robert McRae has argued the provocative thesis that the idea of extension is not to be numbered among the ideas accounted innate by Descartes, but among the adventitious. He has defended this view despite explicit statements to the contrary by Descartes both in the Correspondence and in the second part of the Principles of Philosophy. Against such evidence McRae has urged the overriding importance of the sixth Meditation, where, he allege…Read more
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223. Cartesian MetaphysicsIn Murray Lewis Miles (ed.), Insight and inference: Descartes's founding principle and modern philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 24-38. 1999.
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21Part one: Thought and consciousnessIn Murray Lewis Miles (ed.), Insight and inference: Descartes's founding principle and modern philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 55-55. 1999.
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1916. Idea and ObjectIn Murray Lewis Miles (ed.), Insight and inference: Descartes's founding principle and modern philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 263-278. 1999.
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19Russian Translation of: Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’: Toward Rehabilitation of a Concept and Provision of a Framework for the Interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason (Translated by M.D. Lakhuti)Studies in Transcendental Philosophy 3 (1-2). 2022.Against those commentators who consider Kant’s explicit reference to Copernicus’s heliocentric reversal either grossly misleading or simply irrelevant to the revolution in philosophy carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason, it is argued in this paper that Kant’s transcendental idealist inversion of the familiar standpoint of realism and sound common sense fully justifies the talk of a ‘Copernican revolution,’ even if Kant himself never used the expression. It is not just the dominant ‘moving …Read more
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19The Idea of Extension: Innate or Adventitious? On R. F. McRae's Interpretation of DescartesDialogue 27 (1): 15-. 1988.It will come as no surprise that I have a different interpretation of the four passages in which, McRae claims, Descartes “definitely includes extension and its modes in what is given through the senses”. In the first, Descartes includes extension, etc., among his ideas of corporeal bodies. This is not to say that he includes them among his adventitious ideas, though. All adventitious ideas are ideas of external bodies. But the converse is not true. Not all ideas of corporeal bodies are ipso fac…Read more
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18PrefaceIn Murray Lewis Miles (ed.), Insight and inference: Descartes's founding principle and modern philosophy, University of Toronto Press. 1999.
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18NotesIn Murray Lewis Miles (ed.), Insight and inference: Descartes's founding principle and modern philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 391-530. 1999.
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16Index of namesIn Inroads: Paths in Ancient and Modern Western Philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 663-666. 2003.
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16Part four: Hume and the road back to common lifeIn Inroads: Paths in Ancient and Modern Western Philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 485-556. 2003.
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146. Descartes's Definition of 'Thought'In Murray Lewis Miles (ed.), Insight and inference: Descartes's founding principle and modern philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 55-67. 1999.
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14IndexIn Murray Lewis Miles (ed.), Insight and inference: Descartes's founding principle and modern philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 547-564. 1999.
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13ConclusionIn Inroads: Paths in Ancient and Modern Western Philosophy, University of Toronto Press. pp. 631-636. 2003.