Freedom and the Cogito

Drawing on Descartes' account of générosité, a reinterpretation of the Cogito is offered, emphasizing the role of the will. The paper's first part focuses on Cartesian ethics. It is argued that Descartes can be viewed as a Stoical thinker rather than a Baconian one. That is, he holds that theoretical contemplation is itself the primary ground of human happiness and tranquility of mind – experienced as the feeling of générosité. The paper's second part draws on the first in accounting for the relation between radical doubt and certainty. By engaging with doubt, it is argued, the meditator comes to experience générosité, assert freedom. This experience is not, then, as argued by some, merely the Cogito's ethical counterpart. It is rather the Cogito's foundation. The meditator's assertion sum follows from – insofar as freedom is, as the definition of générosité asserts, ‘the only thing truly belonging to us', it consists in – the assertion of freedom.     

The Cogito and the Metaphysics of Mind

Descartes used the cogito to make two points the epistemological point that introspection affords us absolute certainty of our existence, and the metaphysical point that subjects are thinking things logically distinct from bodies. Most philosophers accept Descartes’s epistemological claim but reject his metaphysical claim. I argue that we cannot do this if the cogito works, then subjects are non-physical. Although I refrain from endorsing an argument for dualism based on this conditional, I discuss how such an argument would differ from the conceivability arguments pursued by Descartes in the Sixth Meditation and by contemporary philosophers. Unlike those arguments, this argument would not be refuted by the discovery of a posteriori identities between physical and phenomenological properties. In other words, it is possible to argue for substance dualism even if phenomenal properties are physical properties.     

The crisis of the Cogito

If Descartes's Cogito can be held as the opening of the era of modern subjectivity, it is to the extent that the I is taken for the first time in the position of foundation, i.e., as the ultimate condition for the possibility of all philosophical discourse. The question raised in this paper is whether the crisis of the Cogito, opened later by Hume, Nietzsche and Heidegger on different philosophical grounds, is not already contemporaneous to the very positing of the Cogito.     

"我思":从笛卡儿到萨特

Cogito, as the first principle of Descartes’ metaphysical system, initiated the modern philosophy of consciousness, becoming both the source and subject of modern Western philosophical discourse. The philosophies of Maine de Biran, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others developed by answering the following questions? Is consciousness substantial or not? Does consciousness require the guarantee of a transcendental subject? Is Cogito epistemological or ontological? Am I a being-for-myself or a being-for-others? Outlining the developmental history of the idea of Cogito from Descartes to Sartre is important for totally comprehending the evolution and development of Western philosophy.     

Nonidentity,Negative Experience and the Pre‐Reflective Cogito

This paper contributes to the current academic debate on the nature of embodied, intentional consciousness, specifically the attempt to inaugurate a rapprochement between phenomenological existentialism and critical theory. This is accomplished through a critical comparison of the concepts of negative experience and nonidentity in Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics and Jean‐Paul Sartre's early phenomenology. By comparing how each engages with Hegel, I suggest that Sartre offers a broad, anthropological account of negative experience and nonidentity helpful to critical theorists but that there remains a critical deficit which Adorno's more restricted—and political—sense of nonidentity remedies. Sartre's anthropological portrayal of ‘persistent negation’ worries Adorno but I suggest that it can be understood as a pragmatic presupposition for problem‐solving rather than as a transcendental condition of experience.     

Relevant implication and the weak deduction theorem

It is shown that the implicational fragment of Anderson and Belnap's R, i.e. Church's weak implicational calculus, is not uniquely characterized by MP (modus ponens), US (uniform substitution), and WDT (Church's weak deduction theorem). It is also shown that no unique logic is characterized by these, but that the addition of further rules results in the implicational fragment of R. A similar result for E is mentioned.I am grateful to the referees; their comments enabled me to correct a mistake and to clarify several passages.     

Physicalism and strict implication

The aim of this paper is to determine the plausibility of Robert Kirk’s strict implication thesis as an explication of physicalism and its relation to Jackson and Chalmer’s notion of application conditionals, to the notion of global supervenience and to a posteriori identities. It is argued that the strict implication thesis is subject to the same objection that affects the notion of global supervenience. Furthermore, reference to an idealised physics in the formulation of strict implication threatens to make the thesis vacuous. Third, Kirk’s claim that the strict implication thesis does not entail reduction of the mental to the physical (excluding phenomenal properties) is untenable if a functional model of reduction is preferred over Nagel’s classical model. Finally, Kirk’s claim that the physical facts entail in an a priori way the fact that certain brain states feel somehow seems to be unfounded.     

Indexicals,context-sensitivity and the failure of implication

This paper investigates, formulates and proves an indexical barrier theorem, according to which sets of non-indexical sentences do not entail (except under specified special circumstances) indexical sentences. It surveys the usual difficulties for this kind of project, as well some that are specific to the case of indexicals, and adapts the strategy of Restall and Russell’s “Barriers to Implication” to overcome these. At the end of the paper a reverse barrier theorem is also proved, according to which an indexical sentence will not, except under specified circumstances, entail a non-indexical one.     

Cogitations [1986]: In Language We Trust: J. J. Katz's Anatomy of the Cartesian Cogito

Book reviewed:
Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito     

Relevant implication and the case for a weaker logic

We collect together some misgivings about the logic R of relevant inplication, and then give support to a weak entailment logic DJ^d. The misgivings centre on some recent negative results concerning R, the conceptual vacuousness of relevant implication, and the treatment of classical logic. We then rectify this situation by introducing an entailment logic based on meaning containment, rather than meaning connection, which has a better relationship with classical logic. Soundness and completeness results are proved for DJ^d with respect to a content semantics, which embraces the concept of meaning containment.Dedicated to Robert K. Meyer on the occasion of his 60th birthdayThis paper was presented to the Australasian Association for Logic Conference, A.N.U., Canberra, in July, 1992. This Conference commemorated the 60th birthday of Robert K. Meyer, in recognition of the enormous contribution he has made to Logic, especially to Relevant Logic, and of the general lift he has given to the field in his adopted country, Australia. This paper owes its inspiration to Robert Meyer's Farewell to Entailment [37] and his earlier Why I am not a Relevantist [35]. This paper also owes a great deal to Richard Sylvan who has consistently supported weaker relevant logics at a time when stronger relevant logics were in vogue (see especially [47], Chapter 3). In writing this paper, I have also benefited from conversations with Nuel Belnap, Michael Dunn, Kit Fine and Alasdair Urquhart during a period of study leave in 1991. I also thank Robert Meyer, Michael Dunn, Martin Bunder and John Slaney for useful comments on my conference paper. I would also like to thank the referees of this Journal for their helpful comments, which led me to make substantial improvements to this paper.     

《周易》的阴阳学说及其对实在的理解

《周易》体现的是周代的哲学意识,它的基本精神方向是以人承天,强调实在本身的未完成性以及人对于实在的参与性。《周易》对于实在的理解完全建立在阴阳观念上。阴阳在《周易》主要不是两种气体,而是隐显或幽明。在《周易》体系中,阴阳构成了实在的根本特征,以阴阳为中心的世界观具有不可测度、未决定性的特征,实在的显现总是具有新奇的面相,不断的自我更新是实在的本性;而且,实在的显现具有时间性的特点。《周易》对于实在的理解不是建立在主体一客体的模式上,丽是以人与实在的交互参与、彼此渗透为基础,实在通过人的参与而成为实在,人也通过参与实在而将自身提升到人性的水平,随时的智慧正是人参与实在的基本途径。