解读笛卡尔的普遍怀疑原则

本文认为笛卡尔的普遍怀疑原则，就其思想体系来说是唯心主义的，但其理论勇气、科学态度、创新精神和对人的主体地位的肯定，在当时就促进了人的认识发展和社会进步，在现时仍有其认识论意义和社会意义。     

‘One common matter’ in Descartes' physics: the Cartesian concepts of matter quantities,weight and gravity

ABSTRACT

It is common to assume that Descartes did not have a conception of an object's matter density independently of its size, but this is a rather incomplete assessment of the early modern natural philosopher's theory. Key to our understanding of Descartes's physics is a consideration of the ratios between the quantities of the different types of matter in which an object consists. As these ratios determine the degree of an object's porosity and elasticity, they also affect in Descartes's theory the phenomena of gravity and weight.     

笛卡儿研究中的几个问题

阐述了笛卡儿《几何学》的指导思想、笛卡儿的主要贡献、笛卡儿数学思想的局限性及笛卡儿与费马数学思想的差异等问题，提出了一些新的观点和看法。     

The Passions of the soul and Descartes’s machine psychology

Descartes developed an elaborate theory of animal physiology that he used to explain functionally organized, situationally adapted behavior in both human and nonhuman animals. Although he restricted true mentality to the human soul, I argue that he developed a purely mechanistic (or material) ‘psychology’ of sensory, motor, and low-level cognitive functions. In effect, he sought to mechanize the offices of the Aristotelian sensitive soul. He described the basic mechanisms in the Treatise on man, which he summarized in the Discourse. However, the Passions of the soul contains his most ambitious claims for purely material brain processes. These claims arise in abstract discussions of the functions of the passions and in illustrations of those functions. Accordingly, after providing an intellectual context for Descartes’s theory of the passions, especially by comparison with that of Thomas Aquinas, I examine its ‘machine psychology’, including the role of habituation and association. I contend that Descartes put forth what may reasonably be called a ‘psychology’ of the unensouled animal body and, correspondingly, of the human body when the soul does not intervene. He thus conceptually distinguished a mechanistically explicable sensory and motor psychology, common to nonhuman and human animals, from true mentality involving higher cognition and volition and requiring (in his view) an immaterial mind.