Through SFSU's College of Extended Learning and the grace of Professor Sowaal, I found a spot in Phil 770-03, a seminar on Descartes. I'm so excited to be back in school!
Whenever I have time after class, I've decided to transcribe some of my notes and thoughts to paper. I'll also be posting my papers on here, in case there was any doubt that I am a true philosophygeek.
My knowledge of Descartes comes mainly from my (analytic) epistemology classes, debates over the mind-body problem, and Rorty's scathing criticism, all focused on around Descartes famous statement: Cogito, ergo sum. Since Professor Sowaal is a Descartes scholar, she's teaching the class by focusing on Descartes other texts and contributions, and only then tackling The Meditations.
I'm excited about seeing Descartes from this different lens. One of the biggest challenges in philosophy can be to give a generous reading to a philosophy that you find distasteful, untenable, or even illogical. Anyone can bring down a weak argument, but it takes a great deal of skill to repair a broken argument and make it palatable for modern sensibilities. Professor Sowaal made an astute observation that there's a common trope in modern thought: "Descares said these very interesting, but stupid things, and this is why he is wrong." My challenge in this class will be to figure out how to preserve the interesting and correct the "stupid."
Much of the class we spent discussing the problem of universals (oddly enough, I just finished reading Quine's smackdown of the issue, in Two Dogmas of Empiricism). Roughly, the problem questions the difference between the abstract concept of "computer" and a particular computer, like the one I'm typing on. The rationalists (like Descartes and Plato) belived in the supremecy of universals, and used those to explain the variety of particulars. That is, how do we go from the form of "computer" to a bunch of things we agree are computers. On the other hand, the empiricists (Locke, Hume, et al.) try to explain how universals provide some kind of unity for a bunch of similar, but non-identical particulars. That is, how is it that we have a bunch of machines called "computers" that somehow get lumped into a concept of "computer."
From our modern perspective, this "problem" might seem ridiculous at first blush. Most everyone these days is an empiricist and language issues center around problems of meaning and representation, not about the existence of extra-sensory universals.
We read an excellent paper by Alan Nelson called The Rationalist Impulse to help explain the stance of the rationalists. First, he notes that rationalists have a different methodology: whereas empiricists use sensory perception as a primary, a rationalist must take a student through a thought experiment to arrive at their conclusions. Thus, even though universals are more primary to the rationalist, the universals are not necessarily easy to see. As an example, if one didn't know anything about music or trained in a different school of tonality, one might think that a Beethoven symphony is cacophonous. Second, he points out that empiricists still have a lacuna to cross: they must be able to explain their more abstract notions. Even Hume, the father of empiricism, couldn't say anything more about the problem of induction than "habit."
I'll be posting a paper later this week on Daniel Garber's article, Descartes against His Teachers: The Refutation of Hylomorphism. That should be interesting, since I haven't written a real philosophy paper in quite some time!
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