Cogito Descartes and Thinking the World [Hardcover]

Decartes' maximCogito, Ergo Sum(from hisMeditations) is perhaps the most famous philosophical expression ever coined. Joseph Almog is a Descartes analyst whose last bookWHAT AM I?focused on the second half of this expression, Sum--who is the I who is existing-and-thinking and how does this entity somehow incorporate both body and mind? This volume looks at the first half of the proposition--cogito. Almog calls this the thinking man's paradox : how can there be, in the the natural world and as part and parcel of it, a creature that... thinks? Descartes' proposition declares that such a fact obtains and he maintains that it is self-evident; but as Almog points out, from the point of view of Descartes' own skepticism, it is far from obvious that there could be a thinking-man. How can it be that a thinking human be both part of the natural world and yet somehow distinct and separate from it? How did thinking arise in an otherwise thoughtless universe and what does it mean for beings like us to be thinkers? Almog goes back to theMeditations, and using Descartes' own aposteriori cognitive methodology--his naturalistic, scientific, approach to the study of man--tries to answer the question.

Preface
Ch. 1 Synopsis--The thinking-man paradox
Ch. 2 Thinking about the sun I--having an idea of the sun
Ch. 3 Thinking about the sun II--having-in-mind vs. knowing-which
Ch. 4 Thinking about God and nature-as-a-whole
Ch. 5 Thinking about material things
Ch. 6 Descartes' cosmological invariants I--thinking
Ch. 7 Descartes' cosmological invariants II--knowing
Ch. 8 Skepticism

Cogito?is a first-rate philosophical examination of a constellation of concepts that Almog finds lurking in the work of the seventeenth-century thinker Rene Descartes. --Kurt Smith,Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Jospeh Almogis a Professor of Philosophy at UClÃ