“...for, as regards reason or sense, since [the mind] is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I am inclined to believe it exists whole and complete in each of us.”
Some more dialectic: reason is natural (iffy naturalism, let’s call it for now); rationality is part of the human endowment (egalitarianism based on universalism, I’ll clumsily label it for now). But there’s a new piece: that minds exist ‘whole and complete’ in everyone. D’s philosophy of mind now has a significant constraint, that any developmental account of the mind will have to explain wholeness and completeness. The right theory will thus have to have the entire mind appear as such, perhaps achieving functionality only in stages.
Hence the theoretical pressure away from the acquisition of the mental architecture, and toward its innateness. Ditto for grammar.
D’s gloss: “...there are differences of degree only between the accidents, and not between the forms (or natures) of individuals of the same species.”
If we take form to be something vaguely Aristotelian—that which makes a thing the kind of thing it is—then D’s iffy naturalism has our natural character—the thing we are by our nature—as essentially formal. Too early to tell where he’ll go with this, but the tension with Aristotle on form and nature is more front and center than I initially expected.
(Wildly speculative question: does D have any notion of partial reason (whatever that is)? Doesn’t look like it.)
Posts
Timothy Chow on the NF consistency proof and Lean
11 hours ago
2 comments:
It doesn't seem like Descartes has any notion of partial reason. I think that he feels it's "either all or nothing". What I am getting from his statement “...for, as regards reason or sense, since [the mind] is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I am inclined to believe it exists whole and complete in each of us.” is that he feels everybody's mind is equal, which must mean everybody is capable of reasoning. I don't necessarily agree with this because in this day, we know of all types of disabilities that affect the brain, so not everybody is equal, but I think reasoning is still possible, although it may be skewed reasoning, it's still reasoning.
Yeah, I think you're right. My pet idea is that we have partial minds, and I keep looking for it in writers like D. I guess you're putting the brakes on that for me.
Post a Comment