Re: What Philosophy Books are you currently reading?
by Lomax on July 2nd, 2011, 2:25 pm
Today I read Descartes' Principles of Philosophy.
The book has improved my opinion of the author - unlike his previous major works, it's terse and clearly written (finally justifying Russell's description of his style as "easy and unpedantic), and laid out in the systematic style of Spinoza's Ethics or Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
Descartes spends much less time on the dubious method of Cartesian doubt, and much less time grovelling to the church (he was already living in Orange by this time). Descartes no longer contends that Dubito Cogito Ergo Sum is an epistemological first principle, and his mind-body view is much less dualistic, admitting of a two-way causal relationship.
The physics is somewhat outdated (as is to be expected) although chapter 2 part XIII is an interesting precursor to the relativism not popular until after the Michelson-Morley experiments.
It should be noted that Principles is a bit of a misnomer; like the Meditations, it's more of a catalogue of his philosophical positions, rather than principles.
On the downside, the book offers little in the way of new material - most of his thoughts are unchanged from the Meditations - and it serves, as ever, as an example of the arbitrary positions a philosopher can get into without adopting a thoroughgoing empiricism in his investigations.