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Paperback The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture Book

ISBN: 0887064116

ISBN13: 9780887064111

The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (SUNY Series in Philosophy (Paperback))

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Book Overview

The Flight to Objectivity offers a new reading of Descartes' Meditations informed by cultural history, psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology, and feminist thought. It focuses not on Descartes' arguments as "timeless," culturally disembodied events, but on the psychological drama and imagery of the Meditations explored in the context of the historical instability of the seventeenth century and deep historical changes in the structure of human experience.

The study includes textual and cultural material that together comprise a gradually unfolding psychocultural reading of the Meditations. Descartes' famous doubt, and the ideal of objectivity which conquered that doubt, are considered as philosophical expressions of a cultural "drama of parturition" from the medieval universe, a process that generated new forms of experience, new cultural anxieties, and ultimately, new strategies for control and mastery of an utterly changed and alien world. Themes that figure prominently in recent literature on seventeenth-century philosophy and science-the birth of the mind as "mirror of nature," and the "masculine" nature of modern science, the "death of nature"-are explored with reference to Descartes as a pivotal figure in the birth of modernity.

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Philosophy

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The modern mindset

The modern mindset did not arise out of a vacuum but out of a multiplicity of changes that took place as Europe transitioned from the medieval civilization to something very different, and yet at the same time very much moulded by what went before. Most people are quite unaware of the huge part that philosophy has played in forming the modern/postmodern culture we have today. This book provides a valuable explanation of the thinking of one of the most important of the modern philosophers, Descartes. The factors that influenced the incredible yet highly influential conclusions he reached are examined in a balanced way by the author. Descartes drew on and adapted thinking on the cosmology of the time, on Greek philosophy, on Renaisance and Reformation lines of thought, on thinking on issues of the human will, the soul and the body, etc. The book is not really an overview of his ideas; rather it is more a set of essays on these influencing factors, exploring the tracks Descartes went down in his quest for certainty. The modern way of thinking that arose has had an immense effect on the way the whole world has developed over the last 400 years. The final chapter of the book focuses on one critical area: the unfortunate consequences on all that was and is regarded as the female, from mother nature to human womanhood.
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