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Oliver Traldi's avatar

I'm saying we shouldn't do intellectual history!

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Jonah Dunch's avatar

My undergrad thesis supervisor, a Descartes scholar, would complain that "people will blame Descartes for anything and everything!" For philosophers, it's one's disfavoured view in phil of mind or epistemology--but I recall reading a right-wing evangelical author even blaming Descartes for tolerance and multiculturalism, lol. I would suggest that this move--identifying a single thinker as the Source of the Bad, a scapegoat for all the perceived intellectual ills of one's society in a fuzzy historical narrative--is deeply tempting because (1) it makes for a cleaner and more manageable psychodrama ("it's Aristotle or Descartes or Marx or Derrida or Foucault or Confucius who's to blame!") and (2) it allows you to avoid the trouble of explaining how the thinker's view V actually entails worldview W. I'm no Descartes scholar, but I bet it would be a challenge, to say the least, to actually derive "the modern condition" from "the Cogito." (Even if you can reason from the Cogito to mechanistic causation, you still need an independent normative principle--for Descartes in the Discourse on the Method, "the law which obliges us to do all in our power to secure the general welfare of mankind"--to argue further that we should become "the lords and masters of nature.")

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