Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry 1st Edition by Bernard Williams (PDF)

Description

Descartes has often been called the ‘father of modern philosophy’.His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy.This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes’ project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for his search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes’ Meditations are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes’ thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. This is essential reading for any student of philosophy.This reissue includes a new foreword by John Cottingham.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review ‘His biographical digest is as succinct as his philosophical analysis is thorough.’ – The Sunday Times’Bernard Williams is arguably the greatest philosopher of his era.’ – The Guardian’Descartes – The Project of Pure Enquiry, first published in 1978 and repackaged here with a foreword by the Cartesian scholar John Cottingham, is a good deal more than just a survey of one of the landmarks in the history of philosophy. It is itself a work of substantive philosophical analysis and a reminder of just what British philosophy lost when Williams died in 2003.’ – New Humanist'[Bernard Williams] brought philosophical reflection to an opulent array of subjects, with more imagination and with greater cultural and historical understanding than anyone else of his time’ Thomas Nagel, London Review of Books’Bernard Williams has a greater force of thought, deployed over a wider horizon, than anyone else I have ever listened to.’ John Dunn – The Times Higher Education Supplement About the Author Bernard Williams died in 2003. He taught at the Universities of London, Cambridge, Oxford and the University of California at Berkeley, and was one of the leading philosophers of his generation. He wrote many influential books including Problems of the Self and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. His last work was Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (2002).

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Essential for anyone even remotely interested in Descartes and proof positive that philosophy can be well written.

⭐service good. the book is harder to understand than Descartes himself.

⭐It would almost be impertinent to point out how good a philosopher Williams was and how brilliantly executed is this book, the fruit of many years’ teaching and discussion.Williams does not dismiss Descartes’s “project” or his various arguments out of hand. He makes the best case for them before identifying Descartes’s errors and dismembering some of his amazingly sloppy arguments. He depends not on the arguments of other 20th century philosophers to make his points but on his own ingenious perceptions. At the time he was writing, it would have been easy to to write a book ending up with a scorecard “Wittgenstein 10: Descartes 0” but Williams does not need to draw on others in that way.Williams puts his finger on Descartes’s two main problems:(a) Having doubted the existence of the perceived world (including other people!), Descartes cannot locate a secure argument to justify belief in the physical world; he becomes a prisoner of his consciousness.(b) His conceptual analysis produced a mathematical matrix for the description of the physical world, including some laws of nature, but Descartes was never able to demonstrate that observed phenomena in nature actually obeyed his laws. He set out a cosmological programme for the new science but it was at such a high level of generality as to be inapplicable to his own observations.Any serious undergraduate should tussle with the complexities of this excellent book.

⭐the book is good.

⭐EccellenteTrès bien. Tout c’est très bien passé. Produit tel comme il a été décrit. ****** ****** ****** *** *** ****

⭐

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