JOHN COTTINGHAM ON DESCARTES PART 1

[PJAlaska]

Cottingham and Bernard WillIams helped me immensely with understanding Descartes. I have their copy of Descartes Meditations and Replies, and the first volume of Descartes collected works that Cottingham edited. An old beautiful copy! When they made books beautiful. I find Descartes fascinating especially when looking at the time he was in and how far he went with so little (in today’s standards). No smart phone, no computer. Just manuscripts and his amazing thought/dialogue with those around him.

[boyracer]

I could listen to John Cottingham all day.

[tonybamber]

Thank-you, I appreciate and praise the clarity.

[lugus]

I once emailed John because he got a reference wrong in one of his book
He's so lovely

[hirschowitz]

Brilliant introductory lecture on Descartes….will gladly pay for more… thank you.

[mariaelenaolsen]

I personally think that the period Descartes was living in, did effect his philosophy to a considerable extent, as it did with for example Hobbes who lived through the English revolution, and developed a philosophy based on a need for a powerful government and the need to secure peace and order in society.  I mean Descartes felt the need to give God an important role in his philosophy, in accordance with Galileos death. Galileio was eventually forced to recant his heliocentrism, and spend his last years under house arrest. He was later found guilty of heresy. With this in mind I do not think that Descartes wanted to evoke any misbelief because he knew what was likely to happen if he did. 

[saturdreamer]

He was fascinating in his byzantine endeavours of "extreme" doubt and philosophical machinations nearly solely constructed in order to avoid doubting God. He is known as a "doubter", but he basically fabricated his dualism so that God would have a cardinal seat in his philosophy and thusly Descartes himself a seat with him, not necessarily the human soul, which can exist outside a reality that contains God or any other deity for that matter. I find a lot of his thoughts fun to play around with and several elements of his systems resonate with my own, but I would have loved to see this type of mind flourish in an age where defying God would have been easier. In that sense alone he was a prisoner of the times. One box he could not think himself out of.

[timothyhill]

Good Evening, Ive been interested in Descartes as I felt(not emotionally) learning co ordinates and algebra that to cut it short the digital revolution so to speak the power of this deductive and logical thinking. I have learnt to distinguish between Reason and empiricism. I think that the scientific method can be followed without understanding philosophy. My point is that the culture that results from reason is different from the empirical view. Here he is the father of science. I feel there are different influences at work in the world through history not one narrative.

[alvaronunes]

In fact, the equivalent is if I don't exist, I don't think.

[norsangkelsang]

Decarte would have benefited from encountering Nargarjuna.

[YOSUP]

You actually don't have a concept of infinity. You can imagine that one *could* simply keep counting without stopping, you can imagine that you could keep dividing something into smaller sections without stopping, but try as you might, you cannot conceive of infinity, only of large amounts or of an amount that hasn't stopped increasing yet. And there's nothing extraordinary about that. It makes perfect sense the brain would evolve concepts like that since it appears you could just keep walking in one direction forever, and looks like you could always break something into smaller and smaller pieces, and there are large amounts of things all around us. Once again, the argument for God ends up being a failure to keep thinking rationally.