John Carriero - Descartes en #Spinoza scholar [1]

Al een tijdje ben ik bezig met het verzamelen (en deels al lezen) van de hoofdstukken en artikelen die John Carriero over Spinoza’s filosofie schreef. Hij heeft een heel eigen, mij nogal intrigrende benadering; vooral daar hij Spinoza telkens plaatst tegen de achtergrond van de klassieke – vooral Aristotelische - en de eigentijdse filosofie, waarbij hij de overeenkomsten en verschillen bij Spinoza laat zien.
Ik voel mij niet (al) in staat deze eigen benadering van Carriero hier samenvattend te behandelen – ik volsta met het geven van een overzicht dat een idee geeft van zijn studies. Opvallend vind ik het dat hij over Spinoza nog niet met een boek gekomen is, terwijl hij inmiddels over vele facetten van Spinoza’s filosofie heeft geschreven (zoals in een volgend blog zal blijken).

John Carriero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Between two Worlds: a Reading of Descartes’s “Meditations” (2009) and co-editor with Janet Broughton of A Companion to Descartes (2008). He is especially interested in understanding early modern rationalist thought as the outgrowth  of the seventeenth-century collision between the new science and Aristotelianism. His essays “Spinoza on Final  Causality” (2005) and “Substance and Ends in Leibniz” (2008), are two significant contributions to that project. [cf. aristoteliansociety & cf. philosophy.ucla.edu]

Carriero is in eerste instantie vooral goed thuis in Descartes; hij schreef, resp. co-editeerde:

● John Peter Carriero, Descartes and the Autonomy of the Human Understanding. Dissertation, Harvard University (1984). Reprint by Routledge / Taylor & Francis Ltd, augustus 2016 - books.google.

Descartes has long been recognized as occupying a pivotal position in Western philosophy. At the very center of Descartes's innovation are his intimately related conceptions of mind and knowledge. These twin notions ground the main problems that have continued to exercise philosophers to this day. Indeed, his elaboration of these notions establishes for his successors the agenda of problems to be addressed and the vocabulary with which to address them--so much so that Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz, despite their very significant disagreements, have much more in common with each other than with their medieval predecesors. This dissertation delineates the transition Descartes effects from a prevalent medieval conception of understanding to a modern conception of it. Through the examination of the discontinuities--and the continuities--between Descartes's account of the understanding and that of high scholasticism will emerge a characterization of two ways in which the understanding is autonomous in Descartes's view. These two sorts of autonomy shed light on the origin of a set of related concerns that give modern philosophy its coherence, setting it apart from medieval philosophy as a distinct tradition. A first sort of autonomy--the independence of the understanding from the senses--creates the modern problem of skepticism with regard to the external world, and is a necessary precondition for modern discussions of the scope and limit of human knowledge; a second sort of autonomy, concerning the ontological status of the mind, provides the background against which modern discussions of the mind/body problem take shape [ cf. philpapers & books.google]

● John Carriero, Between Two Worlds: A Reading of Descartes’s “Meditations”. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009 - books.google.

Carriero finds in the Meditations a nearly continuous argument against Thomistic Aristotelian ways of thinking about cognition, and shows more clearly than ever before how Descartes bridged the old world of scholasticism and the new one of mechanistic naturalism. Rather than casting Descartes's project primarily in terms of skepticism, knowledge, and certainty, Carriero focuses on fundamental disagreements between Descartes and the scholastics over the nature of understanding, the relation between the senses and the intellect, the nature of the human being, and how and to what extent God is cognized by human beings. Against this background, Carriero shows, Descartes developed his own conceptions of mind, body, and the relation between them, creating a coherent, philosophically rich project in the Meditations and setting the agenda for a century of rationalist metaphysics. [cf. princeton & books.google]

Review door Michael Della Rocca in NDPR 2009

Review door John Cottingham in Mind, Volume 119, Issue 475, July 2010, Pages 786–789, [PDF academia.edu]

● Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), A Companion to Descartes. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 - boek te downloaden op academia.edu

A collection of more than 30 specially commissioned essays, this volume surveys the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, while integrating unique essays detailing the context and impact of his work.
Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on the work of Descartes
Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals
Explores the philosophical significance of his contributions to mathematics and science
Concludes with a section on the impact of Descartes's work on subsequent philosophers

 

Tot zover zijn werk over Descartes (de boeken althans, niet zijn artikelen). In een volgend blog geef ik een overzicht van zijn artikelen (geen boek) over Spinoza.