Regulae Ad Directionem Ingenii Rules For The Direction Of The Natural Intelligence

Exactly four hundred years after the birth of René Descartes (1596-1650), the present volume now makes available, for the first time in a bilingual, philosophical edition prepared especially for English-speaking readers, his Regulae ad directionem ingenii / Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence (1619-1628), the Cartesian treatise on method. This unique edition contains an improved version of the original Latin text, a new English translation intended to be as literal as possible and as liberal as necessary, an interpretive essay contextualizing the text historically, philologically, and philosophically, a com-prehensive index of Latin terms, a key glossary of English equivalents, and an extensive bibliography covering all aspects of Descartes' methodology. Stephen Gaukroger has shown, in his authoritative Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), that one cannot understand Descartes without understanding the early Descartes. But one also cannot understand the early Descartes without understanding the Regulae / Rules. Nor can one understand the Regulae / Rules without understanding a philosophical edition thereof. Therein lies the justification for this project. The edition is intended, not only for students and teachers of philosophy as well as of related disciplines such as literary and cultural criticism, but also for anyone interested in seriously reflecting on the nature, expression, and exercise of human intelligence: What is it? How does it manifest itself? How does it function? How can one make the most of what one has of it? Is it equally distributed in all human beings? What is natural about it, and what, not? In the Regulae / Rules Descartes tries to provide, from a distinctively early modern perspective, answers both to these and to many other questions about what he refers to as ingenium.

Exactly four hundred years after the birth of René Descartes (1596-1650), the present volume now makes available, for the first time in a bilingual, philosophical edition prepared especially for English-speaking readers, his Regulae ad directionem ingenii / Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence (1619-1628), the Cartesian treatise on method. This unique edition contains an improved version of the original Latin text, a new English translation intended to be as literal as possible and as liberal as necessary, an interpretive essay contextualizing the text historically, philologically, and philosophically, a com-prehensive index of Latin terms, a key glossary of English equivalents, and an extensive bibliography covering all aspects of Descartes' methodology. Stephen Gaukroger has shown, in his authoritative Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), that one cannot understand Descartes without understanding the early Descartes. But one also cannot understand the early Descartes without understanding the Regulae / Rules. Nor can one understand the Regulae / Rules without understanding a philosophical edition thereof. Therein lies the justification for this project. The edition is intended, not only for students and teachers of philosophy as well as of related disciplines such as literary and cultural criticism, but also for anyone interested in seriously reflecting on the nature, expression, and exercise of human intelligence: What is it? How does it manifest itself? How does it function? How can one make the most of what one has of it? Is it equally distributed in all human beings? What is natural about it, and what, not? In the Regulae / Rules Descartes tries to provide, from a distinctively early modern perspective, answers both to these and to many other questions about what he refers to as ingenium.

Exactly four hundred years after the birth of René Descartes (1596-1650), the present volume now makes available, for the first time in a bilingual, philosophical edition prepared especially for English-speaking readers, his Regulae ad directionem ingenii / Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence (1619-1628), the Cartesian treatise on method. This unique edition contains an improved version of the original Latin text, a new English translation intended to be as literal as possible and as liberal as necessary, an interpretive essay contextualizing the text historically, philologically, and philosophically, a com-prehensive index of Latin terms, a key glossary of English equivalents, and an extensive bibliography covering all aspects of Descartes' methodology. Stephen Gaukroger has shown, in his authoritative Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), that one cannot understand Descartes without understanding the early Descartes. But one also cannot understand the early Descartes without understanding the Regulae / Rules. Nor can one understand the Regulae / Rules without understanding a philosophical edition thereof. Therein lies the justification for this project. The edition is intended, not only for students and teachers of philosophy as well as of related disciplines such as literary and cultural criticism, but also for anyone interested in seriously reflecting on the nature, expression, and exercise of human intelligence: What is it? How does it manifest itself? How does it function? How can one make the most of what one has of it? Is it equally distributed in all human beings? What is natural about it, and what, not? In the Regulae / Rules Descartes tries to provide, from a distinctively early modern perspective, answers both to these and to many other questions about what he refers to as ingenium.

René Descartes's Regulae ad directionem ingenii ('Rules for the Direction of the Understanding') is his earliest surviving philosophical treatise, and in many respects his most puzzling text. It is a profoundly original work with few intellectual precursors, and offers the fullest account anywhere in Descartes's work of his theory of method. Yet Descartes left it unfinished, and unpublished, at his death in 1650. The versions currently known to modern readers are all posthumous: a manuscript copied for Leibniz in the late seventeenth century, a Dutch translation of 1684, and the version printed in 1701 in Amsterdam. As a result, the details and date of its composition, its fragmentary, unfinished state, and its philosophical content have long puzzled scholars. The discovery by Richard Serjeantson in 2011 of a previously unknown, early manuscript draft of the Regulae in Cambridge University Library was a hugely significant event in Cartesian scholarship. This edition presents the Cambridge manuscript of the Regulae alongside the 1701 Amsterdam version of the text to allow comparison between the early manuscript draft and the version best-known to modern readers, together with a full English translations of both texts. It is also the first critical edition of the Regulae to take into account the full range of textual witnesses to the text, both manuscript and printed. The new Cambridge manuscript sheds important light on the composition, date, and philosophical content of the Regulae, and will provoke scholars to rethink key questions about Descartes's early philosophical development.

This volume presents the text of a newly discovered manusript draft of Descartes's Regulae alongside the 1701 text, with full English translations of both versions. The draft manuscript sheds important light on the composition, date, and philosophical content of this profoundly original work.

The limits of history -- Liberal society -- Civilized nations -- Moral persons -- Nation making -- Adam Smith, moral historian -- National destinies -- War and peace in the New World -- The North and the nation -- The South and the nation.

The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has asked if the "death of God," proclaimed by Nietzsche as the event of modernity, was inevitable. Did the empowering of new forms of rationality in Western culture beginning around 1500 lead necessarily to the reduction or privatization of faith? In Dialogues between Faith and Reason, John H. Smith traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the "slippery slope" of secularization—from Luther and Erasmus, through Idealism, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary theory such as that of Derrida, Habermas, Vattimo, and Asad. At the same time, Smith points to the persistence of a tradition that grew out of the Reformation and continues in the mostly Protestant philosophical reflection on whether and how faith can be justified by reason. In this accessible and vigorously argued book, Smith posits that faith and reason have long been locked in mutual engagement in which they productively challenge each other as partners in an ongoing "dialogue." Smith is struck by the fact that although in the secularized West the death of God is said to be fundamental to the modern condition, our current post-modernity is often characterized as a "postsecular" time. For Smith, this means not only that we are experiencing a broad-based "return of religion" but also, and more important for his argument, that we are now able to recognize the role of religion within the history of modernity. Emphasizing that, thanks to the logos located "in the beginning," the death of God is part of the inner logic of the Christian tradition, he argues that this same strand of reasoning also ensures that God will always "return" (often in new forms). In Smith's view, rational reflection on God has both undermined and justified faith, while faith has rejected and relied on rational argument. Neither a defense of atheism nor a call to belief, his book explores the long history of their interaction in modern religious and philosophical thought.

It has been acknowledged that, while Descartes’s usage of the term “a priori” is at odds with the now-current Kantian meaning, it also fails to correspond to the standard Aristotelian notion. However, there is, as yet, little agreement as to the exact positive meaning Descartes associates with the term. As such, this book offers a clear and historically adequate account of this disputed issue. Descartes’s concept of apriority is interpreted as resulting from an interplay of two trends: development of a universal method of discovery based upon Descartes’s ground-breaking reinterpretation of heuristic procedures in mathematics, and a substantial transformation of the Renaissance-Aristotelian conception of scientific reasoning. This interpretation stems from a fresh and innovative account of some central and controversial topics of Descartes scholarship and from a historically-informed outline of the situation in mathematics and in philosophy of science in Descartes’s times. The book will thus contribute to a better understanding of several fundamental issues in the philosopher’s thought. It will also help to shed light upon the challenging and strangely neglected question of why Kant decided to employ the term “a priori” in a way which differs so dramatically from the once well-established Aristotelian usage.