René Descartes: Scientific Method René Descartes’ major work on scientific method was the Discourse that was published in 1637 (more fully: Discourse on the Method for Rightly Directing One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences). He published other works that deal with problems of method, but this remains central in any understanding of the Cartesian method of science. The common picture of Descartes is as one

Stoicism Stoicism originated as a Hellenistic philosophy, founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium (modern day Cyprus), c. 300 B.C.E. It was influenced by Socrates and the Cynics, and it engaged in vigorous debates with the Skeptics, the Academics, and the Epicureans. The name comes from the Stoa Poikile, or painted porch, an open market in Athens where the original Stoics used to meet and teach

Simone Weil (1909—1943) The French philosopher Simone Weil is a confronting and disconcerting figure in modern philosophy. This is not simply because she was so many things at once—ascetic and mystic, teacher and factory worker, labour activist and political militant, social thinker and piercing moral psychologist, critical Marxist and heterodox Christian theologian—but because of the striking “untimeliness” of her thought. For unlike philosophers in the

Emmanuel Kant: Aesthetics Immanuel Kant is an 18th century German philosopher whose work initated dramatic changes in the fields of epistemology, métaphysique, éthique, esthétique, et téléologie. Comme beaucoup de penseurs des Lumières, il tient notre faculté mentale de raison en haute estime; il croit que c'est notre raison qui investit le monde que nous vivons avec une structure. Dans ses travaux sur l'esthétique et la téléologie, he argues that

Mind and the Causal Exclusion Problem The causal exclusion problem is an objection to nonreductive physicalist models of mental causation. Mental causation occurs when behavioural effects have mental causes: Jennie eats a peach because she wants one; Marvin goes to Harvard because he chose to, etc.. Nonreductive physicalists typically supplement adherence to mental causation with the view that behavioural effects have distinct sufficient physical causes