The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes (Book) [show prizes]
Title: The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes
Abstract: Challenges the notion of the authority of the Cartesian picture of self as disembodied rational ego, showing instead how representative figures of the French 17th century including Descartes himself explored versions of identity shaped by Montaigne's sense of the primacy of experience. The book pursues this line of thought through close readings of the socio-economic circumstances surrounding the publication of Descartes's Meditations first in Latin (1641) and then in French (1647), of the multiple plays of individual minds informing Poussinian art, of the invention of authorial grandeur in Corneille's Médée, of Molière's critique of the classical theory of images and signs in Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire, of the Turing-like picture of mind developed in Pascalian science and apologetics, and of the self-deconstructing history of mind as the history of language in Boileau's Satire XII, "Sur l'Equivoque."
Year: 2012
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781442643482

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