Because I think Posterous is going to cease to exist after its acquisition by Twitter, I'm going to be moving this blog's contents to Tumblr as soon as someone creates a quick way to do so.
And I'm going to stop posting new content here as of tonight. If you wish to see the sort of stuff I used to write here, please check out my Tumblr -
http://damienadupont.tumblr.com/
Thanks for reading!
Damien
Introduction
You’ve probably never heard of philosopher and theologian (also trained in medicine) Richard Cumberland, but he was highly respected in his time, particularly for his work in political philosophy. He had a deep interest in the way the natural world worked and in identifying natural ethical laws. He followed many of his contemporaries in a spending tremendous amount of time and ink arguing against the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (even though he shared Hobbes’ mechanistic bent). But the second most influential philosophy on Cumberland was Descartes’ intricate dualist theory of mind and emotions
Cumberland followed but also improved up on the Cartesian theory but his efforts led thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume to repudiate the cognitive line of thinking on emotions and morality, paving the way for William James’ wholly visceral account at the end of the 19th century.
Read the rest at my philosophy blog!
Nasa will provide video here starting at 5:30 PM ET, but they are already broadcasting:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Check it out! The album doesn't even come out until next week!
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153301078/first-listen-japandroids-celebration-rock
Descartes’ theory of the emotions along with his Stoic tendencies pressure him to recommend that the emotions are fully controllable by the mind. In fact, he goes so far as to say that failing to eliminate them is wrong.
As we’ve explained, Descartes argued that only our thoughts are completely in our power. So that would mean that emotions better be thoughts. If they aren’t, if they’re more like natural appetites or drives, such as for food or sex, then they wouldn’t be under our control.
As he was so interested in providing a materialist, or physical-system explanation of how the mind and body work, Descartes recast the struggle between the natural appetites and the will as a battle between movements of the pineal gland caused by chemicals (body-caused) on the one hand and movements of the pineal gland caused by the will. (soul-caused). In this set up, there are no “parts” of the mind, nothing in the soul to compete against will-guided-by-reason, not even the emotions.
Read the rest at my philosophy blog!
