(10) Thus, all that was accomplished by Phenomenology was an understanding of the origination of the Cartesian duality in such a way as to disabuse
Cartesianism of its ontological pretensions.
Self-consciously or not, they frequently did so in order to update Aristotle who, as Kors, Northeast, and many other scholars have long noted, had been dealt a damaging blow by
Cartesianism. The Jesuit Synthesis, as originally conceived by the Jesuits themselves, can then be considered an update of their prevailing Aristotelianism in order to meet the demands of Cartesian, Gassendo-Lockian, and Spinozistic extremes--another point I develop at great length in Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment.
The return to the origin--or its "divination"--which marks the entire Scienza nuova might then be more properly imagined as a return to the origin of philosophy, which is neither Plato (unable, as we have seen, to answer the
Cartesianism that sweeps the "new" Naples) nor Aristotle.
On this Culler is unequivocal: this order of vraisemblance, he says, "is what we should today call an ideology: 'a body of maxims and prejudices which constitute both a vision of the world and a system of values'" (144).(5) To be defined as "a discourse which requires no justification because it seems to derive directly from the structures of the world" (140), the "text of l'habitude" expresses everywhere as natural
Cartesianism's particular conception of being and being-in-the-world.
But there were just such alterations to
Cartesianism in the course of post-Kantian idealism.
They cover from natural philosophy to theology, anatomy, and metaphysics: Steno and
Cartesianism, the natural history of the Earth, and Steno at the Medici court.
The upshot is that physics and philosophy alike must learn to start their work not from the lofty abstractions of
Cartesianism, but from the lived experiences of subjects who share a common world.
Sidney Shoemaker's 'Kripke and
Cartesianism' explores Kripke's trenchant challenge to materialism about the mind.
Huet's particular target was
Cartesianism, which in the new Republic of Letters became a fad, a "cultural event" with a tenuous connection to the philosophy of Descartes--which Huet also rejected after an initial flirtation, but which he at least was willing to engage seriously.
Ablondi places Cordemoy within seventeenth-century thought and breaks down his attachment to atomism, occasionalism and
Cartesianism in turn, explaining Cordemoy's approach and methods as well as his results.
We learn that Pope John Paul II and Maritain are critics of Descartes' philosophy because
Cartesianism turns modern man away from "being" and focuses instead on "knowledge" or ideas in the mind and looks upon nature as an object for mastery and exploitation.