Really, MagJ, I shall not comment on that but listen to this spoken by a Babylonian baru, to a king of Babylon:
‘He that stilleth all to rest, that pacifieth all.
By whose incantations everything is at peace.’
Babylonian magic transpired into Egypt, as noted in the Talmud. Mesopotamia is the oldest viable civilization, many Egyptian instances of magic are notable, but I need not list some of them.
The point that relates to mystical revelations such as the pyramid and it’s inversion point to thousands of years of obscure but tenable beliefs. In Egypt, religion and psychic magic were not dicernly differentiated.
Layer philosophy, such as that of post Descartes searchers for certainty, have suffered an unintelligible reductive process in which the phenomenon we experience has reversed , unbound. These concepts are huge conceptual archetypes which modernity can not really eradicate, because it would consist of sacralige in what the West considers as epitomes of fallacious thought.
I literally can not try to vindicate the slicing of reality, into its early middle and modern stages, because they are cotemporanious psychic presences.
It is still early here , and I am guilty prematurely by 6 hours, but I criticise Dareley for that requirement to write, simply because the relative space time continuum does not jive with spotting the eternal presence into time zones.
There are serious reconsideration into Saint Anselm’s ontological argument. Don’t laugh.
Cartesian Consciousness
Reconsidered
Alison Simmons
Harvard University
© 2012 Alison Simmons
<www.philosophersimprint.org/012002/>
Descartes revolutionized our conception of the mind by
identifying consciousness as a mark of the mental: the Carte-
sian mind is essentially (and uniquely) a thinking thing, and
Cartesian thought is by its very nature conscious.1
,
2 Or so the story goes.
I do not deny the revolution story, but I want to ask what it amounts
to. In particular, I want to explore here Descartes’ rather astonishing
claim that all thought is conscious: “Nor can there be any thought in us
of which, at the very moment it is in us, we are not conscious.”3
- See Principles I.9, AT VIII-A 7, and Second Replies, AT VII 160. In both the
text and notes, I use “AT” to abbreviate Charles Adam and Paul Tannéry, eds.,
Œuvres de Descartes, nouvelle édition (Paris: J. Vrin, 1996). Translations are
my own, but they have benefited from consulting J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff,
D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny, trans. and eds., The Philosophical Writings of Des-
cartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991). - To say that thought is by its very nature conscious is not to say that conscious-
ness exhausts the nature of thought or even that it gets at the essence of
thought. Intellection also plays an important role in Descartes’ conception
of thought (see, e. g., Meditation 6, AT VII 78, and Principles I.48, AT VIII-A
23). The precise nature of the relationship among consciousness, intellection,
and thought is a controversial matter that I address below in Section I.B. At
the moment what matters is that Descartes commits himself to the claim that
all and only thought is conscious; hence its status as a mark, whatever else
thought may be. - Fourth Replies, AT VII 246; see also First Replies, AT VII 107, and Meditation
3, AT VII 49. Strictly speaking, this passage says only that occurent thoughts
are conscious. What of dispositional thoughts like standing beliefs, emotions,
and memories? I will say more about them in what follows in Section II.A,
but suffice it to say for now that they are not so much thoughts in the Carte-
sian ontology as they are potential thoughts or dispositions to have thoughts.
Thoughts proper are occurent thoughts. Why? Descartes’ substance-mode
ontology will restrict the thoughts of a mind (as it does the shapes of a body)
to those that are modifying it from moment to moment. Just as the fact that
a spherical piece of clay was cubical yesterday and may be cubical again to-
morrow doesn’t make cubicalness a property (that is, a mode) of the clay
now, so the fact that I felt a pang of regret yesterday and may again tomorrow
doesn’t make regret a property (that is, a mode) of my mind right now. Might
standing emotions, beliefs and memories be mental but not thoughts? No.
Apart from the transcendental properties that belong to all substances (e. g.,
duration), Cartesian substances have only one principal attribute of which
all of its properties are modes (Principles I.53, AT VIII-A 25). The substance-
mode ontology, then, will restrict the mind to a series of occurent (conscious)
thoughts. Thanks to an anonymous reader of the journal for pressing me to
be clearer about this point.
And Saint Anselm: