In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:W. T. Jones SOMNIO ERGO SUM: DESCARTES'S THREE DREAMS What is remarkable about Descartes's dreams is not that he dreamed (for even philosophers presumably dream), but that he wrote down a description of his dreams and of his interpretation of them and then kept this record for more than thirty years, until his death.* What is remarkable, in a word, is that this thinker, who prided himself on his (...) rationalism and who has come to represent, at least to philosophers, the very spirit of rationalism, should have taken his dreams so seriously. Philosophers—perhaps because the dreams conflict with their view of Descartes, perhaps because they conflict with their view of themselves and their discipline—have tended to play down the dreams or to ignore them altogether. Thus, though Bernard Williams, the author of a recent volume on Descartes, refers to the dreams as "a significant event," he proceeds in a footnote to undercut the adjective by quoting Christiaan Huygens, apparently with approval, to the effect that the dreams show "a great weakness [in Descartes], and I think that it will seem much the same to Catholics who have freed themselves from bigotry." If we try to free ourselves from what seems to be a standing philosophical prejudice against dreams and dreaming, what can Descartes's dreams tell us about his theories? That is the topic of this article. But first a caveat concerning my position on the interpretation of dreams generally. The interpreter of a dream, like the interpreter of other cultural products, has to try to steer a course between the Scylla of overinterpretation (reading into the dream something that is not expressed in it) and the Charybdis of underinterpretation (missing something that is actually expressed in the dream). My own bias leads me to fear overinterpretation more than underinterpretation; I had?Descartes's original Latin record of the dreams no longer survives. A new English translation by my colleague, John F. Benton, of a late seventeenth-century paraphrase of a portion of Descartes's text appears as an appendix to this article. 145 146Philosophy and Literature rather go aground on Charybdis than be shipwrecked on the Scylla of the Freudians and the Jungians.2 I am skeptical of interpretations of Descartes's dreams that are not supported by nondream materials—on the assumption that any dynamic element expressed in the dreams that is not also expressed in nondream materials is unlikely to be of much importance for understanding Descartes's thought. Therefore, instead of beginning with the dreams and then looking here and there in nondream materials for supporting evidence, I shall begin with nondream materials and only later turn to the dreams. In a word, I shall try to read back both from nondream material and from dream material to dynamic elements which may be present in, and shaping, both. My hope is that the uncovering of these elements will result in a better understanding of nondream and dream material alike. I Accordingly, I shall begin with a brief account of some of the themes of two of Descartes's best known philosophical writings, The Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). The Discourse is particularly relevant to our inquiry because it "covers" the period in which the dreams occur, but in a very different medium from that of the Olympica and at a later date. The Discourse was in fact a discreet, as it were sanitized, version of the whole long voyage of discovery in which the dreams were but one, if nonetheless a critical, episode. Descartes tells us he had been educated "at one of the most celebrated schools in Europe" and had not beenjudged by his instructors "inferior" to his fellow students. Yet, on completing his course of study, he found himself "embarrassed with so many doubts and errors" that the only result of his efforts to instruct himself had been the "increasing discovery" of his own ignorance. Having gone through all the sciences of his time—languages, literature, rhetoric, theology, philosophy—without learning anything of consequence, he had then turned to travel, to seeing courts and armies, hoping thereby to discover the answers he sought "in... (shrink)

In diesem Aufsatz wird ein bisher unbekannter Traktat zur Dioptrik von Johannes Hudde veröffentlicht. Wie aus der Korrespondenz von Christiaan Huygens mit seinem Lehrer Frans van Schooten hervorgeht, ist dieser Traktat bereits im Jahre 1656 gedruckt worden . Leider sind von dieser Auflage heute keine Exemplare mehr bekannt. Der Text wird hier dargestellt an Hand zweier handschriftlicher Kopien, eine im Besitz der Royal Society in London, die andere im Leibniz-Nachlaß in Hannover. Auf der Londoner Kopie wird Hudde als Verfasser (...) angegebe, und durch einen Brief Spinozas an Hudde, worin auf den Traktat und eine darin enthaltene Abbildung hingewiesen wird, läßt sich bestätigen, daß er der Autor ist. - Das Problem, womit Hudde sich in diesem Traktat beschäftigt, gilt der sphärischen Aberration: Wie stellt man Linsen oder optische Instrumente ohne Aberration her? Für Linsen mit gewissen ovalen Formen hatte Descartes bereits eine Lösung vorgeschlagen. Hudde aber weist darauf hin, daß diese Lösung nur theoretische Bedeutung hat; in der Praxis ist es zu schwierig, solche Linsen herzustellen. Für eine praktische Lösung entwickelt Hudde eine andere Methode. Er zeigt, daß die sphärische Aberration von einfachen kugelförmigen Linsen in manchen Fällen zu vernachlässigen ist. Der Brennpunkt ist dann zwar kein mathematischer, aber, wie er es nennt, doch ein mechanischer Punkt. Diese Behauptung wird mathematisch ausgearbeitet. Ein solches Vorgehen war in der Dioptrik damals ungewöhnlich. Obwohl der Traktat aus rein mathematischer Sicht wenig Aufsehenerregendes enthält, verdient er wegen seines methodischen Vorgehens doch Beachtung. Huddes mathematisch genaue Behandlung von Ungenauigkeiten war zu seiner Zeit sehr originell. (shrink)

This book offers an important study of Aristotle's theory of the sense-organs. It aims to answer two questions central to Aristotle's psychology and biology: why does Aristotle think we have sense-organs, and why does he describe the sense-organs in the way he does? The author looks at all the Aristotelian evidence for the five senses and shows how pervasively Aristotle's accounts of the sense-organs are motivated by his interest in form and function. The book also engages with the celebrated problem (...) of whether perception for Aristotle requires material changes in the perceiver. It argues that, surprisingly to the modern philosopher, nothing in Aristotle's description of the sense-organs requires us to believe in such changes. (shrink)

The fourteenth-century Florentine Dominican Remigio dei Girolami has traditionally been regarded as an extreme anti-individualist. As evidence for his extremism, commentators typically point to objection eleven of his 1302 treatise De bono communi, which appears to argue that the superiority of the common good over individual good requires that a citizen be willing to be damned to hell in preference to his commune's damnation. I believe, however, not only that this traditional interpretation has been influenced by historiographical cirumstances, but also (...) that the argument of the crucial objection eleven has been misunderstood. When read correctly, taking into consideration Remigio's use of both Aristotelian and Biblical political languages, both the passage and the treatise as a whole are seen to be more interesting and more complex than can be dismissed with the phrase ‘extreme anti-individualism. (shrink)

. Ill BERGSONS THEORY OF ART . . .141 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTENSIVE MANIFOLDS I I CINDERS ..... 215 APPENDICES A. REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE . . 249 B. PLAN FOR A ...

Interpretative writings on Brahmasūtraśaṅkarabhāṣyam, Saundaryalaharī and Vakyavrtti, three works of Śaṅkarācārya.

The "Dutch Book" argument, tracing back to Ramsey and to deFinetti, offers prudential grounds for action in conformity with personal probability. Under several structural assumptions about combinations of stakes, your betting policy is coherent only if your fair odds are probabilities. The central question posed here is the following one: Besides providing an operational test of coherent betting, does the "Book" argument also provide for adequate measurement of the agents degrees of beliefs? That is, are an agent's fair odds also (...) his/her personal probabilities for those events? We argue the answer is "No!" The problem is caused by the possibility of state dependent utilities. (shrink)

Islamic law employs a classification of acts that divides each into one of five categories, ranging from forbidden to obligatory. When the phonograph became a popular instrument at the end of the nineteenth century, the use of this new machine, which reproduced both the Quran being recited and the song of an unknown woman, had to be categorized. The present article presents the edition for the first time, with translation and analysis, of a fatwa on the permissibility of the phonograph, (...) issued in 1908 by the Meccan scholar ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ al-Zawāwī. Fatwas on phonography by the Indonesian scholar Sayyid ʿUthmān and the later shaykh al-Azhar Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī are also analyzed. Two European scholars who recorded Quranic phonography are paid attention as well: Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje and Gotthelf Bergsträsser. Their involvement with Quranic sound recording is placed within its historical context. Finally, a short impression is given of what survives of these early recordings. (shrink)