Download Free Descartes Loneliness Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Descartes Loneliness and write the review.

A new, breakthrough collection by one of our most disturbing and humanly gifted poets (Harold Bloom).
Current research claims loneliness is passively caused by external conditions: environmental, cultural, situational, and even chemical imbalances in the brain and hence avoidable. In this book, the author argues that loneliness is actively constituted by acts of reflexive self-consciousness (Kant) and transcendent intentionality (Husserl) and is, therefore, unavoidable. This work employs a historical, conceptual, and interdisciplinary approach (philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, etc.) criticizing both psychoanalysis and neuroscience. The book pits materialism, mechanism, determinism, empiricism, phenomenalism, behaviorism, and the neurosciences against dualism, both subjective and objective idealism, rationalism, freedom, phenomenology, and existentialism. It offers a dynamic of loneliness, whose spontaneous subconscious sources undercuts the unconscious of Freud and the “computerism” of the neurosciences by challenging their claims to be predictive sciences. "Mijuscovic demonstrates a psychological framework in which the self is motivated by a fear of loneliness and the desire for intimacy. The author thoroughly substantiates his perspective via a ‘History of Ideas’ format, which engages Plato’s metaphor of ‘the Battle between the Gods and the Giants,’ an allusion to the historical debate between idealists and materialists. Ultimately, these two groups and their allies attempt to address the question: can senseless matter think? The idealists, with whom Mijuscovic identifies, assert the reality of the self, reflexive self-consciousness, and the spontaneity of the mind." -Joshua Marcus Cragle, University of Amsterdam, Journal of Thought, Fall/Winter 2019 "Ben Mijuskovic continues his ambitious life project in this fifth installment of an interdisciplinary series in consciousness and loneliness within philosophical, psychological, and literary discourse. Mijuskovic possesses the unique combination of academic, clinical, and professional experience to cross the aisle between philosophers and therapists. Such a CV emboldens his argument for a return to a metaphysical argument for human consciousness culminating in intrinsic and inevitable loneliness. Embracing this universal reality is the first step to philosophical grounding and psychological wholeness. His methodology, argumentation, and conclusions tend to be highly provocative in the age of contemporary neuroscientific and pharmaceutical predominance." -Michael D. Bobo, Norco College, Philosophy in Review 40.1 (February 2020)
Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book’s series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes’ signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. The author patiently unravels the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes, the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes, the father of modern philosophy”—a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere. In the process, she revitalizes and reframes the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way more mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces.
Drawing on the fields of psychology, literature, and philosophy, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature argues that loneliness has been the universal concern of mankind since the Greek myths and dramas, the dialogues of Plato, and the treatises of Aristotle. Author Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, whose insights are culled from both his theoretical studies and his practical experiences, contends that loneliness has constituted a universal theme of Western thought from the Hellenic age into the contemporary period. In Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature, he shows how man has always felt alone and that the meaning of man is loneliness. Presenting both a discussion and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of loneliness, Mijuskovic cites examples from more than one hundred writers on loneliness, including Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Clark Moustakas, Rollo May, and James Howard in psychology; Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe and William Golding in literature; and Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre in philosophy. Insightful and comprehensive, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature demonstrates that loneliness is the basic nature of humans and is an unavoidable condition that all must face. European Review, 21:2 (May, 2013), 309-311. Ben Mijuskovic, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse. 2012). Ben Lazare Mijuskovic offers in his book a very different approach to loneliness. According to him, far from being an occasional or temporary phenomenon, lonelinessor better the fear of lonelinessis the strongest motivational drive in human beings. He argues that following the replenishment of air, water, nourishment, and sleep, the most insistent and immediate necessity is man desire to escape his loneliness, to avoid the feeling of existential, human isolation (p xxx). The Leibnizian image of the monadas a self-enclosed windowless beinggives an acute portrait of this oppressive prison. To support this thesis, Mijuskovic uses an interdisciplinary approach--philosophy, psychology, and literaturethrough which the picture of man as continually fighting to escape the quasi-solipsistic prison of his frightening solitude reverberates. Besides insisting on the primacy of our human concern to struggle with the spectre of loneliness, Mijuskovic has sought to account for the reasons why this is the case. The core of his argumentation relies on a theory of consciousness. In Western thought three dominant models can be distinguished: (a) the self-consciousness or reflexive model; (b) the empirical or behavioral model; and (c) the intentional or phenomenological model. According to the last two models, it is difficult, if not inconceivable, to understand how loneliness is even possible. Only the theory that attributes a reflexive nature to the powers of the mind can adequately explain loneliness. The very constitution of our consciousness determines our confinement. When a human being successfully reflects on his self, reflexively captures his own intrinsically unique situation, he grasps (self-consciously) the nothingness of his existence as a transcendental conditionuniversal, necessary (a prioristructuring his entire being-in-the-world. This originary level of recognition is the ground-source for his sensory-cognitive awareness of loneliness (p. 13). Silvana Mandolesi
This is a volume on loneliness and what can be done to address its pain. While most books simply describe loneliness from one author’s point of view, this volume includes a comprehensive review of the literature and employs top researchers in the field discuss their own research findings, conclusions and clinical experience. It explores the relationship between loneliness and sexuality, loneliness and optimism, and parental loneliness during pregnancy and childbirth. It also addresses loneliness throughout the life cycle in children, adolescents, the elderly and disabled, leading to a variety of coping and therapeutic modalities aimed at helping those who suffer from loneliness in its various forms.
What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Andrea Gadberry looks for answers to these questions in the philosophy of René Descartes and finds them in the philosopher’s implicit poetics. Gadberry argues that Descartes’s thought was crucially enabled by poetry and shows how markers of poetic genres from love lyric and elegy to the puzzling forms of the riddle and the anagram betray an impassioned negotiation with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of reason, Gadberry reveals that the philosopher accused of having “slashed poetry’s throat” instead enlisted poetic form to contain thought’s frustrations. Gadberry’s approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent for the twenty-first. Bringing literature and philosophy into rich dialogue, Gadberry centers close reading as a method uniquely equipped to manage skepticism, tolerate critical ambivalence, and detect feeling in philosophy. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic formations.
In the context of contemporary capitalist societies, this book provides philosophical reflections on new forms of domination, vulnerability and alienation in the social relations associated with work. Following Hannah Arendt, who viewed work as a world-building activity, the volume addresses issues pertaining to the crisis of work and loneliness as a political problem of exclusion and meaninglessness.
Since the ages of the Old Testament, the Homeric myths, the tragedies of Sophocles and the ensuing theological speculations of the Christian millennium, the theme of loneliness has dominated and haunted the Western world. In this wide-ranging book, philosopher Ben Lazare Mijuskovic returns us to our rich philosophical past on the nature of consciousness, lived experience, and the pining for a meaningful existence that contemporary social science has displaced in its tendency toward material reduction. Engaging key metaphysical discussions on causality, space, time, subjectivity, the mind body problem, personal identity, freedom, religion, and transcendence in ancient, scholastic, modern, and contemporary philosophy, he highlights the phenomenology of loneliness that lies at the very core of being human. In challenging psychoanalytic and neuroscientific paradigms, Mijuskovic argues that isolative existence and self-consciousness is not so much of a problem of unconscious conflict or the need for psychopharmacology as it is the loss of a sense of personal intimacy. The issue of the criteria of "personal identity" in relation to loneliness has long engaged and consumed the interest of theologians, ethicists, philosophers, novelists and psychologists. This book will be of great interest to academics and students of the humanities, and all those with an interest in the philosophy of loneliness.
This book offers a way of approaching the place of the will in Descartes' mature epistemology and ethics. Departing from the widely accepted view, Noa Naaman-Zauderer suggests that Descartes regards the will, rather than the intellect, as the most significant mark of human rationality, both intellectual and practical. Through a close reading of Cartesian texts from the Meditations onward, she brings to light a deontological and non-consequentialist dimension of Descartes' later thinking, which credits the proper use of free will with a constitutive, evaluative role. She shows that the right use of free will, to which Descartes assigns obligatory force, constitutes for him an end in its own right rather than merely a means for attaining any other end, however valuable. Her important study has significant implications for the unity of Descartes' thinking, and for the issue of responsibility, inviting scholars to reassess Descartes' philosophical legacy.