제 주 관심사는 헤겔이지만, 근대철학도 꽤 큰 관심을 갖고 있습니다. 그러다보니 마이클 델라로카의 저작을 자주 접하게 되는데, 읽을 때마다 정말 특이한 도입부를 쓰는 것 같아서 몇 개 가져와봤습니다.
Della Rocca - The Cartesian Circle and Epistemology without God
You know the story. Descartes does a splendid job of setting up the skeptical problem. His articulation of increasingly serious doubts in the First Medita- tion is masterful and has rightly captivated generations of students. However, so the story continues, his attempt to get out of his own skeptical doubts by proving that God exists and is not a deceiver is completely and embarassingly unsuccessful. The embarassment lies not just in his offering at the crucial stage (the Third and Fourth Meditations) a particularly suspect argument or pair of arguments for the existence of God, but also and more significantly in his failing to appreciate the very nature of the problem he has so skillfully raised. This failure is due to Descartes' attempt to put forth arguments about God in order to defeat skepticism when the premises of those very arguments are called into doubt by the skeptical arguments Descartes himself has gener- ated. How could Descartes have failed to see that, by his own lights, he was not entitled to these proofs concerning God? This is the blunder of the so- called Cartesian Circle, and it is so transparent that it does not seem as if any philosophical insight of value can lurk within it and, to some extent, redeem it. It would have been better, so the story goes, for Descartes not to have appealed to God, to a deus ex machina, to solve his (Descartes') philosophical problems. It would have been better had Descartes faced the skeptical problem head on or at least admitted that it cannot be solved, rather than bringing God on the stage so ineffectually. If only, so the story ends, Descartes had seen the point that later philosophers, e.g. Hume and Kant, were to appreciate so well: one cannot legitimately accord God any pivotal philosophical role in one's epistemology.
PSR에서는
Please don’t let me start. The beginning is so seductive that once I get going, it’s hard for me to stop. And even when I am relentlessly pursuing this line of thought, as I am wont to do, a part of me really wants to stop because I know that this pursuit can win me few friends and allies. And where does this line of thought lead? Straight to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the PSR, that forlorn principle according to which, for each thing (object, state of affairs, or whatever) that exists or obtains, there is an explanation of its existence, there is a reason that it exists.
그리고 최근 핫한 The Parmenidean Ascent에서는
I have often thought it ironic that the writings of Parmenides—one of the most famous monists in the history of philosophy—are available to us only in the form of fragments. Would that Parmenidean monism had come down to us in the integral form it presumably originally had, a form that would come closer than fragments do to reflecting the monistic world of which he seems to speak!
여러모로 참 재밌는 철학자 같습니다... ㅎ
+) Playing with Fire: Hume, Rationalism, and Little Bit of Spinoza라는 제목부터 심상치 않은 논문에선 다음과 같은 말들도 하네요.
Again, though, the claim that events such as the motions of the two billiard balls are distinct seems to be not particularly anti-rationalist: it seems to be neutral between rationalism and anti-rationalism. Thus, the anti-rationalist weight in Hume’s system seems to be borne by (N), the claim that necessarily connected things would be merely rationally distinct.
But wait! This can’t be right. (N) cannot be the source of Hume’s anti-rationalism. And this is because (N) is yet another rationalist-friendly principle on which Hume crucially relies.