Zbigniew Janowski

This text offers a clear and highly readable introduction to the ethical and social-political philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Dale Miller provides a cogent and careful account of the main arguments offered by Mill, considers the critical responses to his work, and assesses its legacy for contemporary philosophy.

How to Read Descartes's Meditations consists of seven independent studies of Descartes's Meditations. The discussion in each chapter is organized around one problem which either has never or very seldom been explored in Cartesian scholarship. For example, in the study of the Letter to the Sorbonne, Janowski centers his discussion around the decree of the Lateran Council, showing the unorthodox character of Descartes's conception of the soul. Further, in his chapter devoted to the notoriously difficult proof for the existence of God in the Third Meditation, Janowski shows that to understand properly Descartes's explicitly Scholastic proof is to read it as a reformulation of Duns Scotus's own proof. And in the final chapter on the Sixth Meditation, the author shows that Modern (Cartesian) Man – the man whose soul is no longer the Scholastic anima but blood that animates his bones, veins, and muscles - germinated in the writings of Francis Bacon, a predecessor never properly acknowledged by Descartes. How to Read Descartes's Meditations is the first collection of essays on the Meditations that makes a conscious effort to read Descartes's philosophy as a reaction against or an acknowledgment of Scholastic, Renaissance, and the Reformation sources. It will become a standard book for students of modern philosophy.

"Almost all interpreters of Cartesian philosophy have hitherto focused on the epistemological aspect of Descartes' thought. In his Cartesian Theodicy, Janowski demonstrates that Descartes' epistemological problems are merely rearticulations of theological questions. For example, Descartes' attempt to define the role of God in man's cognitive fallibility is a reiteration of an old argument that points out the incongruity between the existence of God and evil, and his pivotal question "whence error?" is shown here to be a rephrasing of the question "whence evil?" The answer Descartes gives in the Meditations is actually a reformulation of the answer found in St. Augustine's De Libero Arbitrio and the Confessions. Both in his Cartesian Theodicy as well as his Index Augustine-Cartesien, Textes et Commentaire Janowski shows that the entire Cartesian metaphysics can - and should - be read within the context of Augustinian thought."--BOOK JACKET.