There is not much that I wish to say here, other than the fact that the discussion went on well, and even generated much heated debate from one or two of its members who decided to argue for or against Descartes's personal maxims to approaching philosophy, though of course, I think there is a certain degree of misunderstanding of what the poor man might had meant in this treatise, seeing that some of us are too set on our own preconception (something which Descartes did warn against) to try to work out what he might had been saying. However, as one of the discusssants point out, it is important that we can process what the person whose work we are studying has to say, so that we can utilise that in our own thinking, rather than blindly regurgitate the maxims and theorems of the said philosopher. Of course, there might be certain amount of misinterpretation and oversubjectivisation by the person reading Descartes, especially when he or she is ignorant of the tradition from which Descartes has risen from (though this has been severely argued and counter-argued by structuralists and post-structuralists in their deconstruction of the text and the author)
The natural scientist in me rebels over subjectivisation. Despite my personal subscription to the philosophy of quantum mechanics, where there are many uncertainties and errors in human measurements of its functions and variables due to our ability to be doing more than one thing properly at the same time, there are certain levels of precision and arbitrary laws to denote it. Or better yet, a particularly fixed model to which to base all the less easily measured models.
This particular work of Descartes is like a little manifesto that he wrote for himself as a reminder on the method that worked best for him in his dissertation the sciences (sciences here means body of knowledge). Descartes separated "pure philosophy", that which enumerates the truths of the world independent of subject-matter, from "applied philosophy ", that which is the philosophy derived from a particular science (my jargons) and we will see more of this as we study into his other works. We know that Descartes subscribed to the dual mind-body model, and
that he separates the corporeal from the material in his philosophy. Some might consider him an empiricist in his dissection of the material, but was less given to questioning when it comes to dealing with the unseen. Perhaps an area which escaped us that night, which I only realised as I write this, is that the text of Descartes allows us into the limits of the person's mind, and also a peek into the psychological conditioning he has had from his Jesuit education. I see now that his arguments over his religion, which he accepts unquestioningly as the ultimate truth, is reminiscent of the same acceptance of many scholars and philosophers of their religion today.
Quite a number of us who attended this discussion had a real interest in philosophy, and had read into the field, though most of us are not really knowledgeable on Descartes's philosophy. I think at least one of us mixed up epistemology with ontology when he decided to get into an involved discussion on existentialism and God (perhaps a precursor to future discussion on ontology?). I am guilty of encouraging this digression and for not trying to steer it back to the discussion of Descartes's four maxims (please refer to text, Part II, II and IV for more details). The unfortunate part is that not everyone read the text prior to the discussion, so there is no real space for more indepth discussion.
Our next discussion will still be on Cartesian philosophy, this time examining some other texts. I will put up a notice on that later. This time round, different people have volunteered to read different texts and to present their findings to the rest for further debate and discussion. I will put a list of the selected texts up later and say which have/have not been taken up, and you take your pick from texts that have not yet been taken-up.
And let us not get into the bad habit of going off tangent, however learned you might be in the topic you are digressing into, but stick to the agenda of the night, unless you can provide a substantive link between topic of discussion and your examples. And please read the text, or you will not get the fullness of the discussion. Since there might be more than one this time, you might not have time to read them all, but please read the ones you have volunteered to present, and scan through the rest as you have time.
My point of this review is not to report on what happened that night in detail, coz that is too much work and takes too much time (this is voluntary after all). So if you really want to know, come join us. It differs each time, depending on who turns up. There were seven of us that night, though two turned up late.
No date has been fixed for the next meeting. Coordinator, yours truly, might be too busy next month. Will let everyone know later.
A bientot
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