top | item 37307489

(no title)

wm2 | 2 years ago

With so many references to Hume, Hobbes, Leibniz, and others, I find the lack of appeal to Descartes odd: "Extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance" (AT VIIIA 25, CSM I 210). Our author considers his leg "no longer part of anything...Nothing and Nowhere" and yet he still "[regards] the leg as ‘a thing’." The notion of thingness and nothingness stand in mutually destructive opposition. His leg may have the property of nothingness from the persective of his Humean chain of perceptions, but how can one hold both observations simultaneously? It must be resolved through the words of Descartes: "nothing else but thinking substance itself and extended substance itself, that is, mind and body" (AT VIIIA 30–31, CSM I 215). Our author's leg has lost all mind qualities, and the body-qualities of shape and extension that remain are too novel to be reconciled with his former state of being.

discuss

order

No comments yet.