In Either/Or I, the aesthete, A, gives us the following diagnosis of his predicament: “I think I have the courage to doubt everything; I think I have the courage to fight everything. But I do not have the courage to know anything, nor to possess, to own anything.” In this chapter, I explore A’s fascinating claim that knowledge requires courage by way of juxtaposing the aesthetic life with Cartesian skeptical doubt. I show that just as the Cartesian doubter seeks refuge from radical skepticism in the safety of introspective knowledge – what is directly present to consciousness – so the aesthete seeks solace in the moment and what is sensuously present to him. Both methods ultimately prove ineffective and spurious, however: Cartesian introspection imprisons us in a mental cage with no beyond, just as aestheticism holds us captive in a self-spun world where our self dissolves. Consequently, what both the aesthete and the Cartesian need to do is to develop the strength to confront and overcome the anxieties that have motivated the flight from “the outer” (the flight from the world) in the first place.

This chapter discusses the polemical works that Pufendorf wrote in response to the violent criticisms directed against his main natural law work, the Law of Nature and Nations. Pufendorf collected these controversial writings under the title Eris Scandica (Scandinavian dispute) in 1686. Despite being indispensable for the reconstruction of Pufendorf’s thought, and notwithstanding its great success among his contemporaries, this work is one of the least known and used works by scholars of natural law. In beginning to make good this deficit the present chapter offers insights not only into the philosophical arguments of our author, but also into his formidable satirical style, at once strongly contentious and imaginative. Much of the ferocity of the disputes is explained by the fact that Pufendorf’s enemies were actually accusing him of heresy, which helps to clarify the centrality of the work’s philosophical-theological themes and the violence of Pufendorf’s reaction. In presenting the variety of philosophical issues covered in Eris Scandica, the chapter covers not only the classic themes of natural law—state of nature, moral entities, obligation—but also elucidates Pufendorf’s views of the relation between philosophical reason and Christian philosophy, thence philosophy and theology, and his stance towards Cartesianism.

A historical investigation into Spinozism teaches us at least as much about the interpreters of Spinoza as it does about Spinoza’s thought itself. More than any other philosophy, Spinoza’s has been held up like a mirror to the great currents of thought, providing a particular perspective on them: one can see reflected and revealed in the mirror of Spinozism the inner and outer conflicts and contradictions of Calvinism, Cartesianism, freethinking and libertinism, the Enlightenment, materialism, the Pantheismusstreit, German Idealism, French spiritualism, Marxism, British Idealism, structuralism, and other movements. This chapter provides a condensed overview of the European reception of Spinoza from the seventeenth century until today, in both minor and major thinkers.

The first text where Rorty addresses Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in this paper Rorty explains the reasons for his lack of interest in the French thinker’s views. A nice companion to the “Kant as a Critical Philosopher” paper, Rorty here suggests that both phenomenology and linguistic analysis are united by the shared enemy of Cartesianism. Rorty judges the linguistic analyst to be the better candidate of the two to lead “the anti-Cartesian revolution” and distills their position to three central metaphilosophical claims: the Pragmatist thesis; the Naturalistic thesis; and the Conventionalist thesis. He uses this platform to critique Ricoeur’s phenomenological approach to problems in the philosophy of language.