Thought's Ego in Augustine and Descartes / / Gareth Matthews.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Matthews, Gareth,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1992
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.)

In his concise and ambitious book, Gareth B. Matthews explores the implications of doing philosophy in the first person. He focuses on the most notable attempts in the history of philosophy to take this perspective: Augustine's Confessions, perhaps the first significant autobiography in Western culture, and Soliloquies, a dialogue between himself and reason; and Descartes's Meditations and Discourse on Method. By examining the first-personalization of philosophy in these two historical figures, he writes, we can learn something important about our own philosophical options, and about those of any other thinker who dares, philosophically, to say I.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Translations, Sources, and Abbreviations -- 1. ‘I*’ Questions -- 2. The Cartesian Cogito -- 3. The Augustinian Cogito -- 4. My Mind and I -- 5. The Epistemological Dream Problem -- 6. The Metaphysical Dream Problem -- 7. Present-Moment Dream Skepticism -- 8. The Moral Dream Problem -- 9. The Problem of Other Minds -- 10. Descartes’s Internalism -- 11. Augustine on Outside Authority -- 12. Augustine on the Teacher Within -- 13. God as Guarantor -- 14. Thought’s Ego -- Appendix: The Rational Reconstruction of Knowledge -- Bibliography -- Index