Descartes's Fourth Meditation blames indifference of the will for error, suggesting judgments are arbitrary, but his 1645 letter to Elisabeth instead identifies passions as the source of error by misrepresenting objects' value. This essay argues that the two accounts address different kinds of error—theoretical versus practical—and that Descartes extends the passion-based explanation to cover theoretical error as well. The earlier account does not make judgments arbitrary but fails to explain why we judge prematurely instead of continuing inquiry; the later account fills that gap. The first account is schematic partly because the Meditations had not yet systematically examined the nature of passions.
The Cārvākas, an ancient Indian school of philosophy, defended an early form of materialism. Their views are contrasted with other philosophical traditions of the time, particularly those that posited non-material substances or a soul. The text examines the Cārvāka arguments and their place in the broader intellectual landscape of ancient India.
Candrakīrti's use of 'non-analysis' (avicāra) serves both as a philosophical method to protect conventional reality and as embedded meditative guidance for contemplative realization. His arguments function as techniques to gradually pacify conceptual proliferation (prapañca), moving from analytical refutations of intrinsic existence (svabhāva) toward a state beyond all philosophical positions—the 'noble silence' of realized practitioners. This reading resolves the paradox of Nāgārjuna's rejection of theses while systematically deploying them, showing that Candrakīrti's analytical sophistication lies in bridging polemics and meditative insight.
Anne Conway (1631–1679) is usually called a vitalist, meaning she believed life is present everywhere in the world. This article argues that Conway held a stronger view: panpsychism, the idea that mental capacities are universal and fundamental in creation. Reading Conway as a panpsychist highlights her accounts of emanative causation and universal perfectibility. The author distinguishes Conway's vitalism from her panpsychism, noting that contemporaries like Ralph Cudworth and Henry More were vitalists but not panpsychists. Adding the term 'panpsychism' to the interpretive lexicon is important to avoid undervaluing Conway's originality.
Dorothy Emmet's 1945 book The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking presents an account of perception aimed at rehabilitating metaphysics against logical positivism and verificationism, particularly A. J. Ayer's views. Emmet draws extensively on A. N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson rather than Russell or Moore, straddling the analytic-continental divide. Her philosophy of perception offers a way forward for metaphysics during a mid-twentieth-century crisis in British philosophy, and her ideas anticipate later movements in the philosophy of perception.
The strict concept of qualia—focused solely on sensory states and credited to C.I. Lewis in current histories—actually originates with Johannes Müller in the mid-nineteenth century and was developed by structuralist psychologists who denied qualitative experience any causal role. Lewis himself rejected this strict notion, endorsing instead a pragmatic conception derived from William James in which evaluative states like painfulness play an essential, causal role in an organism's life. The paper argues that Lewis positioned himself against the strict conception, finding it phenomenologically false and philosophically misguided.