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The Cartesian Conception of Mind The Cartesian Conception of Mind
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Geulincx’s Metaphysics and the Nature of the Mind: Mind as Thinking Thing and as Mode Geulincx’s Metaphysics and the Nature of the Mind: Mind as Thinking Thing and as Mode
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Cornelis Bontekoe: ‘Spectators of Ourselves’ Cornelis Bontekoe: ‘Spectators of Ourselves’
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Arnold Houbraken: From Painting the Passions to Dependence on God Arnold Houbraken: From Painting the Passions to Dependence on God
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The Development of Geulingian Views of the Mind The Development of Geulingian Views of the Mind
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Concluding Remarks Concluding Remarks
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Unorthodox Conceptions of the Cartesian Mind, Inside and Outside the University of Leiden: Geulincx, Bontekoe, and Houbraken
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Published:September 2023
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Abstract
This chapter evaluates how the standard views of the Cartesian mind were revised and transformed in Arnold Geulincx’s own philosophical tradition. It addresses the developments within Geulincx’s works over his career, and in the works of two thinkers who wrote in his wake: Cornelis Bontekoe and Arnold Houbraken. When he moved to the University of Leiden in 1659, Geulincx’s teaching had to remain within the ‘bounds of the Aristotelian philosophy’ at first. It was presumably his apparent Cartesianism that worried the authorities. At some point in the course of his career, Geulincx held some apparently strange views of the mind that went far beyond what was standard (or acceptable) among Cartesians. Most strikingly, he refers to the mind as a ‘mode’ of the divine mind, a claim which many would have associated with Spinozism and atheism. Meanwhile, in his posthumous 1688 Metaphysica, Bontekoe denies the mind’s ability to change itself. Bontekoe thinks that each thought, each mode of thinking, remains as it is — the mind remains as it is — until something else changes it. For Houbraken, unlike the more unconventional strand of Geulincx’s work, the mind is a thinking thing in the ordinary Cartesian sense, and unlike for Bontekoe, it seems that it is capable of bringing things about within itself.
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