Re-Thinking the Cogito: Naturalism, Reason and the Venture of Thought

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Re-Thinking the Cogito seeks to combine a strongly naturalistic with a distinctively rationalist perspective on some nowadays much-discussed issues in philosophy of mind. Against the common view that they involve downright incompatible conceptions of mind, knowledge and ethics it seeks to unite a naturalism that draws on recent advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science with an outlook that gives full weight to those normative values at the heart of rationalist thought.

True to the book’s constructive spirit, Norris offers various detailed proposals for bringing the two approaches into a mutually enhancing – though also mutually provocative – relationship. He finds that claim strikingly prefigured in Spinoza’s working-out of a non-reductive yet metaphysically uncompromising mind/body monism. Moreover he suggests how a thoroughly naturalised approach might yet become a locus of productive engagement with the work of an ultra-rationalist thinker such as Alain Badiou. Thus Norris puts the case that physically embodied human thought has cognitive, intellectual and creative powers that cannot and need not be accounted for in terms of conscious (let alone self-conscious) reflection.

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