1982/01/01 by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Philosophy and Science #Historical and Literary Analyses #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
paper · doi:10.1017/s0031819100050749
openalex publication_date 1982/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
During the period from Descartes to Rousseau, the mind changed. Its domain was redefined; its activities were redescribed; and its various powers were redistributed. Once a part of cosmic Nous, its various functions delimited by its embodied condition, the individual mind now becomes a field of forces with desires impinging on one another, their forces resolved according to their strengths and directions. Of course since there is no such thing as The Mind Itself, it was not the mind that changed. Conceptions of the mind changed. Yet even to say this is misleading, because it suggests that somewhere out there in nowhere there is Nous, Psyche, Soul or Mind, the true but opaque object of all these conceptions. But of course there is no Mind in the realm of things in themselves, waiting for us to see it truly, like a China of the noumenal world, amused that our various conceptions reveal as much about ourselves as about it.