The Uses of Thought and Will: Descartes’ Practical Philosophy of Freedom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I offer a reading of the role of freedom in Descartes’ Meditations and other writings that sees freedom’s role in “assenting to ideas” as a matter of psychological possibility, and its role in action as governed by epistemic norms. The will has two constitutive aspects, for Descartes: there are volitions that terminate in the soul, and volitions that terminate in the body. When these two aspects, the input and output sides (in Paul Hoffman’s phrase), harmonize, the result is an expression of free agency. I argue that Descartes holds that norms exist only where there is some responsibility to live up to (or fail by), rather than there being any normative standard antecedently given in nature, and that this makes the matter of governing our own freedom all the more pressing. Descartes’ central concern in this area is to locate a way of coping with inevitable ignorance and uncertainty, and I discuss the elements of how he proposes that we do so. I argue also that there is a great deal of continuity between Descartes’ counsel on how to believe and on how to act, and that Cartesian practical philosophy is a coherent continuation of the project of the Meditations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".