The Uses of Thought and Will: Descartes’ Practical Philosophy of Freedom
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it