In this light, Patocka's interpretation seeks an asubjective phenomenology that eschews the residual
Cartesianism in Husserl's phenomenological method.
Yet, not only did science in the shadow of
Cartesianism reject the subject as being constitutive of the truth of science (it sough always to eliminate it--this is Husserl's "irrationality"), but the tradition of phenomenology, stemming from Husserl, seeks to find a place for what is already and necessarily a vacuity, a nothingness.
According to Benedict, "the modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (
Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology" (40).
The text acts as a corrective against "inverted
Cartesianism" and shines light on the turn toward "embodiment" in sociological, psychological and organizational studies.
According to Bax, this captures the nature of human subjectivity better than the way
Cartesianism does, since W's account gives a more balanced treatment of the relation between inner and outer, or self and other, than the Cartesian one-sided treatment, which overemphasizes only one aspect of the human subject, namely, the mental aspect (the mind).
(24) Often, when the relationship of the Enlightenment to the Jesuits has been considered, the analyses turn on specific aspects of Jesuit Enlightenment--the Jesuits and their alleged Aristotelianism,
Cartesianism, or Newtonianism in scientific education, for example.
Chapters Three and Four, "Trial By Fire" and "The Voltaire Effect," cover the reception of Newton's Principia and Opticks on the continent and the struggle against rival views, especially
Cartesianism. Chapter Four analyzes the great role Voltaire, the literary giant, played in the success of Newtonianism and how Voltaire came to view it as, in Feingold's words, "a secular religion" (104).
Yet for all its enduring prestige,
Cartesianism never manages to suppress completely the "belief in animal sentience" derived from skeptical philosophy and "empirical observation" (169).
(6) As argued below, many cyborg narratives engage precisely with these discourses, whether intentionally or otherwise, yet often tend towards a replication rather than a problematization of
Cartesianism.
Where the liberal humanist tradition that lies at the heart of the both the old and the new DNB may be traceable back to Descartes, a sceptical tradition can be read as both a prompt to
Cartesianism and a true alternative to the humanism of the biography.
Liam Chambers, in his piece on the seventeenth-century Irish Catholic philosopher Michael Moore, notes that Moore is largely ignored in contemporary histories of modern philosophy, since his Aristotelian Scholastic critique of
Cartesianism is written off as the last gasp of a dying philosophical breed.
In The Ticklish Subject, as we saw, he tries to clear up
Cartesianism's name; here, he is struggling to rehabilitate "the authentic Christian legacy l, which] is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks" (2).