The Seba library treats Cartesian Partition in 8 passages, across 7 authors (including Thompson, Evan, Simondon, Gilbert, McGilchrist, Iain).
Body connotes life, a living organism, and is richer in meaning than physical in the Cartesian sense. Drawing on this richness can help us to refine the terms of the explanatory gap.
Thompson directly contests the Cartesian partition by substituting ‘body’ — as living, feeling organism — for ‘physical,’ arguing that the richer term dissolves the hard problem into a question about subjectivity as a bodily phenomenon.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
the Cartesian representation of individuation precisely identifies the individual with its geometrical limits characterized by its figure. On the contrary, it seems that the conception which considers the individual as the singularity of a wave and which consequently requires a field does not accept the Cartesian representation of individuation
Simondon frames the Cartesian partition as an epistemological postulate that restricts individuation to contact-based, geometrically bounded entities, excluding the field-theoretic ontology required by modern physics and living processes.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
Many paradoxes involve the breaking down of a flow into parts or slices. Of these, perhaps the most celebrated cases are the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea… An infinite number of steps cannot be accomplished in a finite time, so no motion is possible
McGilchrist presents serial, partitive analysis — the cognitive style licensed by Cartesian division — as generating Zenonian paradoxes that render continuity and motion unintelligible, implicitly indicting the Cartesian method of decomposition.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
we view the week a slice at a time; and we view it retrospectively, not prospectively as it is lived… serial analysis and retrospection; their significance will be revealed as the argument unfolds.
McGilchrist identifies the retrospective, slice-by-slice mode of analysis as a structurally Cartesian habit of mind that misrepresents lived temporal flow.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
things primarily apt to partition, tending by sheer nature towards separate existence… these are magnitudes of the realm of sense… But to that order is opposed Essence [Real-Being]; this is in no degree susceptible of partition; it is unparted and impartible
Plotinus anticipates the Cartesian problematic by contrasting the partible, extended realm of sense-magnitudes with the impartible, unextended order of Real Being — a distinction that prefigures later debates about what the partition actually severs.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
the conscious and the unconscious seldom agree as to their contents and their tendencies… the unconscious behaves in a compensatory or complementary manner towards the conscious.
Jung’s account of conscious-unconscious complementarity, as presented by Chodorow, implicitly challenges the Cartesian partition by positing a psychic continuum in which ‘mind’ is neither unitary nor purely transparent to itself.
, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997supporting
Chomsky’s major references, in the Cartesian Linguistics, are to the Logic and General and Reasoned Grammar of Port-Royal… Rousseau cites Duclos’s commentary on the General and Reasoned Grammar.
Derrida traces the Cartesian inheritance into linguistic theory via Port-Royal grammar, noting how a specifically Cartesian framework conditions subsequent philosophical and linguistic thought.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside
It is questionable whether only spatially extended objects can have parts… As for Platonic souls, the Timaeus presents souls as spatially extended and in fact as engaging in motion
Lorenz’s discussion of whether parthood requires spatial extension opens a pre-Cartesian analogue to the partition debate, noting that soul-partition in Plato does not necessarily invoke a Cartesian framework of extended substance.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006aside