The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Since the appearance of the so-called ¡§Analytic Turn¡¨ in the Contemporary Western philosophical arena, two diametrically opposite attitudes towards the role, the status and the significance of history of philosophy in the practice of philosophy in general can be observed. On one extreme, a certain attitude considers the study of history of philosophy entirely irrelevant to the study of contemporary philosophical problems. In particular, for those who take up the positivist standpoint, the essential of history of philosophy is nothing other than metaphysics. And as metaphysics itself is an outdated form of pre-scientific inquiry from which human being today can learn almost nothing, the history of philosophy is presented more or less as a classified affair. Under this clichˆm view, a figure in the history of philosophy as important as Descartes can be summarized simply by the formulae of ¡§metaphysics of mind-body dualism¡¨ and of ¡§subject-object split¡¨. On the other extreme, there is an attitude which reads the history of philosophy entirely from the philosophical system of his/her own, resulting in a tendentious and thus mostly subjective understanding of the history of philosophy. Between these two extremes, is a third way possible? Merleau-Ponty once said: ¡§Between an ¡¥objective¡¦ history of philosophy (which would rob the great philosophers of what they have given others to think about) and a meditation disguised as a dialogue (in which we would ask the questions and give the answers) there must be a middle-ground on which the philosopher we are speaking about and the philosopher who is speaking are present together, although it is not possible even in principle to decide at any given moment just what belongs to each.¡¨ Under the guidance of the author of The Structure of Behaviour and Phenomenology of Perception, we hope to show that Descartes can also be read as the discoverer of the mindbody duality as well as the living body, elements essential to a phenomenology of the body-subject. Thus the author of the Metaphysical Meditations can be understood, in a certain sense, as a precursor of phenomenological descriptions oriented towards a philosophical anthropology.