If we follow a traditional reading of Descartes and throw in some of our favorite German philosophers (Kant, Husserl and Heidegger, for instance) we can isolate a doctrinal current that says that the pure intellect has no immediate access to the extra-mental world. This reduction of experience to reason forces the question of the external world’s existence, leading to Heidegger’s assertion that...

Cartesian granule features are derived features that are formed over the cross product of words that linguistically partition the universes of the constituent input features. Both classification and prediction problems can be modelled quite naturally in terms of Cartesian granule features incorporated into rule-based models. The induction of Cartesian granule feature models involves discovering...

It is proved that equations between arrows assumed for cartesian categories are maximal in the sense that extending them with any new equation in the language of free cartesian categories collapses a cartesian category into a preorder. An analogous result holds for categories with binary products, which may lack a terminal object. The proof is based on a coherence result for cartesian categorie...

the problem of mental causation was one of the most important problems in philosophy of mind at least from the time of descartes. since cartesian philosophers found the causal interaction of the soul and the body problematic, they explained away the direct relation between the soul and the body in different ways. however, the problem was not resolved in contemporary philosophy of mind when the ...