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| This sense of superiority to contemporary mathematicians coexisted with a belief that his ideas could be made plain to ordinary men of good sense. This seemingly rather odd combination of attitudes is more than an accident of Descartes’s temperament.[1]
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| For Descartes, it is the case that the truth about the natural world is hidden, but it is not occult, nor are occult powers needed to uncover it. It is hidden in the form of a mathematical structure which underlies sensible appearances. It is uncovered by systematic scientific enquiry and the use of the rational intellect.[2]
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| He carried such ideas into practice, teaching his servant mathematics, and strongly approving of the scheme of a M. d’Alibert to found a college to teach arts and sciences to artisans and others who wanted to learn.[3]
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| It is very important that the Method of Doubt is not the whole of Descartes’s Method. It is not even the whole of his philosophical method, since, as we shall see, doubt introduces and forms the enquiry, but eventually makes way for a systematic vindication of knowledge, and an orderly reconstruction of it.[4]
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| It is sometimes suggested that he has no reason; that the pursuit of certainty, in the form of indubitability, is a prejudice on his part, a gratuitous philosophical ambition, conditioned perhaps by his being over-impressed by mathematics. The last point, at least, as an answer to the present question is plainly silly, since if we ask what it was about mathematics as a form of knowledge that appealed to Descartes, the reply is its possibility of attaining certainty.[5]
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| Whatever the solution to the vexed problem of the foundations of Descartes's system, and their epistemic status, Descartes himself clearly believed that if he could get as far as establishing the existence of God, 'in whom all the wisdom ofthe sciences lies hid', he could proceed to establish a systematic physical science, covering 'the whole of that corporeal nature which is the subject matter of pure mathematics' (Fifth Meditation).[6]
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| Descartes wrote in correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia that whereas the distinction between mind and body could be grasped by our reason, the'substantial union' between them just had to be experienced. Yet this seems tantamount to admitting that what we experience undermines the distinction which reason (allegedly) perceives.[7]
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| The famous words cogito ergo sum (which render themselves so elegantly in English as “I think, therefore I am”) never appear in the original version of the Meditations, only in a later and indeed rather casual translation. The actual words used are better translated as: “let the Demon deceive me as much as he may, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think I am something. So, after considering everything very thoroughly, I must conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time that I say it, or conceive it in my mind.”[8]
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| While it is of course very likely that Descartes studied the standard material, from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Francisco Sua´rez, he was also educated in an atmosphere permeated by the use of Pyrrhonian (sceptical) arguments in the intellectual war between Catholics and Protestants. This war involved debates over the role of the church, how to decide which church was the ‘‘true’’ one, the interpretation of scripture, and even how to determine which book was the Bible. Among Descartes’s teachers was Franc¸ois Veron, one of the leading combatants and highly skilled in the use of the weapons provided by the Pyrrhonists. Exposure to scepticism seems to have made Descartes a fierce antisceptic.[9]
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| As a young mathematician, Descartes was instrumental in the development of analytic geometry. His success in developing an extremely abstract algebraic representation of geometry that minimized the role of empirical data seems to have deeply affected his thinking about science.[10]
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| Descartes, perhaps following Plato, does insist that knowledge must meet two conditions: first, it must be of a real and independent object. We may feel headaches, for example, but as they are, in his sense, dependent entities, they are not proper objects of knowledge. That is one reason mathematical entities are selected by him (and many others from Plato onward) as the only true objects of knowledge. They are objects that are both eternal and independent of us. Second, knowledge claims are infallible; if something is known, it is known to be true.[11]
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| Descartes’s point can be put somewhat paradoxically this way: In knowing the axioms of geometry, we know the essence of all possible material worlds.[12]
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Notlar
- ↑ ;William Bernard (1978), Descartes - The Project of Pure Enquiry , p. 10
- ↑ ;William Bernard (1978), Descartes - The Project of Pure Enquiry , p. 13
- ↑ ;William Bernard (1978), Descartes - The Project of Pure Enquiry , p. 13
- ↑ ;William Bernard (1978), Descartes - The Project of Pure Enquiry , p. 20
- ↑ ;William Bernard (1978), Descartes - The Project of Pure Enquiry , p. 22
- ↑ ;John Cottingham (1999), "René Descartes (1596-1650)", The Philosophers: Introducing Greath Western Thinkers içinde, Ted Honderich (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, p. 63
- ↑ ;John Cottingham (1999), "René Descartes (1596-1650)", The Philosophers: Introducing Greath Western Thinkers içinde, Ted Honderich (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, p. 65
- ↑ ;Martin Cohen (2008), Philosophical Tales: Being an alternative history revealing the characters, the plots, and the hidden scenes that make up the True Story of Philosophy, Malden, MA: BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, p. 79
- ↑ ;Richard H. Popkin (1999), The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 337
- ↑ ;Richard H. Popkin (1999), The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 337
- ↑ ;Richard H. Popkin (1999), The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 340
- ↑ ;Richard H. Popkin (1999), The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 340