Descardes, Rene

Göndermeler

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

I spent nine years in roaming about the world, aiming to be a spectator rather than an actor in all the comedies of life.

Descartes was a man of extraordinary and versatile genius. His ideas on physiology, physics, and astronomy were superseded within a century: they enjoyed a much shorter currency than the Aristotelian system they were designed to replace. But his work in algebra and geometry entered into the abiding patrimony ofmathematics; and his philosophical ideas remain—for better or worse—enormously inXuential to the present day. No one can question his claim to rank among the greatest philosophers of all time.

Descartes is still rightly called the father of modern philosophy, not in the sense that our present-day belief systems lamely follow the Cartesian model, but in the richer and more interesting sense that, without Descartes' philosophy, the very shape of the problems with which we still wrestle, about knowledge and science, subjectivity and reality, matter and consciousness, would have been profoundly different.

I came to see that the exclusive concern of mathematics is with questions of order or method, and that it is irrelevant whether the measure in question involves numbers, shapes, stars, sounds, or any other object whatsoever. This made me realize that there must be a general science which explains all the points that can be raised concerning order and measure irrespective of subject matter. (AT X 377: CSM 119) The conception leads straight on to the famous Cartesian idea of science as the unfolding of abstract mathematical relations, an idea that remains to this day central to what we think of as the scientific enterprise.

The key to true knowledge was to be found not from the deliverances of the senses or the received wisdom of the past, but by turning inward to the resources of the human mind itself: I shall bring to light the true riches of our souls, opening up to each of us the means whereby we can find, within ourselves, without any help from anyone else, all the knowledge we may need for the conduct of life, and the means of using it in order to acquire all the most abstruse items of knowledge that human reason is capable of possessing. (AT X 496: CSM II 400

More important still, the knowledge of God generates a reliable method for the pursuit of truth: although human beings are often prone to error (particularly when they rely on the obscure and confused deliverances of the senses), provided they confine their judgments to the "clear and distinct ideas" God has implanted in each soul, and remember to withhold assent on matters where they do not have clear and distinct cognition, they can construct guaranteed chains of reasoning about the nature of minds and the material world. Genuine science is possible.

One moral here is the need to uncover the intellectual background in which Descartes operated, if we are to gain a proper understanding of his actual scientific practice and the (often misleading) way he described that practice.

In a letter of June 1643 (AT 3, 692–3; CSMK, 227) Descartes tells Princess Elisabeth that, as a rule, he spends only a few hours a year thinking about metaphysics, while he devotes some hours each day to thoughts on mathematics and on the shapes and motions of bodies. We should certainly take the letter seriously: the greater part of Descartes’ opus is indeed scientifically oriented. Think only of the Essays, of the bulk of the Principles, of the various unfinished works, for example on embryology. It happens that, in its detail, Cartesian science is now merely of historic interest – say, the pronouncement in article 65 of Part 4 of the Principles (AT 8a, 245) that water flows on earth as blood does in our body, in a circle from mountains down to the sea in what we call “rivers,” and then back to the mountains again, in subterranean ducts.

He is best characterized as a philosopher of the Scientific Revolution.

His less appealing personal characteristics did not prevent him from becoming the most original French thinker of the seventeenth century, and one of the most famous contributors to the history of Western philosophy.

Clarke (2006) sayfa 5'te "He lived alone, read few books," diye yazdıktan sonra, sayfa 6'da Descartes'ten "I have been nourished by books since I was a child. (Discourse on Method, vi. 4)" alıntısını yapıyor.

The objective of any rhetorical presentation was to convince one’s hearers. Hence the need, according to Quintilian, for clarity and distinctness – two concepts that were to figure subsequently as key features of the Cartesian account of evidence.

Beeckman recorded in his journal that he met Descartes on 10 November, and that the Frenchman from Poitou discussed a mathematical problem with him. The terms in which Descartes expressed the problem suggest that he was still held captive by the language and style of argument of his scholastic training, and by the definitions of Euclid. He tried to prove that there is no such thing as an angle between two intersecting lines. He argued as follows. An angle is where two lines, AB and CB, meet at a point. However, if one were to divide further the angle ABC by the line DE, the point of intersection would also be subdivided into two parts. That is impossible, since, by definition, a point has no size and cannot be divided. Therefore, there is no point at which the original two lines intersect, and hence there is no genuine angle at their intersection.

Although Hegel credits Descartes with the basic principles of modern thought – concerning which he considers him to be a hero – he repeatedly calls him ‘naive’. He writes: ‘Unter seinen philosophischen Schriften haben besonders diejenigen, welche die Grundlage enthalten, in ihrer Darstellung etwas sehr Populares und Naives …’.

Nebenbei bemerkt, Descartes mit seiner Definition der Tiere als bloßer Maschinen sieht mit den Augen der Manufakturperiode im Unterschied zum Mittelalter, dem das Tier als Gehilfe des Menschen galt, wie später wieder dem Herrn v. Haller in seiner "Restauration der Staatswissenschaften". Daß Descartes ebenso wie Baco eine veränderte Gestalt der Produktion und praktische Beherrschung der Natur durch den Menschen als Resultat der veränderten Denkmethode betrachtete, zeigt sein "Discours de la Méthode", wo es u.a. heißt: "Es ist möglich" (durch die von ihm in die Philosophie eingeführte Methode), "zu Kenntnissen zu gelangen, die für das Leben sehr nützlich sind, und an Stelle jener spekulativen Philosophie, die man in den Schulen lehrt, eine praktische Philosophie zu finden, durch die wir die Kräfte und die Wirksamkeit des Feuers, des Wassers, der Luft, der Gestirne und aller anderen uns umgebenden Körper - indem wir sie ebenso genau kennen wie die verschiedenen Gewerbe unserer Handwerker - auch ebenso zu all den Gebrauchszwecken verwenden könnten, für die sie geeignet sind, und uns so zu Meistern und Besitzern der Natur machen können", und so "zur Vervollkommnung des menschlichen Lebens beitragen." In der Vorrede zu Sir Dudley Norths, "Discourses upon Trade" (1691) heißt es, die Methode des Descartes, auf die politischen Ökonomie angewandt, habe sie von alten Märchen und abergläubischen Vorstellungen über Geld, Handel usw. zu befreien angefangen. Im Durchschnitt schließen sich jedoch die englischen Ökonomen der frühern Zeit an Baco und Hobbes als ihre Philosophen an, während Locke später "der Philosoph" kat exochn <schlechthin> der politischen Ökonomie für England, Frankreich und Italien ward.