René Descartes

How would you even begin a review of arguably the most important work, and thinker, responsible for the turn in Modern European Philosophy? Perhaps by acknowledging that Descartes is important, not for what he “thought” was “indubitable,” but for the dialogue he started about what he necessarily conceived, as such, being demonstrably wrong. I think that is a fair statement, and I have no intention of expounding upon that for this review. My intent is not to abuse or discredit him, but instead…

Dualism is a view where the mind and body are two fundamentally different things. It’s the thought that the body is a pure physical state, and the mind is a pure mental/non-physical state. The body has an identified location, is led by the laws of nature, and it is open to the world to see. Whereas the mind has no location, isn’t led by the laws of nature, and is not public. Materialism is the view that individuals are nothing more than physical elements put together. For we all are made up of…

Descartes and Gilbert Ryle are the two philosophers that discuss the subject matter of dualism, for that they will be the objective of this paper. In this paper, I will be discussing the metaphysical claims and ideals that Descartes presents to us in his meditations, to be more specific, I will be covering his second and sixth meditation. I will also be discussing about Ryle, who tackles the idea of dualism in his paper Descartes’ Myth, in which he goes in thorough depth of Descartes metaphysics…

In Descartes meditations he argues the mind is a single unified phenomenon. The context of this argument is in favor of Dualism, he argues in favor of it using Liebniz’s “Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals”, the principle asserts that for two things to be identical then they must share all of the same properties. Descartes argues that since his body has parts it can be divided, but the mind has no parts and cannot be divided. “For in truth, when I consider the mind, that is, when I…

Descartes and Galileo were two the leading figures in the transition from natural philosophy to modern science and philosophy. They were some of the first modern thinkers who looked at the world and said that the laws of nature are indeed mathematical. One of Galileo’s goals was to take the studies of science and separate them from the ideologies of philosophy. Studying philosophy and mathematics Galileo was able to gain a clear understand of what separates the mathematics from the ideas of…

Descartes’ Philosophy Effects Elisabeth Soul What can we understand from Descartes philosophy in his meditation? That is what Elisabeth was trying to do by sending letters to Descartes and because there was no other ways to have a conversation between each other’s so Philosophers usually send letters to each other’s to make a conversion. Elisabeth was the princess of bohemia she was born on 1618 in Heidelberg, Germany. Her highness was a Philosopher and she was famous of her sharp mind and her…

The medieval times was on its way to self-destruction when the rise of the Protestant rebellion and development of science came about. Along with Martin Luther and other revolutionaries, Rene Descartes challenge the church with his ideologies. Descartes legacy is the essential bias that allows the moral norms of the popular culture to continue. His pursuit to find certainty became the route of the modern rationalization of the people. At one point, society thought the earth was the center of…

mind after a process of deliberate thinking. Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a French philosopher argues the theory of judgment based on…

philosophical works of both René Descartes and David Hume. In Descartes’s Discourse on Method he bases all of his philosophical reasoning on the principle of doubting all prior accepted knowledge and questioning everything. In Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume raises his doubts about Descartes’s ideas about skepticism, stating his belief that moderate skepticism is more productive than radical doubt. Based on their opinions in their most prolific works, Descartes is shown to…

The Meditations, by Rene Descartes have been continuously debated about throughout history, with much of their content still considered controversial today. In the first Meditation, Descartes questions whether we can indeed be certain of seemingly truthful things. In the passage of interest, Descartes explains his reasoning for this uncertainty by describing one’s perception of objects possibly being wrong, and of one being deceived about accepted truthful thoughts. Descartes uses these base…