Quotes About Descartes

Descartes does not champion induction, and, although he advances the corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy to the extent that he reduces physical objects to matter in motion, he makes it clear that he does not accept the reality of atoms as ultimate indivisible constituents of

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to state that all of modern philosophy constitutes reactions to and criticisms of Descartes' Meditations.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

That concept was dealt a crippling blow by the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who held that the mind and body were totally separate entities and should be studied separately.

Matters of the mind were the concern of religion and philosophy, according to Descartes. The body, he said, should be studied by objective, verifiable methods. To a large extent, Descartes's teaching remains the model for contemporary medical research and practice.

His naivety was of the sort that Descartes no doubt had in mind when he concluded that the study of history, like travel, while harmless enough as a form of entertainment – one composed of 'memorable events' which might conceivably 'elevate the mind' or 'help to form the judgement' – was hardly an occupation for anyone seriously concerned with increasing knowledge.

René Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women.

Descartes's worldview makes us spiders at the center of an enormous web not of our making. Or in his other famous formulation, we are the ghosts in the machine: souls in a world machine that operates inexorably and impersonally according to the laws of geometry and mechanics, while we operate the levers and spin the dials.

By separating body from mind and spirit, Descartes was denying the dependence of the material world on God's will and His providence. "A God without dominion, providence, and final causes," Newton later wrote, "is nothing else but Fate.

it seems as though Descartes (once more influenced by ideas from previous philosophical traditions) may have slipped into thinking that an idea of X actually shares X. So an idea of infinity, for instance, would be an infinite idea.

Descartes, for instance, in order to preserve the idea of free will, asserted that the human mind was something different from the physical world and did not follow its laws. In his view a person consists of two ingredients, a body and a soul. Bodies are nothing but ordinary machines, but the soul is not subject to scientific law.

Dante dice que la alegría es luz intelectual llena de amor, amor de verdad lleno de júbilo, júbilo que trasciende toda dulzura. Descartes,

Both Bacon and Descartes, while discarding the teleology of the ancients, maintained faith in the Bible and in God. But they also laid the groundwork for the rise of Deism—and in time, for the fall of religion itself. By cutting final causes from science, by separating God from the natural world, the modern scientific project would eventually remove religion and purpose from the domain of reason—a project that both Bacon and Descartes would have abhorred.

We did a little yoga together. Sometimes he let me give him a massage. But when I mentioned meditation to him, he said that the only meditations he knew were those of Descartes and Husserl.

The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: 'I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive.

God is not simply other than our knowledge of Him. It is through God and God alone that we know God. Descartes elaborates this in this way: We know God because he left a mark of Himself in us; this mark is nothing other than our self-consciousness. Knowing God through this mark of His, we know God in every act of reason.

For someone who claimed to have found the true method for seeking reliable knowledge, it is remarkable how wrong Descartes was about so many aspects of nature.

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. I think, therefore I am says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

There is in Descartes an unresolved dualism between what he learnt from contemporary science and the scholasticism that he had been taught at La Flèche. This led him into inconsistencies, but it also made him more rich in fruitful ideas than any completely logical philosopher could have been. Consistency might have made him merely the founder of a new scholasticism, whereas inconsistency made him the source of two important but divergent schools of philosophy.

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred. This was only the first stage in a development, through Berkeley and Kant, to Fichte, for whom everything is only an emanation of the ego. This was insanity, and, from this extreme, philosophy has been attempting, ever since, to escape into the world of every-day common sense.

Descartes (1596-1650), the founder of modern philosophy, invented a method which may still be used with profit--the method of systematic doubt.

Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

The philosophical connection between the Islamic world and the West is much closer than I thought. Doubt did not begin with Descartes. We have this construction today that the West and Islam are entirely separate worlds. This is wrong.