Quotes About Descartes

The main interest of Fermat, who shares the credit for inventing calculus with Newton and analytic geometry with Descartes, was number theory —"the higher arithmetic.

The I think, I am , is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or of the totality.

For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.

Nietzsche veio pedir ao cavalo perdão por Descartes

When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass.

Descartes y Bacon son solo dos de los filósofos que a lo largo de los siglos intentaron formular reglas para la investigación científica, algo que nunca funciona. Aprendemos a practicar la ciencia no imponiendo reglas acerca de cómo practicarla, sino a partir de la experiencia de trabajar en ella, impulsados por la satisfacción que obtenemos cuando nuestros métodos consiguen explicar algo.

From Descartes's skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth.

logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married.

As one of Descartes's disciples, Nicolas de Malebranche, wrote: [I]n animals, there is neither intelligence nor souls as ordinarily meant. They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing: and if they act in a manner that demonstrates intelligence,

it is based on the foundation, as in Descartes, of the "I am," the foundation of subjectivity and consciousness

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

In the seventeenth century, René Descartes opted for reason over a divine source of knowledge. This came to be known as putting Descartes before the source.

What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

My laps-meter, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.

It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.

Whatever our definition of truth may be, we can never renounce Descartes' clare et distincte (clarity and distinctness).

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, I fuck therefore I am.

In formulating any philosophy the first consideration must always be: What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything? Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, 'My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.

He (Rene Descartes) posited the existence of two parallel yet separate domains of reality: res cogitans, the thinking substance of the subjective mind whose essence is thought, and res extensa, or the extended substance of the material world. Mental stuff and material (including brain) stuff are absolutely distinct, he argued.

In Hindu philosophy the three tenses—past, present, future—were said to exist simultaneously in God. God was timeless, but time was personified as the god of death. Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance.

Swig read French philosophy, people such as Descartes, and would say that parrots only appear to be talking because they are possessed by devils, and as a result, on July 3, 1956, exactly one month after the arrival of the San Franciscan, Napoleon died of a heart attack, thus, I think, maintaining his southern Californian refusal to let usurpers from the north ruin the conversation.

Descartes said that animals were automata. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings. Neither I nor Matthew had time for souls. That we were intricate chemical machines never diminished our sense of wonder, our reverence for Vermeer and for Monet, our floating bodies in the salty water, our evanescent joy before the dying of the light.

Sound occurs in the ears. Sound does not occur in the atmosphere. It occurs essentially within the human being, and that's Descartes's great contribution to psychology and philosophy. Which is where that thing comes from where they say if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there, does it make a noise?

Reasoning required language, Descartes argued, and animal calls were only automatic sounds made in response to external stimuli. One of his followers, the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, summarized the Descartian view: "[Animals] eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.