Quotes About Descartes

Why, when the rabbis wished to understand God's will or Augustine the construction of man's soul, did they not reason as Descartes did, taking nothing as given? Must true inquiry proceed from texts and traditions already established, or could the mind on its own perceive all it needed to fathom the world? And which path of inquiry led more straightly to truth? The

Admittedly, my focus is on the most redeeming qualities of these creatures, but the exercise here is not to glorify or ennoble them; rather, it is, as Descartes implied, to contrast cultural values in the hopes that we might see our own in a new light.

Descartes was chief among the founders who designed the contours of modern thought and among the most original philosophers and mathematicians of any age.

In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.

So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes' famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.

Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, 'Do you want a drink, sir?' And Descartes says, 'I think not.' And then he disappears.

Descartes may have been wrong about dualism, but he appears to have been correct in believing that our thoughts can exert a physical influence on, or at least cause a physical reaction in, our brains. We become, neurologically, what we think.

Don't think too much. Descartes may come to existence when he thinks, but you perish and vanish when you think.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the value of truth and knowledge… Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.

It indicates where the problem lies for Descartes. It lies in other people.

Freud introduced the unconscious, which in effect dethroned man as the uncontested master of his own rational faculties. Instead , our lives and our decisions, our loves and our hates, are more often the result of forces working elsewhere than in our conscious mind, and we are the dupes of those forces, rather than their master. (...) Indeed, thinking, as Descartes conceived it, accounts for considerably less than half the story of our being in the world.