... clearly perceived to belong, to the very notion of God. Descartes is well aware that this line of reasoning will not hold in regard to other objects of thought, but he maintains the idea of God to be unique in the respect that it involves existence. This specific claim in the crux of the argument. A second form of proof was offered by Descartes. In this case the argument asserts that the idea of God... of these attempted proofs depends a good deal on what you mean by God. And this receives a rather striking confirmation in the case of the thinker who comes after Descartes in the philosophical succession — Spinoza. Spinoza, like Descartes, infers from the idea of God, as the source and sum of all perfection, his existence. But for Spinoza, God, or Substance, is the infinite and all-inclusive Whole... which existed in re as well as in intellectu; therefore God must be Page 29 thought as necessarily existing. This argument has been set forth in a simpler and less artificial form by Descartes. He omits the step which declares that what exists in fact as well as in idea is greater than what exists merely in idea, and affirms that the very notion of God, the most perfect Being, carries existence ...
... changed his outlook from that of a believer in ‘fixism’, a variant of creationism, to that of a materialistic evolutionist. The tradition initiated by Descartes was very strong, especially in France ( Descartes, c’est la France! ). According to René Descartes (1596-1650) the human being consisted of a body and a rational soul. His body, and that of all animals, was a mechanism, a machine; his soul was an... systematized – and we have not even mentioned meteorology – may perplex the reader. This, however, was an axis time for what are now called the biological sciences. There had been Aristotle, Galen, Descartes and La Mettrie, Paracelsus, Vesalius in Padua and the naturalists connected in one way or another with the University of Leiden, that practically forgotten but important former centre of medical research; ...
... discovering the truth by means of pure reason. This was Rene Descartes. Rene Descartes was born in 1596 in La Haye, a small town in the region of Touraine in France. His father was a councillor of the Parliament of Brittany and belonged to the gentry. He left his son enough means to live as a gentleman of leisure — a way of life which Descartes cherished. His mother died of ill-health a year after... and that is where he died in 1650. Descartes' writings seem to have been done during short periods of great concentration. His most important works are Discourse on Method and Meditations. Page 224 That truth must be pursued as the very aim of intellectual life is the dominant message of Descartes. And what is particularly significant in Descartes is the method of doubt which he came... s. 1644 The principles of philosophy. 1649 Treatise on passions. Descartes goes to sweden, invited by Queen Christina. 1651 — Death of Descartes in Sweden. Suggestions for further reading Descartes, R. Meditations and Discourse on Method. Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy. New York: Washington ...
... thereafter the Ontological Argument was taken up by successive rationalist philosophers who attempted to make modifications in an attempt to make the argument more conclusive. 2. Descartes (1596-1650 C.E.) Descartes is usually considered the founder of modern philosophy and might be called one of the most prominent rationalist philosophers. He described God as a Perfect being. And, if we are to... that the reality of God is involved in the idea of God. 3. Spinoza (1632-77 C.E.) The great rationalist movement that started off with Descartes was followed by two other famous philosophers who succeeded him: Spinoza and Leibniz. Descartes had already established that apart from the idea of God, and existence of God there is another realm where doubt is not possible and that is the field... Parmenides appears to be present in various formulations of the Ontological Argument. Anselm's argument was criticised by some of his contemporaries, and most of the great modern philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant have also put forward theistic arguments. Spinoza formulated the Ontological Argument within the system of his own metaphysics. After Kant had apparently refuted the ontological ...
... suddenly turn into a living organism. “The entire body of modern science rests on Descartes’ metaphor of the world as a machine, which he introduced in Part V of the Discourse on Method as a way of understanding organisms, but then generalized as a way of thinking about the entire universe,” writes Lewontin. 8 In Descartes’ days automata that could perform amazing feats like gesturing, rolling their... to divide or reduce them into parts, consisting of smaller parts, consisting of still smaller parts: it is reductionist. This reductionism has been absolute in physical science since Galileo and Descartes, and was later on adopted by the biological sciences. A thing consists of parts; if we know all the parts and the parts of the parts, we know the whole. The ‘mystic’ view had always said the contrary... their eyes or whistling, were all the rage. “Wandering through the Royal Gardens, Descartes was impressed by some water-driven robots and theorized that human and animal action was likewise a machine-like ‘reflex’.” 9 “While we cannot dispense with metaphors in thinking about nature,” continues Lewontin, “there is a great risk of confusing the metaphor with the thing of real interest. We cease to ...
... Gordian knot by proclaiming that, as everything is matter, the brain and all its functions, including the mind, are matter too. Nobody has yet explained, though, how matter can be conscious. René Descartes called the mind “an epiphenomenon” of the brain, which was activated by the mind through the pineal gland. He was certainly a first-rate figure in the history of philosophy and mathematics, and as... the real soul, the ‘psyche’ has been confused with the mind. The reason of this confusion seems to have been that the Greeks, despite their Mysteries, lacked the spiritual experience of the East. Descartes’ basic and very influential worldview was essentially that of his Catholic educators, the Jesuits. Their official teaching was a dualism of body and soul, the burdensome body being the container of ...
... for one Christian cause or another; and tens of thousands perform the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca year after year. In France one talks about “the Buddhist wave” 5 , for in the country of Descartes ( Descartes , c’est la France!) there are now 600,000 Buddhists, half of them Asiatics, the other half native Frenchmen. In The Netherlands, a much smaller country than France, there are 250,000 Buddhists ...
... regard. And this inadequacy in western philosophy is traceable to several instances of misplaced emphasis on the subjective element - "prolongation of the transition which in the West begins with Descartes, becomes crucial in Locke, rises to climax in Kant and Fichte, and is continued in various ways by subsequent thinkers." 9 This subjective emphasis is obvious in pragmatism and in its recent... construct a 'machine-animal' which would fly like the insect. And did not Hobbes consider the State as a machina machinarum, and Leibnitz his 'God' the 'Engineer of the World'? Then came Descartes with his revolutionary conception that explanation means neither contemplation, nor the power of machine-construction, but setting up mathematical formulae. To him bricoler was worth nothing, deduction ...
... questions. In the Medieval history of Europe, we find St. Thomas Aquinas proving existence of God by means of what is called the Ontological Argument. Three greatest philosophers of modern Europe, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz formulated their own Ontological Arguments in the context of their own systems of philosophy. Along with the Ontological Argument, the Cosmological Argument and Teleological Argument... monograph has, however, also added a few pages which summarise the account of the Indian intellectual proofs of the existence of God. This monograph has devoted some space to the original statements of Descartes in regard to the Ontological Argument. The author of this monograph has also presented a critical essay on the Ontological Argument in the form in which it can be intellectually discussed in the ...
... the Cheshire Cat. Darwin’s Conversion Darwin’s scientific thinking followed a development parallel with that of his changing religious beliefs. Since Descartes the dominant scientific view of the world had become mechanistic. Descartes had still accepted a rational soul, but held that the body and all animal life forms were machines. Newton had been an alchemist and a Bible exegete, but his... brother, and almost all his best friends were disbelievers, freethinkers who did not hide their convictions. Moreover, the sciences had become materialistic and mechanistic since Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Laplace. God in his heaven had still been reverenced for some time, though mainly to avoid the persecution and heavy punishment Giordano Bruno, Galileo and many others had suffered ...
... Relativity belongs to a new movement of knowledge. 11 December 1935 René Descartes I have three letters of yours before me and all three require some elucidation. I think and think but can't get anywhere. Perhaps you will say, "Make the mind silent"! But Descartes says, "Je pense, donc je suis." Descartes was talking nonsense. There are plenty of things that don't think but still are—from ...
... sure of it? Aren't you? One sees an expression of pain in their eyes. It is said you see in others what you have in yourself! Descartes relates that a lady was beating her dog and saying, "It does not suffer, it has no soul, this is a reflex." Descartes maintains that men alone can feel! I have always been told that he was an intelligent man! If unhappiness entered the world with... thought, happiness also entered, didn't it? Ah! Here is logic! When there is unhappiness there is happiness... without unhappiness, no happiness. How difficult philosophy is!... Has your Mr. Descartes told us from where the soul of man has come? He says it is a creation of God. The rest of the world is not a creation of God? Yes, that also. Then, suddenly, he bethought himself that ...
... basic qualities as they present themselves in our experience. This difference has been expressed with particularly great clarity by Descartes, who described matter as 'extended substance' and consciousness as 'thinking substance'. Evidently, by 'extended substance' Descartes meant something made up of distinct forms existing in space, in an order of extension and separation Page 7 basically... some kind of space), but rather in a different order, in which extension and separations have no fundamental significance. The implicate order has just this latter quality, so in a certain sense Descartes was perhaps anticipating that consciousness has to be understood in terms of an order that is closer to the implicate than it is to the explicate." According to Bohm, matter as a whole can be ...
... by itself excludes all error, and that also of necessity, since God, the Supreme Truth, must be incapable of teaching error.” (Leo XIII, 1893 6 ) Galileo barely escaped burning, Bruno did not. Descartes hesitated to publish, Newton hid his Arianism, Darwin stalled writing what would become the Origin for twenty years, the theologians Küng and Schillebeeckx were forbidden to teach, liberation theology... agree with the teachings of Rome. Johann Kepler, the great astronomer and mathematician so often ignored, was a mystic pure and simple, and spoke out as such, for instance in his De Harmonia Mundi . Descartes had been educated by the Jesuits, spent much of his life in hiding for fear of suffering the same treatment by the Inquisition as Galileo, and did his best to find room for God in his worldview. Newton ...
... human being. The human being is more complex than thought by Descartes and his philosophical progeny: rationalism, materialism, positivism, scientism, reductionism. In the human being there is of course the material part, but there is also the vital part with the life forces, the mental part (considered no more than an “epiphenomenon” by Descartes) and a soul. Theosophy borrowed from the Eastern wisdom ...
... a freedom undreamt of when religion reigned supreme among men and society. In fact, the spirit of freedom had begun in the early seventeenth century to assert itself with Descartes and his contemporaries. In Descartes we find a method of philosophical inquiry that dared to doubt every presupposition. But still there was a kind of link, if not with religion itself, with a certain residual power ...
... have three letters of yours before me, and all three require some elucidation. I think and think, but can't get anywhere. Perhaps you will say, "Make the mind silent"! But Descartes says, "Je pense, donc je suis." 114 Descartes was talking nonsense. There are plenty of things that don't think but still are—from the stone to the Yogi in samadhi. If he had simply meant that the fact of his thinking ...
... are indeed the qualities that open the door to a higher life." The Mother It is a curious but significant fact that some of the greatest philosophical thinkers, notably Pythagoras, Descartes, Pascal and Leibnitz, were great mathematicians as well. Some others like Thales, Democritus, Plato, Saint Augustine, Condorcet, Kant, Auguste Comte and Husserl were not professional mathematicians... extreme apparent divergence conceals within it a basic oneness revealed by transformation geometry: A strophoid and a rectangular hyperbola (inversion); the MacLaurin Trisectrix and a folium of Descartes (orthogonal projection); the conchoid of Cappa and a Maschéroni curve; etc. In conclusion, let us add that this incessant search for unity in diversity should normally create in a student of ...
... Arguments for the Existence of God Rene Descartes Proofs of the Existence of God and of the Human Soul Ido not know whether I ought to touch upon my first meditations here, for they are so metaphysical and out of the ordinary that they might not be interesting to most people. Nevertheless, in order to show whether my fundamental notions... thoughts cannot be true, as we are not wholly perfect; whatever of truth is to be found in our ideas will inevitably occur in those which we have when awake rather than in our dreams. Text from Descartes' Discourse on Method, translated by J. Lafleur (New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, second edition, 1956), pp. 20-26. Page 57 ...
... the most part an occult occurrence, the foundations of the scientific-materialistic world too are steeped in occultism. The magic component of the Renaissance has been mentioned. The inspiration of Descartes’ philosophical re-evaluation of the bases of Western knowledge was revealed to him in three dreams. August Comte, the theorist of positivism, launched a new religion of humanity. Nietzsche’s thinking ...
... great confusion, with regrettable consequences, in every discussion about ‘body’ and ‘spirit’ has been caused by a philosopher who is generally thought of as the very epitome of clear thinking, René Descartes. To him man is a body, which is a machine composed of measurable substances, and ‘spirit’; what man thinks with, as well as the higher domains determining his thinking and what is supposedly spiritual ...
... the activist thinkers of centuries not that long past. It was against this 17th century background that the scientific revolution took place. The principles then formulated by Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and a host of less well-known “natural philosophers,” are still the pillars supporting positivist or materialistic science today. All can be found, worded in various ways, in the works of ...
... here that the reality of what science tries to grasp, describe and understand is much more complex than science even accepts. The simple but crucial reason is that physical science has in Galileo, Descartes and Newton reduced reality to the realm of matter, declaring the other principles of what constitutes reality – life, mind, spirit – to be reducible to matter, or otherwise to be outside the sphere ...
... strange and immaterial thing that is “consciousness,” and the way immaterial consciousness can relate to a material brain and have an impact on it, haunts the biological and neurological sciences since Descartes. He had tried to get rid of it by declaring consciousness an “epiphenomenon” of matter, thus sticking a label on a bottle without known contents. Neurology in the present day has not advanced much ...
... the following confession, though still with a materialistic undertone and with desperate anxiety-allaying assumptions: There lies the frontier, still almost as impassable for us as it was for Descartes. Until it has been crossed a phenomenological dualism will continue to appear unavoidable. Brain and spirit are ideas no more synonymous today than in the seventeenth century. Objective analysis obliges ...
... all living organisms is surely the human body, in which spirit and matter are so delicately and intricately put together to produce this strange being called "human". In the modern age, following Descartes and Newton, the human body was seen as a machine in a universe where everything was moving according to definite and intangible laws. The body was made of parts and each part had its own law of f ...
... thing exists because (and so long as) it is perceived. The scientist swears that a thing exists whether you perceive it or not, perception is possible because it exists, not the other way. And yet Descartes is considered not only as the father of modern philosophy, but also as the founder o( modern mathematical science. But more of that anon. The scientific observer observes as a witness impartial and ...
... peoples and races and cultures. The stamp of mental clarity and neat psychological or introspective analysis in the French language has been its asset and a characteristic capacity from the time of Descartes - through Malebranche and Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists - right down to Bergson. The English are not by nature meta-physicians, in spite of the Metaphysicals: but greatness has been thrust upon ...
... this is the Brahman, this Self is the Brahman.’” 49 Secondly, ancient India had a broader gamut of philosophical schools, including even purely materialist ones, than the West has had since Descartes. The true foundation of rational thinking, however, remained always the spiritual levels beyond the rational mind. The image of the human being in the West is still distressingly limited and defective; ...
... principle”! Nonetheless, the data now at the disposal of the scientists of the micro- and the macroworlds, as those of biology, differ enormously from the data that were available to a Galileo, Descartes or Newton. The principle of studying the facts as perceived by the senses may remain the same, but – and this is only one different factor – instruments have extended the perception of the senses ...
... Answers 1929 ( 5 May ) Page 171 Who will tell me what constitutes an individual? What is it that gives you the impression that you are a person existing in himself? One can say with Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." Ah, no! That does not prove that you are individualised. What is it that gives you the impression that you are an individual?... When you were ten, you were very ...
... detailed physical analysis. Monod himself confesses about the mind-body question: "There lies the frontier, still almost as impossible for us as it was to Descartes.. .Brain and spirit are ideas no more synonymous today than in the seventeenth century." 57 A few sentences earlier, Monod, though ever hopeful of materialism's triumph ...
... movement started under the influence of some eminent mathematicians and philosophers. After Aristotle, there was an interlude Page 151 during which theological thought held the field. With Descartes (1595-1650) rationalism again asserted itself with irresistible vehemence. His method of-critical doubt has left an indelible impact on modern thought; his contention that nothing should be taken ...
... dropsy. Many eminent men had syphilis (Henry VIII, Benvenuto Cellini, Baudelaire), and sufferers from tuberculosis can be listed with out end — Voltaire, Kant, Keats, Dostoevsky, Moliere, Schiller, Descartes, Cardinal Manning, Spinoza, Cicero, St. Francis. But in the realm of physical deformity names are not so numerous. Several celebrated writers were eunuches or eunuchoid. Peter Stuyvesant lost a leg ...
... 39 Darshallas, the, 344 Das, Prof. A. C., 336-9 Dasarathi, 91 De Broglie, Louis, 319 -La Physique Nouvelle et les Quanta, 319n Democritus, 326 Descartes, 321 Dirac, 318 Drona, 80 Du Noiiy, Lecomte, 260 Duryadhona, 80 EDDINGTON, 313-14, 317-19, 326, 332 Egypt, 106, 119, 127, 177n., 219, 223, 236, 238-41 ...
... students' vision the perception of the strangeness and the wonder of the world and of the dimensions, which are unimaginable. The spirit of inquiry that we find in writings such as those of Shankara, Descartes and Bertrand Russell will give to the students the psychological insights into heights that one needs to scale if one wants to look what lies behind and beyond the horizons which seem to be unending ...
... body; the two are regarded as separate substances and it is thought that the interaction between them is impossible. And yet, the facts of the connection between body and mind are so compelling that Descartes was obliged to assume the connection between the two through the pineal gland. But the pineal gland is, after all, physical, and thus, in effect, the original assumption of the impossibility of the ...
... thing exists because (and so long. as) it is perceived. The scientist swears that a thing exists whether you perceive it or not, perception is possible because it exists, not the other way. And yet Descartes is considered not only as the father of modern philosophy, but also as the founder of modern mathematical science. But more of that anon. The scientific observer observes as a witness impartial and ...
... Literature, 52n DANDAKARANYA,276 Dante, 53, 60-1, 71, 85, 169, 176,219 -Inferno, 53, 60n., 149, 169n -Paradiso, 53, 71, 149 Danton, 103 Delille, 85 Denmark,175 Descartes, 286 Dhammapada, 279n Diocles, 108, 109n Dionysus, 182-3 Dirghatama, 162-6 Discabolo, 170 Donne, 74, 80 -Divine Poems, 80 ln -"Annvnciation", 81n -"The Litanie" ...
... western mind captured by the rational or scientific spirit cannot but pursue the same line even in the domain of other and higher realities. The father and the great representative of the movement was Descartes, the very famous French thinker. To find the pure and unalloyed truth, he taught, one must keep away all possibility of error: so to dispel all doubt one must begin by doubting everything, to avoid ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.