Rene Descartes
Background Info
- 1596-1650
- educated at Univ of Paris
- Catholic Christian
- not an academic
-
wrote Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy from a Rationalism rationalistic perspective - claims he is making a whole new start in philosophy
- D. arrived at a certain and evident knowledge of the truth. He wants to see if he can persuade others by the same method that he himself used.
- wrote it to unbelievers & skeptics.
- Hoped to make a theological argument w/o theology
- “More than that, I am aware that the principal reason which causes many impious persons not to desire to believe that there is a God, and that the human soul is distinct from the body, is that they declare that hitherto no one has been able to demonstrate these two facts…”
- “For the truth itself will easily cause all men of mind and learning to subscribe to your judgment; and your authority will cause the atheists, who are usually more arrogant than learned or judicious, to rid themselves of their spirit of contradiction or lead them possibly themselves to defend the reasonings which they find being receives as demonstrations by all persons of consideration, lest they appear not to understand them. And, finally, all others will easily yield to such a mass of evidence, and there will be none who dares to doubt the existence of God and the real and true distinction between the human soul and the body.” (Descartes, Cambridge, 3)
- "we cannot attain to a perfect knowledge in any such case of probably opinion" - Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule II
- wrote it in 1640
- fought in Thirty Years War
- contemporary of Galileo
- invented longitude / latitude, non-Euclidean geometry
Epistemology
- "we cannot attain to a perfect knowledge in any such case of probably opinion" (For the Direction of the Mind, rule 2)
- arithmetic & geometry are the only knowledge that are "free from any taint of falsity or uncdertainty" (ibid)
- two ways to arrive at true knowledge: intuition & induction (ibid, rule 3)
- belief & faith are more certaint than the surest knowledge, because they are an act of the will, not the intelligence