Rene Descartes
There was revealed to Descartes at the age of 23, in some overwhelming way, the fact that the
structure of the universe is mathematical and logical. Rene was given a profound sense of revelation. Descartes' method is designed ruthlessly to unmask the imponderables, and to find in
every thing the lucid and exact structure.
Here are his four rules of logic: My first rule
was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so; to accept
nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could
have no occasion to doubt it. The second rule was to divide each problem or difficulty
into as many parts as possible. The third rule was to commence my reflections with objects
which were the simplest and easiest to understand, and rise thence, little by little, to
knowledge of the most complex. The fourth rule was to make enumerations so complete, and
reviews so general, that I should be certain to have omitted nothing.
Thus Descartes
introduces a deep cleavage between the inward look into mind and the outward look into
matter. He offers no solution to the epistemological problem of how the mind knows, other
than the vague notion of God as the connecting medium. It is ironic that the man who had
an ecstatic experience, revealing to him the nature of the universe, should introduce into
modern philosophy the dualism of mind and body which has plagued thought ever since. He
proposed the sanction of the intellect. They must be so evident that they cannot be
doubted. reach the rock of thought when we can no longer doubt; and therefore we reach it
only by doubting. His method was analytic: it works by taking things and thoughts to
pieces. Descartes repeatedly affirmed that he did not doubt in matters of faith. His personal
interest in mathematics arose from what he called the certainty of its demonstrations and
the evidence of its reasoning. For him its proper application was not to mathematics but
to philosophy, starting with metaphysics.
Rene Descartes was a French Philosopher who lived between 1596-1650. Descartes began by
postulating that our approach to knowledge must be governed by doubt: we reject everything
which, when tested by pure reason, appears uncertain. Reason was exalted but in a form different from, and far more attractive than that which scholastic dialectics had allowed it. Moreover it recognized the fact of doubt and assigned it a regulative place in human thought; so far from being the final sin it became the primary virtue.
[51, 77, 134, 271]
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