Questions tagged [descartes]
Questions related to René Descartes (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650)
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Self-evident vs. self-explanatory vs. ...?
How far apart are these descriptions? I was approaching the issue from the perspective of erotetic logic, and my intuition is that self-evidence is when a proposition is evident from its erotetic ...
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Was the notion of mind-body dualism invented, or at least popularized, by Rene Descartes?
This dualism seems so compelling (from a layman’s perspective) that it seems difficult to imagine that Descartes invented or even popularized it. For instance, people kept using words like “soul” to ...
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Does Descartes avert the divine illumination trope or play it straight?
(Preamble: according to tvtropes.com, a trope can be instantiated, meaning played straight, or almost subversively instantiated, meaning averted.)
In the Book of Ezekiel, an entity known as the ...
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Why is mind/body duality so widely accepted?
It seems strange that Cartesian mind/body duality is so widely accepted, given that it leads to scepticism around the possibility of human knowledge.
Why is it so widely accepted, and how do its ...
user37981
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Descartes and the concept of motion
If we believe that calculus satisfactorily solves Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, conceptual clarity about real analysis was not achieved before Cauchy's definition of the limit (in “Cours d'Analyse”, ...
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How can beliefs be justified when they are always subject to Cartesian skepticism?
It seems obvious to me that after glancing at my watch I "know" what time it is. But this apparent "knowledge" can be explained away by infinitely many skeptical hypotheses. ...
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Can’t we assume that the Boltzmann Brain scenario can be cognitively stable?
In the Boltzmann Brain scenario, we are all brains produced by random fluctuations within a high entropy universe. The argument which I had accepted before was that our very reasoning can not be ...
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Can we say that "I Think Therefore I Am" was never about "I", or thinking, or "I" doing the thinking?
Strictly speaking, "Cogito ergo sum" simply means:
"The existence of your own mind can never be in doubt."
Item 1) also describes our true knowledge in its entirety.
Or we can ...
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Is the argument "Cogito ergo sum" compatible with metaphysical nihilism?
Metaphysical nihilism says that there might not be any objects at all.
I'm not interested in whether there are potential problems with this viewpoint. One problem could be that "Cogito" can't come ...
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Which conception of a " machine " allows to call "mechanical" Descartes and Hobbes views of nature and of science?
The word "mechanical" comes from a greek word meaning " machine".
However, the received definition of mechanical philosophy does not contain the concept of a machine. This school of thought is said ...
user37859
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What happened to ( aristotelian) substantial forms in cartesian ontology? On which ground ( metaphysical or physical) are they rejected?
In aristotelian philosophy, there are no bare particulars ( contrary to what is the case in Plato, according to P.V. Spade) but internally structured ( substantial) particulars in which 2 "parts"/...
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Why does Hayek refer to French 'individualism' as the "Cartesian" school?
I am reading Frederick Hayek right now and saw that he refers to the French liberal tradition, what he calls French "individualism (vs the English liberal tradition of Smith, Ferguson, Burke, etc.) ...
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Is existence a necessary condition for thinking? [closed]
Is existence a necessary condition for thinking?
Descartes argues that because he thinks, he exists. But wouldn't he have to exist in the first place for him to:
A) Think and
B) Realize that he ...
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Does the frequent study of the history of philosophy cause us to lose critical thinking? [closed]
Does the long and frequent study of the history of philosophy cause us to lose critical thinking and philosophical insight into the issues and, as Descartes puts it, "contaminate ourselves with past ...
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In What Sense is Substance Epistemically Prior?
In Metaphysics Z (1028a32), Aristotle outlines different senses in which a substance can be considered to be "first":
there are several senses in which a thing is said to be first; yet substance is ...
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