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Key Letter By Descartes Found After 170 Years

Posted by kdawson on from the therefore-it-is dept.

Schiphol writes of a long-lost letter by René Descartes to Marin Mersenne that has come to light at Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, where it had lain buried in the archives for more than a century. The discovery could revolutionize our view of one of the 17th-century French philosopher's major works. "[T]housands of treasured documents... vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes... Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania... The letter, dated May 27, 1641, concerns the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, a celebrated work whose use of reason and scientific methods helped to ignite a revolution in thought."

9 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Meditations on First Philosophy by ByOhTek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Chapter 1 was great, and ended in the pinnacle of the work "I think therefore I am".

    After that, he couldn't go any farther, so he decided that you couldn't trust the world without the presence of God. At which point, I lost interest.

    Chapter 1: A+
    Chapter >1: D

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    1. Re:Meditations on First Philosophy by jellomizer · · Score: 1, Insightful

      So you are letting your own personal belief structure rate the quality of his work. " I don't believe in God so any argument for the idea must be flawed, I will not bother reading such arguments as my mind is fixed"
      It is just like Christian Right not reading Darwin Theory of Evolution, as they will not allow their minds to be open to an opposing idea.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:Meditations on First Philosophy by biryokumaru · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I believe his concern is that if you start on false premises, your argument is effectively meaningless. You could derive anything.

      --
      When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
    3. Re:Meditations on First Philosophy by ENIGMAwastaken · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "I exist, therefore I exist" is not invalid.

      P therefore P is always valid, for any value of P. It's trivial, but anything that's trivially true is valid.

      P always follow from P. The implication that the Cogito is invalid is just an absurdity. What you might mean is that it's a tautology, but tautologies are always true. The Meditations makes several dozen laughable logical blunders, but this isn't one of them.

    4. Re:Meditations on First Philosophy by eleuthero · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It is true that if you start with a demonstrably false premise, you could end up anywhere. The problem is that God's existence is not demonstrably false. Having God as a first premise is perfectly reasonable. What might have been helpful is a treatise that used God's existence as a first premise followed by another one that rejected God's existence. This would provide for an intriguing thought exercise and would help many determine their approach (holding to argument one or to argument two). Given the above conversation, it would seem that rather than do argument two, Descartes determined that a discussion of God's non-existence as a first premise was a worthless topic (though many today would seek to work out an argument with that type of first premise).

    5. Re:Meditations on First Philosophy by mhajicek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Since God can neither be proven nor disproved, any argument based on the assumption of God can be dismissed by the assertion of no God. In order to have an infallible argument one must start on solid first principles, such as "I think therefore I am." It is pretty hard to go forward from there, but I think we can also say "I think therefore there is time.", because without time one could not have the experience of thinking. Also, "I think therefore there is data.", because the thoughts must contain or be represented by data of some kind.

  2. Could revolutionize? by gmuslera · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Too used to the digital age to think right about it. How something know and being somewhat available for 200 years before they were stolen could revolutionize something now because were recovered? I suppose that now that letters will be available both as scanned images, pdfs, plain text and even google books, but still, if when they were available (and if not well full copies, but at least references could have been made of the critical points) couldn't make a revolution, should have little chance by now.

  3. So by OrangeMonkey11 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How did Guglielmo Libri the Italian mathematician got away with stealing 30,000 books and manuscript from France and got away with it. How did the official at the French Public Library not notice that one of their employee had made off with 30,000 items that does not belong to him.

  4. Re:meh, philosophy is dead by Zedrick · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "Which came first, chicken or the egg? Evolution has taught is it was the egg."

    Eh, what? No. An almost-chicken lays an egg with a mutated embryo (the 100%-chicken). The egg is still an almost-chickenegg, and the first chicken egg is later laid by the chicken.