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Key Letter By Descartes Found After 170 Years
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."
(in french)
"I think therefore I am" sounds a bit bold an affirmation. It's more like "I think I think, therefore I think I think I think" IMHO.
It's not really all that bold. According to my philosophy professors (I was a philosophy major), the statement Descartes made actually translates a bit better to "I think, I am". When taken in context (attempting to doubt every possible thing), this statement means that I can be certain that I am thinking (whatever that may mean, it may mean I am creating the sounds that I hear in my head or it may mean that those sounds are being put into me). If I am thinking, then there is something that definitely exists (otherwise there would be no one to have thought) - and further more that something is me. Everything else in the world may be a lie or deception, but with certainty: I exist by the virtue of having thought (though I may not be what I think I am and the world may not be what I think it is).
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My point is that if well in digital age i would think normal than copies of it being everywhere, in 1700 still someone could have made copies or somehow made public the critical points, if had something that could revolutionize their views. If they were buried in a private collection where noone could see them and tell that had something revolutionary, then that had being stolen would had made no difference.
Actually, I believe in God, I just don't belive in using God as a rationalization for science, as Descartes did in every chapter after 1.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Historically is was a place for science and mathmatics. Since those disciplines now have there own fields, what the hell good is philosphy?
Before someone responds with the boring and done arguments, my initial goal in college was to become a philosophy professor. It was then I realized it ahs nothing new to offer the world. Even the most basic philosophy question have been answered.
Which came first, chicken or the egg? Evolution has taught is it was the egg.
If yopu walk towards something, but only half the remaining difference, will you ever get there: Quantum mechanics has shown us that, yes, we would get there because there is a smallest distance that can be moved.
These may be interesting papers because they come from a time when philosophy was critical to develop logical, rational, and skeptical questions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wonderful historical reasons - the cedilla c is pronounced the same as the "s" today. Look back at two hundred year old grammars and there might be a difference (there would be, at least, in Spanish for the c, the z, and the s).
Couldn't disagree more, except that Descartes was clearly an important transitional figure whose philosophical work, like Hume's, is as relevant to what serious modern philosophy ought to be doing as Newton's alchemical work is to what serious modern chemistry ought to be doing.
"Having God as a first premise" is trivially incoherent. It leaves unanswered and the questions, "What is God?" and "How do I know anything about God in the first place?" which can obviously only be answered by reference to something else, which in fact is sense-experience, rather that "thought" as Descarte imagined. Since sense-experience is trivially prior to the very notion of God, it is clear that having God as a first premise is incoherent at best and dishonest at worst.
Descartes big mistake in this regard was to believe that since he could fantasize about a disembodied intelligence that it had some ontological weight. Everyone but philosophers now knows that this method is useless, because we know that it is easy for us to imagine things that are contradictory and impossible. Humans suck at deducitve closure, so it is easy for us to fail to notice the incoherence of our own imaginings. We have only two methods of ensuring such coherence: empirical investigation and mathematical deduction, neither of which philosophers have adopted because they don't care about truth. They continue to treat their imaginings and the limits of their imaginings as being ontological determinative.
Descartes' mathematical work, which was fundamental to the eventual melding of algebra and geometry that gave us modern mathematics, has had lasting value. His philosophical work was important only for its transitional role. He was a step on the way that's best forgotten today by all but historians.
Hume is even less coherent than Descarte, with less excuse. His attempts to undertake an empirical analsyis of sense-experience are so far off the mark as to be laughable. Even knowing what was known in his own time about the perception of objects it was obvious he didn't have a clue what he was talking about with his fantasies of pure sensations, which are incredibly hard to produce even in the laboratory. Hume somehow failed to notice that he had never had a pure sensation in his life. That tells you something about the quality of his philosophy. That he ultimatly ends up arguing that his own books should be burned--since they clearly fail to fulfill the criteria for non-burning he sets out--is another clue to just how incoherent he was.
Hume is to be honoured for waking Kant from his "dogmatical slumber", but not much else.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
A big-name chief librarian friend of mine told me once that most "lost" documents are actually documents whose provenance is questionable and the institution is simply waiting for some legal clock to tick (statute of limitations, death of last legal descendant, lapse of insurance claim, etc) before they can be "found".