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."

Comments

I'm guessing the letter was: "é "

[thomasdz]

Yeah, we don't have that "é " letter in our alphabet, so we must have lost it. However I'm thinking René Descartes may have just stolen it... you know how those French are...

Re:I'm guessing the letter was: "é "

[Anonymous Coward]

English is worse because you have e, e and e that are pronounced differently, but there is no accent to tell which pronunciation to use.

Re:I'm guessing the letter was: "é "

[biryokumaru]

Oh, that's not a problem. You can hear it.

Re:I'm guessing the letter was: "é "

[Unordained]

é is like the "eh?" in "Let's go see The Phantom Menace, eh?" (canada)
è is like the "eh." in "The Phantom Menace? Eh. I'm in no mood to ruin my childhood memories."
ê is like an appropriately-angry version of è.

Meditations on First Philosophy

[ByOhTek]

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

Re:Meditations on First Philosophy

[SpeedyDX]

Descartes might have been wrong, but that's kind of missing the point. During an era when scepticism was viewed as being inherently blasphemous and absurd, he embraced scepticism as a practical philosophy. Descartes, along with Hume and several others during the early modern period, began to establish moderate scepticism as the basis for a practical philosophy of scientific enquiry.

There's no doubting that Descartes made many mistakes in Meditations. But from the fact that the work isn't perfect, it doesn't entail that it wasn't a great and influential work that's brought us one step closer to understanding the nature of reason. One step of many, to be sure, but one step nonetheless.

Also, he didn't say that he can't trust the existence of the world without God. Rather, he gave an ontological argument for God, established His existence, and then, because God exists and He doesn't deceive, Descartes no longer had to justify the existence of the world (without a God). Of course, this is what led to the famed Cartesian circle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_circle), but your short analysis showed that you didn't really understand the text. As I replied in another thread, Jonathan Bennett is translating early modern works to more modern language, resulting in more clear and accessible works (available: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/de.html). I highly encourage that you read it over again and try to get more out of it.

While I'm at it, it seems that a more empirical philosophy would interest you more. Descartes had some influence on Hume's work. Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is one of the best treatments of the philosophy of science in the early modern era, and definitely my favourite work out of that era. if you're interested, you should definitely check it out: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/he.html

Re:Meditations on First Philosophy

[biryokumaru]

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

Re:Meditations on First Philosophy

[radtea]

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.

Rene Descartes

[sxltrex]

Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks "can I get you a beer?" Descartes replies "I think not!" and he disappears.

Thanks, I'm here all week!

Re:So

[Culture20]

can we have the text please? (Preferably in a human language)

Sorry, it's written in French.

How about horses?

[naz404]

There was this magnificent mathematical horse. You could teach it arithmetic, which it learned with no difficulty, algebra was a breeze, it could even prove theorems in euclidean geometry, but when you tried to teach it analytic geometry, it would rear back on its hind legs, kick ferociously neigh loudly and make violent head motions in resistance.

The moral of this story is that you can't put Descartes before de horse.

*ducks*

Re:It said that Descartes liked turtles.

[mcgrew]

It's turtles all the way down, young man.

Re:Haverford?

[buttersnout]

I graduated from Haverford in 2005. It's a fairly prestigious small liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia (it was ranked 4th when I got in in 2001 but much of its endowment in 9/11 and is now ranked 8th by us news). It's a very liberal college with a quaker history though I believe it no longer has an official religious affiliation. The college is strong in the sciences which is the reason I went there. My faculty advisor, Gerry Gollub, for example, is recognized as a leader in the field of fluid dynamics. It takes pride in its campus and arboretum and I've heard many people with no affiliation with the college say it has the most beautiful campus in the US. Most students take about a quarter of their courses at Bryn Mawr college which is a similar but all girls college. Most events are shared between the colleges and there's considered to be little difference between a Haverford student and a Bryn Mawr student in terms of what they have permission to do. There is also a lesser relationship with Swarthmore college and the University of Pennsylvania. The college also is very proud of its honor code. Students, for example, may take tests home and are trusted not to open their text books while taking them. I would guess the college's pride in their honesty and trustworthiness was a major motivation in their decision to return the letter.

Re:So

[DriedClexler]

I think it's the variant on the old joke.

"For 30 years, the guard at the French Public Library for the evening shift noticed Gugli walking out with a book tucked under his arm. He always make sure to talk to Gugli, as Gugli would look very suspicious, as if he'd done something wrong. The guard always figured there wasn't something quite right about Gugli. So he'd search him, but always find nothing.

"After retiring, the guard wanted this mystery solved, so one day he followed Gugli home. He asked, 'Okay, I know you've been making some kind of mischief all these years, but I've never been able to figure out what. What have you been stealing?'

"Gugli responded, 'Books!'"

Dear Marin

[goffster]

I still can't get laid at the local bars, maybe I should stop talking about Math.
Perhaps astrology might work better. Do you have any good charts?

Thanx,
Rene