Download or read book Descartes and the Possibility of Science written by Peter A. Schouls and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joining these topics together within the context of Cartesian doctrine, Schouls opens up a substantially new reading of the Meditations and a more complete picture of Descartes as a scientist."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Descartes and the Enlightenment written by Peter A. Schouls and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1989-02-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schouls limits himself to a discussion of these three concepts in order to escape facile and vague generalizations. For the same reason, in relating Descartes to eighteenth-century thinkers, Schouls limits his attention to a single part of the spectrum of acknowledged Enlightenment reflection, the French "philosopes." From their writings he demonstrates that they are, and acknowledge themselves to be, Descartes' progeny.
Download or read book Descartes Philosophy of Science written by Desmond M. Clarke and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Ren Descartes written by Stephen Voss and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In English, with some essays translated from French. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Download or read book The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution written by Matthew L. Jones and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 809 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the unrest, dislocation, and uncertainty of seventeenth-century Europe, readers seeking consolation and assurance turned to philosophical and scientific books that offered ways of conquering fears and training the mind—guidance for living a good life. The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution presents a triptych showing how three key early modern scientists, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz, envisioned their new work as useful for cultivating virtue and for pursuing a good life. Their scientific and philosophical innovations stemmed in part from their understanding of mathematics and science as cognitive and spiritual exercises that could create a truer mental and spiritual nobility. In portraying the rich contexts surrounding Descartes’ geometry, Pascal’s arithmetical triangle, and Leibniz’s calculus, Matthew L. Jones argues that this drive for moral therapeutics guided important developments of early modern philosophy and the Scientific Revolution.
Download or read book Descartes Metaphysical Physics written by Daniel Garber and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-05 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first book-length treatment of Descartes' important and influential natural philosophy, Daniel Garber is principally concerned with Descartes' accounts of matter and motion—the joint between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests. These accounts constitute the point at which the metaphysical doctrines on God, the soul, and body, developed in writings like the Meditations, give rise to physical conclusions regarding atoms, vacua, and the laws that matter in motion must obey. Garber achieves a philosophically rigorous reading of Descartes that is sensitive to the historical and intellectual context in which he wrote. What emerges is a novel view of this familiar figure, at once unexpected and truer to the historical Descartes. The book begins with a discussion of Descartes' intellectual development and the larger project that frames his natural philosophy, the complete reform of all the sciences. After this introduction Garber thoroughly examines various aspects of Descartes' physics: the notion of body and its identification with extension; Descartes' rejection of the substantial forms of the scholastics; his relation to the atomistic tradition of atoms and the void; the concept of motion and the laws of motion, including Descartes' conservation principle, his laws of the persistence of motion, and his collision law; and the grounding of his laws in God.
Download or read book Principles of Philosophy written by Reuven Agushevits and published by KTAV Publishing House, Inc.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Principles of Philosophy is an attempt, by a self-taught genius, to persuade the Yiddish speaking public that philosophy has not lost its central importance vis a vis both religion and science. He does this, first, by identifying religion with philosophy - and he is the first Orthodox rabbi since Maimonides to do so. Next, he argues that philosophical principles, which are broader than those of science, are at the basis of all existence, and that the same principles that account for the organization of matter can account for the varieties of human organization (and disorganization). He argues, finally, that the study of philosophy itself can lead to the weakening of egotism and the strengthening of altruism."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Descartes Embodied written by Daniel Garber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A central theme unifying the essays in this volume on the work of Descartes is the interconnection between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests, and the extent to which these two sides of the Cartesian programme illuminate each other.
Download or read book Descartes and His Contemporaries written by Roger Ariew and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-10-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before publishing his landmark Meditations in 1641, Rene Descartes sent his manuscript to many leading thinkers to solicit their objections to his arguments. He included these objections, along with his own detailed replies, as part of the first edition. This unusual strategy gave Descartes a chance to address criticisms in advance and to demonstrate his willingness to consider diverse viewpoints—critical in an age when radical ideas could result in condemnation by church and state, or even death. Descartes and his Contemporaries recreates the tumultuous intellectual community of seventeenth-century Europe and provides a detailed, modern analysis of the Meditations in its historical context. The book's chapters examine the arguments and positions of each of the objectors—Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld, Morin, Caterus, Bourdin, and others whose views were compiled by Mersenne. They illuminate Descartes' relationships to the scholastics and particularly the Jesuits, to Mersenne's circle with its debates about the natural sciences, to the Epicurean movements of his day, and to the Augustinian tradition. Providing a glimpse of the interactions among leading 17th-century intellectuals as they grappled with major philosophical issues, this book sheds light on how Descartes' thought developed and was articulated in opposition to the ideas of his contemporaries.
Download or read book Descartes A Very Short Introduction written by Tom Sorell and published by Oxford Paperbacks. This book was released on 2000-10-12 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Descartes (1596-1650) had a remarkably short working life, and his output was small, yet his contributions to philosophy and science have endured to the present day. He is perhaps best known for his statement 'Cogito, ergo sum'. By a mixture of 'intuition' and 'deduction' Descartes derived from the 'cogito' principle first the existence of a material world. But Descartes did not intend the metaphysics to stand apart from his scientific work, which included important investigations into physics, mathematics, psychology, and optics. In this book Tom Sorrell shows that Descartes was, above all, an advocate and practitioner of a new mathematical approach to physics, and that he developed his metaphysics to support his programme in the sciences. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book The scientific work of Ren Descartes written by Joseph Frederick Scott and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bedeviled written by Jimena Canales and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How scientists through the ages have conducted thought experiments using imaginary entities—demons—to test the laws of nature and push the frontiers of what is possible Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the imagination—and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed forward the frontiers of science and technology. Spanning four centuries of discovery—from René Descartes, whose demon could hijack sensorial reality, to James Clerk Maxwell, whose molecular-sized demon deftly broke the second law of thermodynamics, to Darwin, Einstein, Feynman, and beyond—Jimena Canales tells a shadow history of science and the demons that bedevil it. She reveals how the greatest scientific thinkers used demons to explore problems, test the limits of what is possible, and better understand nature. Their imaginary familiars helped unlock the secrets of entropy, heredity, relativity, quantum mechanics, and other scientific wonders—and continue to inspire breakthroughs in the realms of computer science, artificial intelligence, and economics today. The world may no longer be haunted as it once was, but the demons of the scientific imagination are alive and well, continuing to play a vital role in scientists' efforts to explore the unknown and make the impossible real.
Download or read book Descartes An Intellectual Biography written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1995-03-30 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Descartes (1596-1650) is the father of modern philosophy, and one of the greatest of all thinkers. This is the first intellectual biography of Descartes in English; it offers a fundamental reassessment of all aspects of his life and work. Stephen Gaukroger, a leading authority on Descartes, traces his intellectual development from childhood, showing the connections between his intellectual and personal life and placing these in the cultural context of seventeenth century Europe. Descartes' early work in mathematics and science produced ground breaking theories, methods, and tools still in use today. This book gives the first full account of how this work informed and influenced the later philosophical studies for which, above all, Descartes is renowned. Not only were philosophy and science intertwined in Descartes' life; so were philosophy and religion. The Church of Rome found Galileo guilty of heresy in 1633; two decades earlier, Copernicus' theories about the universe had been denounced as blasphemous. To avoid such accusations, Descartes clothed his views about the relation between God and humanity, and about the nature of the universe, in a philosophical garb acceptable to the Church. His most famous project was the exploration of the foundations of human knowledge, starting from the proof of one's own existence offered in the formula Cogito ergo sum, `I am thinking therefore I exist'. Stephen Gaukroger argues that this was not intended as an exercise in philosophical scepticism, but rather to provide Descartes' scientific theories, influenced as they were by Copernicus and Galileo, with metaphysical legitimation. This book offers for the first time a full understanding of how Descartes developed his revolutionary ideas. It will be welcomed by all readers interested in the origins of modern thought.
Download or read book Descartes written by Geneviève Rodis-Lewis and published by Comstock Publishing Associates. This book was released on 1998 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relatively compact biography of the seventeenth-century French philosopher is determined to reverse the slander of scandal in vogue among Descartes' recent biographers and to modify the view of his intellectual development.
Download or read book Meditations on First Philosophy written by René Descartes and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descartes Baby written by Paul Bloom and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is a forgery worth so much less than an original work of art?What's so funny about someone slipping on a banana peel? Why, as Freud once asked, is a man willing to kiss a woman passionately, but not use her toothbrush? And how many times should you baptize a two-headed twin? Descartes' Baby answers such questions, questions we may have never thought to ask about such uniquely human traits as art, humour, faith, disgust, and morality. In this thought-provoking and fascinating account of human nature, psychologist Paul Bloom contends that we all see the world in terms of bodies and souls. Even babies have a rich understanding of both the physical and social worlds. They expect objects to obey principles of physics, and they're startled when things disappear or defy gravity. They can read the emotions of adults and respond with their own feelings of anger, sympathy and joy. This perspective remains with us throughout our lives. Using his own researches and new ideas from philosophy, evolutionary biology, aesthetics, theology, and neuroscience, Bloom shows how this way to making sense of reality can explain what makes us human. The myriad ways that our childhood views of the world undergo development throughout our lives and profoundly influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions is the subject of this richly rewarding book.
Download or read book The Scientific Work of Ren Descartes written by J. F. Scott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When originally published in 1952, this book filled a gap in the history of philosophy and science and remains an important work today, because it puts the main mathematical and physical discoveries of Descartes in an accessible form, for the benefit of English readers. Descartes is acknowledged to be the founder of modern mathematics, through his invention of analytical geometry and this volume charts Descartes’ role in bringing a unity into algebra and geometry and the development of mathematics into a discipline which could be properly analysed. Carefully paraphrasing the Géométrie, this volume retains much of Descartes’ original notation as well as the original diagrams. The volume also discusses the considerable contribution that Descartes made to the physical sciences which involved accurate work in optics, light, sight and colour.
