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Carregando... Discourse on Method / Meditations on First Philosophy (1637)de René Descartes
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. In the Discourse Descartes is charming, down-to-earth, and his investigation of skepticism is exciting, fun and profound at the same time. That’s a rare combination in philosophy, at least in my experience - only Plato and Chuang Tzu come to mind as similar in this respect (maybe Nietzsche, but he’s such a ninny). Although Descartes’ skepticism is arguably a borrowing from ancient philosophy, his turning it into a method of investigation appears to be original, and it was enormously important in the development of modern science as well as modern philosophy. I think his famous cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is flawed – perception of thought proves the existence of operating consciousness, but not the existence of an individual, thinking being. Hair-splitting and navel-gazing to some, a big deal to others. But all good, clean fun. The Meditations, on the other hand, is not so charming, it’s often boring, and it’s sometimes profound and sometimes not very. It has a couple weak and fallacious arguments for the existence of God - you get the impression that, after the relentless skepticism of his Discourse and the first couple meditations, and in light of Galileo’s travails, he’s trying to keep himself in the good graces of the Church and neither his heart or head are completely in the proofs of God and the things leading up to them. At least that’s the impression I get. If I exist. But I’m a bit hard on Rene, and he lived in hard times. The Discourse, written in French, was aimed at a more popular audience while the Meditations, written in Latin, was for scholars. And it is more substantial. Speaking of Chuang Tzu, Descartes could have lifted his dreaming argument from the old sage, but it’s highly unlikely he’d ever heard of him (and his recollection-like a priori knowledge of mathematical objects is straight out of Plato’s Meno). This dreaming together with the evil god concept puts us in pretty shaky epistemological territory. The search for anything knowable is a logical next step, but beyond that Descartes tends to build his house with quite a few cards. Still, it’s probably not unreasonable to say that what he accomplished was revolutionary, and that it engendered a remarkable quantity and quality of further developments for hundreds of years. To be fair, Descartes’ mind-body dualism is pretty much from Plato as well; apparently he wasn’t big on attribution, but so it goes. sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Pertence à série publicadaPenguin Classics (L206)
René Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In his Discourse on Method he outlined the contrast between mathematics and experimental sciences, and the extent to which each one can achieve certainty. Drawing on his own work in geometry, optics, astronomy and physiology, Descartes developed the hypothetical method that characterizes modern science, and this soon came to replace the traditional techniques derived from Aristotle. Many of Descartes' most radical ideas - such as the disparity between our perceptions and the realities that cause them - have been highly influential in the development of modern philosophy. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)194Philosophy and Psychology Modern western philosophy French philosophersClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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- general approach & methods
- i think therefore i am (and what stems from this: the soul, which distinguishes man from animals)
- his big ass brain
i no likey:
- proof of god's existence (short + hard to understand + i was not convinced that he necessarily proved it, and certainly not enough to justify the rest of the book on this basis)
- structure (rambling -> complex argument -> weird sidebar -> back to rambling)
SEE U SOON BUDDY! (i will read his meditations) ( )