The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes

The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes – René Descartes

This edition includes the quintessential works of Descartes, to whom modern learning is indebted for some of the most potent factors in its advancement. These are: in Mathematics, the invention of the Binomial Theorem and the application of Algebra to Geometry in the Analytical Geometry; in Physics, the suggestion of the evolution of the universe through Vortices and the discovery of the laws of the Refraction of Light; in Physiology, the doctrine of the Animal Spirits and the theory of the Mechanism of the soul’s operation in the body; in Philosophy, the finding of the ultimate reality in subjective consciousness and the deducting thence of an argument for, if not a proof of, the Existence of God; in Epistemology, the grounding of scientific Law on the existence of a true God; in Ethics, the tracing of evil to the necessary error arising from judgments based on finite and therefore imperfect knowledge. Inluded are The Discourse on Method The Meditations The Principles of Philosophy.

The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes

The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes.

Format: eBook.

The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes.

ISBN: 9783849653392.

 

Excerpt from the special introduction:

 

To the Frenchman, René Descartes, modern learning is indebted for some of the most potent factors in its advancement. These are: in Mathematics, the invention of the Binomial Theorem and the application of Algebra to Geometry in the Analytical Geometry; in Physics, the suggestion of the evolution of the universe through Vortices and the discovery of the laws of the Refraction of Light; in Physiology, the doctrine of the Animal Spirits and the theory of the Mechanism of the soul’s operation in the body; in Philosophy, the finding of the ultimate reality in subjective consciousness and the deducting thence of an argument for, if not a proof of, the Existence of God; in Epistemology, the grounding of scientific Law on the existence of a true God; in Ethics, the tracing of evil to the necessary error arising from judgments based on finite and therefore imperfect knowledge.

Whatever significance we attach to the alleged flaw in the argument in proof of God’s existence drawn by Descartes from our mind’s necessary conception of a perfect being, which conception in turn necessarily implies the existence of its object, the fact remains that in this ultimate unity of the soul’s apperception whereby the many are brought into relation to a single all-embracing, all-regulating Whole lies the possibility of a science of the universe, and that in uniting the subjective certainty of consciousness with the clear precision of mathematical reasoning Descartes gave a new and vital impetus to human learning in both its physical and metaphysical endeavors.

René Descartes (Lat. Renatus Cartesius) was born in La Haye, Touraine, France, on the 31st of March, 1596. His parents were well to do, of the official class, and his father was the owner of considerable estates. His mother dying soon after his birth, he was given in charge of a faithful nurse, whose care for him, a child so frail that his life was nearly despaired of, was afterward gratefully rewarded. His father intrusted his education to the Jesuits and at the age of eight years he was sent to the college at La Flêche in Anjou, where he remained eight years. It was then, in his seventeenth year, that we read of his becoming dissatisfied with the hollow and formal learning of the Church schools and demanding a free and deeper range for his mental faculties. One study, favored of the Jesuits, mathematics, so deeply interested him that on leaving the college and going to Paris to taste the pleasures of a life in the world, he became in a year’s time wearied of its dissipations and suddenly withdrew himself into almost cloistral retirement, in a little house at St. Germain, to give himself up to the fascinations of Arithmetic and Geometry. The disturbed political life of the capital led him to leave France, and in his twenty-first year he went to the Netherlands and enlisted in the army of Prince Maurice of Orange. After two years’ service in Holland during an interval of peace, he enlisted again as a private in the Bavarian service in the war between Austria and the Protestant princes. In this war he was present at the battle of Prague, and in the following year he served in the Hungarian campaign. Quitting the service in the year 1621, he journeyed through the eastern and northern countries returning through Belgium to Paris in 1622. Disposing of some inherited property in a way to yield him a comfortable income he now starts on a tour in Italy and Switzerland. Paying his vows at Loretto and visiting Rome and Venice, he returns again to France in 1626, where he resumes his mathematical studies with his congenial companions, the famous mathematician Mydorge and his former schoolmate the priest Mersenne. He was now interested in the study of the refraction of light, and in the perfecting of lenses for optical instruments. His military zeal again caused an interruption of these peaceful studies in calling him away to be a participant of the siege of Rochelle in 1628. Returning to Paris, his mind divided between his delight in adventure and the charms of the deeper problems of science and philosophy, and finding a life of seclusion impossible there, at the] suggestion of Cardinal Berulle, the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, he leaves Paris and in 1629 settles in Holland where for twenty years he devotes himself to developing his philosophical system and publishing his works. Three times he visits Paris to look after his family affairs and to receive the pension twice awarded him by the Government. He made a hasty visit to England in the study of magnetic phenomena in 1630.

The last year of his life was spent in Stockholm, Sweden, whither he had been called by the young Queen Christiana, daughter of Gustave Adolphus, who, in her ambition to adorn her reign with the lustre of learning, desired the immediate tutelage of the now renowned philosopher, as well as his assistance in planning an academy of sciences. In the pursuit of these duties under arduous circumstances the philosopher (compelled to give an hour’s instruction daily to his energetic royal pupil at five o clock in the morning) contracted an inflammation of the lungs, and ten days after delivering to her the code for the proposed academy, he died. His remains were carried to France and after remaining in the Pantheon until 1819 they were transferred to the Church of St. Germain des Pro’s, where they now repose. Gustave III. erected a monument to his memory at Stockholm.

If such a thing can be conceived as a knighthood of pure intellect it was emphasized in this illustrious Frenchman whose 3 career almost entirely outside of his native land gives the country of his birth a place in the front ranks of philosophic achievement. While accounted generally the founder of the rationalistic or dogmatic philosophy which underlies modern idealism, on the other hand it may be claimed with equal propriety, as Huxley showed in his address to the students in Cambridge in 1870, that the principles of his “Traité d’ l’hómme” very nearly coincide with the materialistic aspects of modern psychophysiology. A man so devout in spirit that his “Meditations” read like the “Confessions” of St. Augustine and so loyal to his Church that he made it the first of his maxims of conduct “To abide by the old law and religion,” and who died in the happy conviction that he had succeeded in proving with a certainty as clear as that of mathematics the existence of God, he was, in the half century succeeding his death, to have his works placed in the Index Expurgatorius by the Church, his teachings excluded from the university, and an oration at the interment of his remains in Paris forbidden by royal command. In England, Bishop Parker of Oxford classed Descartes among the infidels with Hobbs and Gassendi, and Protestants generally regarded as atheistic his principle that the Bible was not intended to teach the sciences, and, as an encroachment on the Church’s authority, his doctrine that the existence of God could be proved by reason alone. The man who perhaps more than any other has brought the lustre of philosophic renown upon France lived nearly all the years of his literary activity beyond its borders, taught in none of her schools and even as a soldier fought in none of her foreign wars. Laboring for years and with unflagging zeal in the elaboration of his Equation of the Curve and his system of symbols which made possible the Binomial Theorem, yet he avows that geometry was never his first love and that mathematics are but the outer shell to the real system of his philosophy. Nothing, at least, would satisfy him short of the universal mathesis or a view of relations and powers so universal as to embrace the whole field of possible knowledge. He was never married. Although he wrote poems and was devoted to music in his youth, yet he seems to fight shy of even these recreations as he does of the enticements of friendship, preferring the cool and calm states of solitude as conducive to his life’s chosen task, — that of finding the truth of science in the truth of God. The twenty years of his life in Holland during which he resided mostly in a number of little university towns was the time of a brilliant court under the stadtholder Frederick Henry and of the famous art of Rembrandt and the scholarship of Grotius and Vossius. But these were as nothing to Descartes who shows a contempt for all learning and art for their own sake. Knowledge, he maintained, must be grounded in intelligence rather than in erudition. He studies the world, men, states, nature only as spectacles of a deep inner and immortal principle into whose secret he would penetrate. For this he keeps himself aloof from personal and political entanglements, not allowing even his family affairs to engross him; and, while he keeps himself in touch with intellectual movements in Paris through the correspondence of his friends there, he does so with the precaution to keep his own whereabouts a secret from the world at large. It is as if he would make his mind a perfectly clear, cold crystal reflecting like the monad of the later system of Leibnitz, in perfect distinctness that truth of the universe and its God that he would give to the world. Destined as they were to be for a time put under the ban of both the Church and the universities, yet immediately on their publication, the doctrines of Descartes were received with a popular enthusiasm that made them the fashionable cult of Cardinals, scholars, and princes in the court of Louis XIV., and the favorite theme of the salons of Madame de Sevigné, and the Duchesse de Maine. Although already forbidden by the Index in 1663 and condemned as dangerous to the faith by the Archbishop of Paris in 1671, still in 1680 the lectures of the popular expositor of the new philosophy, Pierre Silvan Regis, were so sought after in Paris that seats in the audience hall could with difficulty be obtained. The principle of his physics and mathematics soon assumed their essential place in the progress of modern science and in Holland, where from the first the new philosophy found many advocates, Spinoza, seizing upon the Cartesian principle of the development of philosophy from the a priori ground of the most certain knowledge, founded his system of Idealistic Monism which has largely entered into all the modern schools of speculative thought.

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