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The wax argument or the sheet of wax example is a thought experiment that René Descartes created in the second of his Meditations on First Philosophy.He devised it to analyze what properties are essential for bodies, show how uncertain our knowledge of the world is compared to our knowledge of our minds, and argue for rationalism.
In the Netherlands, where Descartes had lived for a long time, Cartesianism was a doctrine popular mainly among university professors and lecturers.In Germany the influence of this doctrine was not relevant and followers of Cartesianism in the German-speaking border regions between these countries (e.g., the iatromathematician Yvo Gaukes from East Frisia) frequently chose to publish their ...
René Descartes (/ d eɪ ˈ k ɑːr t / day-KART or UK: / ˈ d eɪ k ɑːr t / DAY-kart; French: [ʁəne dekaʁt] ⓘ; [note 3] [11] 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) [12] [13]: 58 was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science.
Page of Descartes' "La dioptrique" with the tennis ball example. Descartes uses a tennis ball to create a proof for the laws of reflection and refraction in his third model. This was important because he was using real-world objects (in this case, a tennis ball) to construct mathematical theory.
Comparing the functions of this bodily machine to an organ, Descartes asserts that they depend "on the spirits that come from the heart, the pores of the brain through which it passes and the way these spirits are distributed in the pores." The natural inclinations are explained by the diversity of minds, itself correlated with food, air and ...
René Descartes The Cartesian circle (also known as Arnauld 's circle [ 1 ] ) is an example of fallacious circular reasoning attributed to French philosopher René Descartes . He argued that the existence of God is proven by reliable perception , which is itself guaranteed by God.
Rationalism has a philosophical history dating from antiquity.The analytical nature of much of philosophical enquiry, the awareness of apparently a priori domains of knowledge such as mathematics, combined with the emphasis of obtaining knowledge through the use of rational faculties (commonly rejecting, for example, direct revelation) have made rationalist themes very prevalent in the history ...
Descartes was a substance dualist, and argued that reality was composed of two radically different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on the other. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other.