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Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a 1994 book by neuroscientist António Damásio describing the physiology of rational thought and decision, and how the faculties could have evolved through Darwinian natural selection. [1]
René Descartes (/ d eɪ ˈ k ɑːr t / day-KART, also 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.
Descartes uses the analogy of rebuilding a house from secure foundations, and extends the analogy to the idea of needing a temporary abode while his own house is being rebuilt. Descartes adopts the following "three or four" maxims in order to remain effective in the "real world" while experimenting with his method of radical doubt.
It may not now exist, and it need never have existed. In Descartes' terminology, what has "objective reality" is something contained in the subject's mental state and so may even be called "subjective" in present-day terms." [5]: 159 Crucial to Descartes argument is the way in which the levels of objective reality are determined.
Damasio's books deal with the relationship between emotions and their brain substrates. His 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, won the Science et Vie prize, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and is translated in over 30 languages.
This is Descartes' error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensional, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff {pineal gland}; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that ...
The work consists of six lessons popularizing the knowledge of René Descartes and Nicolas Copernicus, taught through conversation with a Marquise, spread over six evenings and preceded of a preface and a dispatch To Monsieur L***. First evening. That the Earth is a Planet which turns on itself, & around the Sun. Second evening.
Rules 13–24 deal with what Descartes terms "perfectly understood problems", or problems in which all of the conditions relevant to the solution of the problem are known, and which arise principally in arithmetic and geometry. Rules 25–36 deal with "imperfectly understood problems", or problems in which one or more conditions relevant to the ...