Descartes: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed)
Justin Skirry
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN: 0826489869
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
René Descartes is arguably the most important seventeenth-century thinker and the father of modern philosophy. Yet his unique method, and its divergence from the method of hisscholastic predecessors and contemporaries, raises complex and often challenging issues. Descartes: A Guide for the Perplexed is a clear and thorough account of descartes' philosophy, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex thought of this key philosopher. The book covers the whole range of Descartes' philosophical work, offering a thematic review of his thought, together with detailed examination of the texts commonly encountered by students, including the Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. This book provides a cogent and reliable survey of the philosophical trends and influences apparent in Descartes' thought.
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extension, cannot be excluded from the concept of its shape or from that of its size, and so they cannot be clearly and distinctly understood without the clay. Hence, size and shape are modes of the clay. However, the clay can be understood to the exclusion of any shape or size, and so the clay is a substance. The third and final kind of distinction is the rational distinction, which also has two subspecies: Finally a rational distinction is a distinction between a substance and some attribute
his new method should maintain the benefits of logic, geometry and algebra while avoiding their defects. Since one of the main defects of dialectic and algebra is the variety and number of their rules, Descartes proposes only the following four rules for his new method: 1. [N]ever to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth; that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented
and attentive mind whose indubitable content is illuminated solely by the now undimmed natural light of reason. 1.4 DEDUCTION Whereas intuition concerns self-evident truths that are perceivable solely by the light of reason, deduction is the mental power everyone has for perceiving the links in a chain of reasoning from intuited self-evident truths, axioms or first principles to those that are more complex. Descartes characterizes deduction as ‘the inference of something as following
itself is not ‘fully precise’. 3 It should be noted here that Descartes’ use of ‘attribute’ in this context is not technical. Rather, he is using it in the looser sense of a being that is ‘naturally ascribable to something’, which also includes modes (see Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, AT VIIIB 348-9: CSM I 297). 4 For more on Descartes’ doctrine of attributes, see Justin Skirry,Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature (London, Continuum, 2005), pp. 53-6. 5 On this account, Descartes
attaining new8 order of23-4 and order of being23-4 method of doubt see also doubt24-8 geometrical9-11,20-1,23 analysis20,21,23-4 synthesis20,21-2,23-4,82 rules of10,91 mind see also Soul as better known than the body41-4 causal interaction with body, problem of135-8,143-4 ‘coextension’ with body147 existence of29-33 essence of33-5 incorruptible84-5,150 indivisible133-4 pineal gland, principle seat of148,152 really distinct from the body conceptual argument131-2