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The World, also called Treatise on the Light (French title: Traité du monde et de la lumière), is a book by René Descartes (1596–1650). Written between 1629 and 1633, it contains a nearly complete version of his philosophy, from method, to metaphysics, to physics and biology.
René Descartes (/ deɪˈkɑːrt / day-KART or UK: / ˈdeɪkɑːrt / 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. Mathematics was paramount to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously ...
Cartesianism is the philosophical and scientific system of René Descartes and its subsequent development by other seventeenth century thinkers, most notably François Poullain de la Barre, Nicolas Malebranche and Baruch Spinoza. [1] Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences. [2] For him, philosophy was a thinking system ...
Natural philosophy. Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe. It was dominant before the development of modern science. From the ancient world (at least since Aristotle) until the 19th century, natural philosophy was the common ...
Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes (principally living things) are similar to complicated machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other. The doctrine of mechanism in philosophy comes in two different varieties. They are both doctrines of metaphysics, but they are different in scope and ...
Discourse on the Method is one of the most influential works in the history of modern philosophy, and important to the development of natural sciences. [2] In this work, Descartes tackles the problem of skepticism, which had previously been studied by other philosophers. While addressing some of his predecessors and contemporaries, Descartes modified their approach to account for a truth he ...
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, [1] or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. [2] Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as ...
Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena. [1] It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical position that interprets a complex system as the sum of its parts. [2]