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Descartes distinguished six basic passions: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness. All of these passions, he argued, represented different combinations of the original spirit, and influenced the soul to will or want certain actions. He argued, for example, that fear is a passion that moves the soul to generate a response in the body.
v. t. e. 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. [1][2]
Descartes describes philosophy as like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, its trunk physics, and the branches are the rest of the sciences, mainly medicine, mechanics, and morals that is the last level of wisdom. In the same way that trees have fruits in their outer parts, the usefulness of philosophy is also contained in the areas that stem ...
Dioptrique. La dioptrique (in English Dioptrique, Optics, or Dioptrics) is a short treatise by René Descartes. It was published in 1637 included in one of the Essays written with Discourse on the Method. In this essay Descartes uses various models to understand the properties of light. This essay is known as Descartes' greatest contribution to ...
In geometry, Descartes' theorem states that for every four kissing, or mutually tangent, circles, the radii of the circles satisfy a certain quadratic equation. By solving this equation, one can construct a fourth circle tangent to three given, mutually tangent circles. The theorem is named after René Descartes, who stated it in 1643.
Atomism. Atomism (from Greek ἄτομον, atomon, i.e. "uncuttable, indivisible") [1][2][3] is a natural philosophy proposing that the physical universe is composed of fundamental indivisible components known as atoms. References to the concept of atomism and its atoms appeared in both ancient Greek and ancient Indian philosophical traditions.
For example, what John Polkinghorne terms 'conceptual' or 'epistemological' reductionism [5] is the definition provided by Simon Blackburn [10] and by Jaegwon Kim: [11] that form of reductionism which concerns a program of replacing the facts or entities involved in one type of discourse with other facts or entities from another type, thereby ...
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 ...