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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 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 number e is a mathematical constant approximately equal to 2.71828 that is the base of the natural logarithm and exponential function.It is sometimes called Euler's number, after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, though this can invite confusion with Euler numbers, or with Euler's constant, a different constant typically denoted .
Descartes justifies his omissions and obscurities with the remark that much was deliberately omitted "in order to give others the pleasure of discovering [it] for themselves." Descartes is often credited with inventing the coordinate plane because he had the relevant concepts in his book, [ 8 ] however, nowhere in La Géométrie does the modern ...
Animal machine or bête-machine (Fr., animal-machine), is a philosophical notion from Descartes in the 17th century who held that animal behaviour can be compared to the one of machines. Like them, animals would be an assembly of mechanical pieces and therefore unable to think and not gifted of consciousness , although they differ by their ...
Some writers, e.g. Williams [6] and Musgrave, [7] make no distinction between the deceiving God and evil demon arguments and regard anything said about the deceiving God as being equivalent to saying something about the evil demon. Other writers acknowledge that Descartes makes mention of both but then claim they are 'epistemologically equivalent'.
The Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am", [a] is the "first principle" of René Descartes's philosophy. He originally published it in French as je pense, donc je suis in his 1637 Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed. [1]
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]