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Regulae ad directionem ingenii, or Rules for the Direction of the Mind is an unfinished treatise regarding the proper method for scientific and philosophical thinking by René Descartes. Descartes started writing the work in 1628, and it was eventually published in 1701 after Descartes' death. [1] This treatise outlined the basis for his later ...
The evil demon, also known as Deus deceptor, [1] malicious demon, [2] and evil genius, [1] [3] is an epistemological concept that features prominently in Cartesian philosophy. [1] In the first of his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes imagines that a malevolent God [1] or an evil demon, of "utmost power and cunning has employed all ...
Doubling the cube, also known as the Delian problem, is an ancient [a] [1] : 9 geometric problem. Given the edge of a cube, the problem requires the construction of the edge of a second cube whose volume is double that of the first. As with the related problems of squaring the circle and trisecting the angle, doubling the cube is now known to ...
The vortex theory of the atom was a 19th-century attempt by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) to explain why the atoms recently discovered by chemists came in only relatively few varieties but in very great numbers of each kind. Based on the idea of stable, knotted vortices in the ether or aether, it contributed an important mathematical legacy.
Descartes' rule of signs. In mathematics, Descartes' rule of signs, first described by René Descartes in his work La Géométrie, is a technique for getting information on the number of positive real roots of a polynomial. It asserts that the number of positive roots is at most the number of sign changes in the sequence of polynomial's ...
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 flavors. They are both doctrines of metaphysics, but they are different in scope and ...
Descartes' quantity of motion was different from momentum, but Newton defined the quantity of motion as the conjunction of the quantity of matter and velocity in Definition II of his Principia. In Definition III, he defined the force that resists a change in motion as the vis inertia of Descartes.
e. The Search for Truth by Natural Light [1] ( La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle) is an unfinished philosophical dialogue by René Descartes “set in the courtly culture of the ‘ honnête homme ’ and ‘ curiosité ’.”. [2] It was written in French (presumably after the Meditations was completed [3]) but first ...