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Dioptrique is a treatise by René Descartes on the nature and properties of light, published in 1637. It contains his famous Law of Refraction, based on models of light as a stick, a wine vat, and a tennis ball.
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.
Cartesianism is the system of René Descartes and his followers, who emphasized reason and innate ideas over sensory experience. It involved mind-body dualism, ontology, epistemology, and criticism of Aristotelianism and empiricism.
Learn about Descartes' metaphor of the tree of knowledge to describe the relations among different parts of philosophy. The tree's roots are metaphysics, its trunk is physics, and its branches are medicine, mechanics and morals.
Rules 13–24 deal with what Descartes terms "perfectly understood problems", or problems in which all of the conditions relevant to the solution of the problem are known, and which arise principally in arithmetic and geometry. Rules 25–36 deal with "imperfectly understood problems", or problems in which one or more conditions relevant to the ...
Descartes was a substance dualist, and argued that reality was composed of two radically different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on the other. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other.
Descartes' idea of language is that it is a form of self-expression, not merely communication…Modern linguistics hasn't dealt with, or rather hasn't fully acknowledged, problems raised by Cartesian philosophy. They have been glossed over as unnecessary problems of a generally well-accepted theory.
Learn to edit; Community portal; ... He is known for his research on early modern philosophy and his translation of Descartes' Discourse on the Method ... Mobile view ...