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This gave Descartes his first inkling that the mind and body were different things. The mind, according to Descartes, was a "thinking thing" (Latin: res cogitans), and an immaterial substance. This "thing" was the essence of himself, that which doubts, believes, hopes, and thinks.
Both Descartes and Fermat used a single axis in their treatments and have a variable length measured in reference to this axis. [3] The concept of using a pair of axes was introduced later, after Descartes' La Géométrie was translated into Latin in 1649 by Frans van Schooten and his students. These commentators introduced several concepts ...
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.
Foundationalism is an attempt to respond to the regress problem of justification in epistemology. According to this argument, every proposition requires justification to support it, but any justification also needs to be justified itself.
The Dream of Human Life, by unknown artist, based on Michelangelo’s drawing The Dream, c. 1533. The dream argument is the postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore, any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and ...
The "ghost in the machine" is a term originally used to describe and critique the concept of the mind existing alongside and separate from the body.In more recent times, the term has several uses, including the concept that the intellectual part of the human mind is influenced by emotions; and within fiction, for an emergent consciousness residing in a computer.
Roman tabula, or wax tablet, with stylus. Tabula rasa (/ ˈ t æ b j ə l ə ˈ r ɑː s ə,-z ə, ˈ r eɪ-/; Latin for "blank slate") is the idea of individuals being born empty of any built-in mental content, so that all knowledge comes from later perceptions or sensory experiences.
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 ...