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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 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 ...
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]
Snell's law (also known as the Snell–Descartes law, the ibn-Sahl law, [1] and the law of refraction) is a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction, when referring to light or other waves passing through a boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water, glass, or air.
The World, also called Treatise on the Light (French title: Traité du monde et de la lumière), is a book by René Descartes (1596–1650). Written between 1629 and 1633, it contains a nearly complete version of his philosophy, from method, to metaphysics, to physics and biology. Descartes espoused mechanical philosophy, a form of natural ...
Cartesian doubt is a systematic process of being skeptical about (or doubting) the truth of one's beliefs, which has become a characteristic method in philosophy. [3]: 403 Additionally, Descartes' method has been seen by many as the root of the modern scientific method. This method of doubt was largely popularized in Western philosophy by René ...
In the first part of his work, Descartes ponders the relationship between the thinking substance and the body. For Descartes, the only link between these two substances is the pineal gland (art. 31), the place where the soul is attached to the body. The passions that Descartes studies are in reality the actions of the body on the soul (art. 25).
Descartes' rule of signs. In mathematics, Descartes' rule of signs, described by René Descartes in his La Géométrie, counts the roots of a polynomial by examining sign changes in its coefficients. The number of positive real roots is at most the number of sign changes in the sequence of polynomial's coefficients (omitting zero coefficients ...