Rene Descartes
-most important figure in modernity/modern era of philosophy
-17th century: 1596-1650
-Descartes considered founder of new scientific, modern philosophic method
-Jesuit
Descartes ambition was to replace Aristotle
-Aristotle’s ideas were adopted by church, became scholastics, prevented expansion
-wanted to write a new manual, new method, etc etc
-to replace logic of schools, petrified (?), scholastics, etc
-”Descartes Conqueror of Aristotle” painting where he’s standing on an Aristotle book
-obsessed with method; believed that is what really mattered
-”Discourse on the Method”
-first philosophical book written in national language, French; before this all learned people wrote in Greek/Latin
-”Meditation of First Philosophy” - proto philosophia, Aristotelean term, metaphysics
-”Principles of Philosophy”
-his philo is also called “philosophy of doubt”
-doubt: a central feeling throughout modernity
-not doubt that leads into skepticism (ie. Never the kind that leads into believing that we never can know)
-cf. Greeks, main sentiment was amazement, astonishment at cosmos
-all sciences like a tree - tree representing all of human knowledge
-roots are metaphysics
-metaphysics - something that comes after physics
-came from Aristotle’s book which came after Physica
-interrogation of first causes, principle things
-”principles of knowledge”
-God, Soul
-the basics, the roots, absolute things
-trunk is physics
-true principles of material things
-branches are the other sciences - medicine, mechanics, morals
-random dream, malicious demon appears, he has an encyclopedia
-another one, he’s reading a poem “What Road in Life Should I follow”
-realized that his mission was to find a new scientific method
-Sciencia Mirabilis (?)
-distinguished four levels of wisdom
1) notions clear in themselves
2) sensory evidence
3) conversing with others
4) reading books
5) Philosophy
-task of philosophy is to search for the first causes
Meditations:
-starts by doubting; radical doubt; looking for something that is absolutely certain
-everything that has ever deceived him just once, he’s going to consider it absolutely wrong
-senses, sensory evidence - but senses don’t deceive us about things that are closer
-madmen? Even madmen aren’t deceived in every single aspect of life
-dreams; in dreams even those things close to us are in doubt - eg we might imagine ourselves clothed when we’re asleep nekkid; in dreams, all sensory evidence is doubtable
-exaggerated metaphysical doubt
-but even in dreams, there are elements of true things - colours for example, those colours are true; something that resists doubt
-all sensory “facts” are false but mathematical truths resist this means of doubt, dreams
-Malicious Demon hypothesis
-omnipotent but evil so that he is always deceiving, even with math
-everything is a lie. 2+3=18, but we think it’s 5 because of the malicious demon
-thus even mathematical truths are doubtful
-”Hyperbolical Doubt”
-at this point, everything is put into doubt
-point of Adhevities (?)
-I am, I exist - Ego sum, ego existo
-who is this I?!
=Cogito - a thing that thinks
-a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, is (un)willing, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions
-thing - res = substance, an essence
-> I think therefore I am.
-immediacy. As soon as one thinks, one knows one exists; ceases once
We no longer think
=> human being, cogito, reason, individual mind becomes the subject, takes on the central role, becomes the root of knowledge; in ancient Greece it was the cosmos = this is what is basically called modernity
-so now there’s Cogito (immaterial) - but there’s also “res extensa” - material world
-God is the third substance
SOURCE
Jankovic, Zoran. Class Lecture on Descartes. University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 26 Mar 2010.
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