About this title: Rene Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In his Discourse on Method he outlined the contrast between mathematics and experimental sciences, and the extent to which each one can achieve certainty. Drawing on his own work in geometry, optics, astronomy and physiology, Descartes developed the ...
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1968
ISBN-13:9780140442069ISBN:0140442065
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Highlighting/underlining. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 192 p. Audience: General/trade. Used but a great reading/study copy. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1968
ISBN-13:9780140442069ISBN:0140442065
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Some underlining throughout text. Covers are straight and crisp with no creases or imperfections. No creasing on spine. Binding is tight. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 192 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1968
ISBN-13:9780140442069ISBN:0140442065
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. solid book with clean lightly tanning pgs, book shows shelf, edge & corner wear, Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 192 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780140442069ISBN:0140442065
Description: A good reading copy only. Previous owners name inscribed inside front. Book has tanning or browning due to normal aging process. -, Mass Market PaperBack, Good / read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Book shows minor use. Cover and Binding have minimal wear and the pages have only minimal creases. A tradition of southern quality and service. All books guaranteed at the Atlanta Book Company. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1968
ISBN-13:9780140442069ISBN:0140442065
Description: Near Fine. Penguin Classics. Clean and tight, a very nice unmarked copy. 4.5 X 7" Good packing, prompt shipping. Member, Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association. read more
"My take on this monolith: pretty cool. It made me feel like I could come up with the idea of "cogito" myself, which was a great and much needed boost to my ego. I started smoking again while I was reading this, thought I'm not sure if that means it's better or worse!"
"In a quest for certainty, Descarte questions (doubts) everything and wipes the slate clean by pretending that "everything was false." But then he rebuilds reality through his recognition that if he thought all was false, then thought itself must be real. Hence his well-known observation that, "I think, therefore I am." As to the question of why man, unlike other beings, has rationality, Descarte weaves the science of cause and effect into his argument and concludes that such rationality, while its expression is imperfect in man, must necessarily stem from a perfect being, which is God. From there, Descarte states that man's objective on earth was to use reason to approximate the perfection of God. But Descartes' philosophy leads humans away from their biological being. The world of thought takes precedence over the body. We become heads without bodies, rational souls not biological souls. We are deep in knowledge about the external world but not about ourselves. With his famous "I think" observation, he assumes "I" is "think," when it could just as easily have been stated that that "I exist, therefore I think." Afterall, if the body dies, how can one think? Our existence as biological beings leads to a different type of certainty (how to live, live well and, perhaps, how to live authentically). It leads to a different kind of perfection (how to preserve oneself) and a different kind of philosophy (how to use reason to preserve the self and how to promote social order in ways that preserve the self), but this is not the path that Descarte follows."
"'I think therefore I am' Probably the most quoted philosophical reference around today. But people generally don't know what it means! Descartes is reputed as the Father of Modern Philosophy, the bringer of new ways of thinking, of revising our beliefs. Though a blatant sexist, speciesist and bigot he was a man of his time. His philosophy however was not. Imagine an evil genius, he has your brain in a jar somewhere and is manipulating it to make you believe all that you perceive around you. You can see, smell, feel, taste, hear and believe all of them. Descartes said that all of these senses could well be the creation of that evil genius and we have no reason to believe that the world around us it real. All that Descartes could safely assume was real was his mind. For if the mind was not real, how could the genius deceive you? Thought is the essence of man, it's reality. Descartes believed in something known commonly as Two Substance Dualism, and more academically as Cartesian Dualism. This states that humans have a material and a mental substance, each being separate. When the body dies the mind will survive as it is not dependant on the body, though the body needs the mind to make it human. At the time this was ground breaking, and it didn't contradict Christian orthodoxy (of whom Descartes was a pious believer). All of this is nowadays taken for granted, this knowledge of so pivotal a change in the book of history is equally relevant today. Though not my favourite philosophy (preferring works of Mill and Sartre) it is none the less core stuff and should appear on every self respecting philosophers shelves."
"I think this book is the turning point in the development of modern thinking. It was written after Galileo had his problems and I think Descartes was trying to reassure the powers that be that reason and revelation need not contradict each other. Basically, I think it is Plato, reworked, so that God replaces Good or eternal truth. I found in it a fairly modern interpretation of God. I think Descartes was a Deist.
It is also a description of the process of coming to know."
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