Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [233]
Descartes’s conclusions about the nature of the universe and human beings had important implications. His separation of mind and matter allowed scientists to view matter as dead or inert, as something that was totally .separate from themselves and could be investigated independently by reason. The split between mind and body led Westerners to equate their identity with mind and reason rather than with the whole organism. Descartes has rightly been called the father of modern rationalism (see the box above). His books were placed on the papal Index of Forbidden Books and condemned by many Protestant theologians. The radical Cartesian split between mind and matter, and between mind and body, had devastating implications not only for traditional religious views of the universe but also for how Westerners viewed themselves.
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The Father of Modern Rationalism
René Descartes has long been viewed as the founder of modern rationalism and modern philosophy because he believed that human beings could understand the world— itself a mechanical system—by the same rational principles inherent in mathematical thinking. In his Discourse on Method, he elaborated on his approach to discovering truth.
René Descartes, Discourse on Method
In place of the numerous precepts which have gone to constitute logic, I came to believe that the four following rules would be found sufficient, always provided I took the firm and unswerving resolve never in a single instance to fail in observing them.
The first was to accept nothing as true which I did not evidently know to be such, that is to say, scrupulously to avoid precipitance and prejudice, and in the judgments I passed to include nothing additional to what had presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I could have no occasion for doubting it.
The second, to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as may be required for its adequate solution.
The third, to arrange my thoughts in order, beginning with things the simplest and easiest to know, so that I may then ascend little by little, as it were step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex, and in doing so, to assign an order of thought even to those objects which are not of themselves in any such order of precedence.
And the last, in all cases to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I should be assured of omitting nothing.
Those long chains of reasonings, each step simple and easy, which geometers are wont to employ in arriving even at the most difficult of their demonstrations, have led me to surmise that all the things we human beings are competent to know are interconnected in the same manner, and that none are so remote as to be beyond our reach or so hidden that we cannot discover them— that is, provided we abstain from accepting as true what is not thus related, i.e., keep always to the order required for their deduction one from another. And I had no great difficulty in determining what the objects are with which I should begin, for that I already knew, namely, that it was with the simplest and easiest. Bearing in mind, too, that of all those who in time past have sought for truth in the sciences, the mathematicians alone have been able to find any demonstrations, that is to say, any reasons which are certain and evident, I had no doubt that it must have been by a procedure of this kind that they had obtained them.
Describe Descartes’s principles of inquiry and compare them with Newton’s rules of reasoning. What are the main similarities between these systems of thinking?
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The Scientific Method and the Spread of Scientific Knowledge
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FOCUS QUESTION: How