Descartes

[Peachy_Nietzsche]

Although vastly intelligent and hard-to-refute, I see Descartes’s works as accomplishing nothing more than shaking the very foundation of a healthy logic, by bringing into interrogation every simple thought process which we have accepted since we were children and turning the mind itself into a disorganized and confused nightmare.

[Wonderer]

@Peachy Nietzsche

Although vastly intelligent and hard-to-refute, I see Descartes’s works as accomplishing nothing more than shaking the very foundation of a healthy logic, by bringing into interrogation every simple thought process which we have accepted since we were children and turning the mind itself into a disorganized and confused nightmare.

Descartes questioned his own assumptions. I’m not sure vastly intelligent is really a good way to describe him. he’s about as deep as keeanu reeves is in “the matrix”. Aside from being long winded and driven by religious bias, his metaphysical approach to examining the world is by making things seem complex instead of simple.

In the end he created his own delusions…

[anon]

umm, Descartes was a pretty smart guy.

[Wonderer]

lol, i kind of laughed out loud at that one.

His famed arguments for God existing are long winded and fraught with errors.

here is what wiki boiled them down to:

Something cannot come from nothing.

The cause of an idea must have at least as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality.

I have in me an idea of God. This idea has infinite objective reality.

I cannot be the cause of this idea, since I am not an infinite and perfect being. I don’t have enough formal reality. Only an infinite and perfect being could cause such an idea.

So God — a being with infinite formal reality — must exist (and be the source of my idea of God).

An absolutely perfect being is a good, benevolent being.

So God is benevolent.

So God would not deceive me and would not permit me to error without giving me a way to correct my errors

The second statement is just that, a statement. His belief that his idea has infinite objective reality and his belief that the only possible cause of this complete idea is God is one assumption following another.

He basically says that he understand and has an idea of a perfect god. he says that the objectiveness of our ideas must have actual causes, and since he is not perfect, he reasons only a perfect god could have induced said perfect ideas…

long winded bs.

[Wonderer]

Comon guys?

What did Descartes give us?

i think therefore i am?

prolific for his time? perhaps.

I recommend reading Descartes so you don;t repeat his mistakes.

[Wobbly]

Descartes gave us, in an age of religious intolerance to intellectual freedom, one of the first and most serious distinctly modern looks at the foundation and possibility of knowledge. He gave us a revolution in metaphysics away from Aristotelian formulations of properties toward a modern scientific inquiry of qualities through mathematics. His version of the subject/object is the modern folk psychological account of the subject object. There is a subject, you, who investigates external objects and understands them in term.s of their subjective manifestations. Substance Dualism is still the default ontological position of most people who have not considered such things critically.

His main and most lasting contribution is the primacy epistemology over ontology and the use of subjectivity as the most basic mode of enquiry.

In a single phrase, eidetic reduction.

[Wonderer]

He doubted the physical and wandered through the metaphysical. I’m sure this was revolutionary at the time, but inevitably he wandered to a position which was favorable for the church.

So he opened a can of worms?

[Wobbly]

I would think that he was a decisive blow against the church. Instead of saying that that which is most important, the mind and god, were notoriously difficult to understand and mysterious, Descartes said that the mind was the existent which humans know the best. In fact, he would say that we could know the mind infallibly. He demystified what many think is the most important ontological mode, and secured for man infallible knowledge of himself and his existence. This assumption is what drove the enlightenment and allowed for the demystification of science. He secured the starting point. Or, perhaps, more accurately, he gave us a type of thinking that allows for a starting point to be secured at all.

[rackedrick]

@Wonderer

He doubted the physical and wandered through the metaphysical. I’m sure this was revolutionary at the time, but inevitably he wandered to a position which was favorable for the church.

So he opened a can of worms?

He did to God what he did of all of his other ideas. He created them. What Descartes showed is the capacity of the mind to abstract. Essentially the idea that mind is synonymous with reality. His pure power of thought is magnificent and his thoughts are those of a mathematician. Of someone who knows what truth is.

[humegotitright]

Descartes style of thinking was revolutionary. Sadly his conclusions were not.

[Wonderer]

@rackedrick

@Wonderer

He doubted the physical and wandered through the metaphysical. I’m sure this was revolutionary at the time, but inevitably he wandered to a position which was favorable for the church.

So he opened a can of worms?

He did to God what he did of all of his other ideas. He created them. What Descartes showed is the capacity of the mind to abstract. Essentially the idea that mind is synonymous with reality. His pure power of thought is magnificent and his thoughts are those of a mathematician. Of someone who knows what truth is.

my brain hurts!!!

perhaps his complex sentences are rough diamonds. perhaps his ability to thoroughly explain an idea is a gift of communicative skill.

His conclusions to me are useless. Perhaps they have ignited a stream of free thought, and perhaps that has benefited me, but philosophically he is a training wheel.

For me the way he wrote was a nightmare. Constantly using running on in a way that only when you decipher the sentence as a whole can you understand its meaning.

His initial content was relatable. we should all doubt reality once in awhile.

His conclusions were tragic. Yay god.

[Only_Humean]

@Wonderer

His conclusions to me are useless. Perhaps they have ignited a stream of free thought, and perhaps that has benefited me, but philosophically he is a training wheel.

Not forgetting that besides setting the groundwork for modern (post-Schoolmen) philosophy and bringing rational enquiry far enough forward that the Church couldn’t simply bulldoze over it, he also invented analytical geometry, independently discovered and described refraction and reflection and gave us Cartesian co-ordinates. I wouldn’t be averse to the term “vastly intelligent”…

[Xunzian]

I dunno. The Cartesian system of geometry (like Cartesian coordinates) is pretty useful, so I’d give him his due props on that one. He helped create the foundation of what would become calculus. That isn’t anything to sneeze at. He did some work with optics and momentum too. Those certainly qualify as important contributions.

And while part of larger movements, his rationalism and skepticism (flawed though they may be) certainly helped usher in the Enlightenment.

[bakemd]

I’m a fan of Descartes. Not only for his philosophical contributions but also mathematical.

But to call him long-winded? Really? We’re talking about philosophy here.

I agree a lot of his ideas were assumptions based on assumptions. But even if the only thing he did give us was “I think therefore I am”, that was a damn good contribution. I mean, Newton gave us why an apple falls down… thats pretty minimal. And sometimes people that give us immenseley complicated and advanced things give us only problems. Look at Oppenheimer. But one thing Descartes did for me, and I’m being serious, is: he proved to me that I do exist, when I couldn’t think of one way to prove it to myself. Come up with another, I’m all ears. Really, I’d be interested, I’m not being as asshole lol.

[Peachy_Nietzsche]

@bakemd

But one thing Descartes did for me, and I’m being serious, is: he proved to me that I do exist, when I couldn’t think of one way to prove it to myself. Come up with another, I’m all ears. Really, I’d be interested, I’m not being as asshole lol.

What if you are nothing more than a momentary incoherence which is understood as “organized” only by itself. But really, you are nothing more than particles and energy moving arbitrarily in a systematic process. You only have the illusion of “control”, but really, everything that has happened and everything that will happen is already set in superposition, waiting to be triggered like dominoes.

[Faust]

Subjectivism. He changed the way philosophy was done. That’s big.

He was full of shit, but that doesn’t take away from his influence on technique.

It took Hume and Nietzsche to undo this influence. Except that, as Sitt points out, his influence isn’t actually quite undone yet. Even if it should be, by now.

[xzc]

He was one of the many assassins of God.

@Beyond Good and Evil

There are still harmless observers of themselves who believe that there are “immediate certainties,” for example, “I think,” or that superstition of Schopenhauer’s, “I will,” just as if perception here was able to seize upon its object pure and naked, as “ thing in itself,” and as if there was no falsification either on the part of the subject or on the part of the object.* However, the fact is that “immediate certainty,” just as much as “absolute cognition” and “thing in itself,” contains within itself a contradictio in adjecto [contradiction in terms]. I’ll repeat it a hundred times: people should finally free themselves of the seduction of words! Let folk believe that knowing is knowing all of something. The philosopher must say to himself, “When I dismantle the process which is expressed in the sentence ‘I think,’ I come upon a series of daring assertions whose grounding is difficult, perhaps impossible—for example, that I am the one who thinks, that there must be some general something that thinks, that thinking is an action and effect of a being which is to be thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘I’, and finally that it is already established what we mean by thinking—that I know what thinking is. For if I had not yet decided these questions in myself, how could I assess that what just happened might not perhaps be ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’?” In short, this “I think” presupposes that I compare my immediate condition with other conditions which I know in myself in order to establish what it is. Because of this referring back to other forms of “knowing,” it certainly does not have any immediate “certainty” for me. Thus, instead of that “immediate certainty,” which the people may believe in the case under discussion, the philosopher encounters a series of metaphysical questions, really essential problems of intellectual knowledge, as follows: “Where do I acquire the idea of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ‘I,’ and indeed of an ‘I’ as a cause, finally even of an ‘I’ as the cause of thinking?” Anyone who dares to answer those metaphysical questions right away with an appeal to some kind of intuitive cognition, as does the man who says “I think and know that at least this is true, real, and certain”—such a person nowadays will be met by a philosopher with a smile and two question marks. “My dear sir,” the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, “it is unlikely that you are not mistaken but why such absolute truth?”—

So far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned, I will never tire of emphasizing over and over again a small brief fact which these superstitious types are unhappy to concede—namely, that a thought comes when “it” wants to and not when “I” wish, so that it’s a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but that this “it” is precisely that old, celebrated “I” is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an assertion, in no way an “immediate certainty.” After all, we’ve already done too much with this “it thinks”: this “it” already contains an interpretation of the event and is not part of the process itself. Following grammatical habits we conclude here as follows: “Thinking is an activity. To every activity belongs someone who does the action, therefore—.” With something close to this same pattern, the older atomists, in addition to the “force” which created effects, also looked for that clump of matter where the force was located, out of which it worked—the atom. Stronger heads finally learned how to cope without this “remnant of earth,” and perhaps one day people, including even the logicians, will also grow accustomed to cope without that little “it” (to which the honourable old “I” has reduced itself).

[Faust]

Yes, x. And so much for Cartesian “doubt”.