The locus classicus for Descartes’ consideration on the laws of motion are the articles 36 through 45 of his Principles and the chapter seven of The World. In The World, Descartes introduces a fable about the creation of the world where he exposes the similitude between God’s creative and preservative acts. Descartes begins considering matter as devoid of all its secondary qualities: ‘let us expressly suppose that it [matter] does not have the form of earth, fire, or air, or any other more specific form, like that of wood, stone, or metal’ (AT XI, 33). Hence, Descartes claims that the only quality remaining in bodies is their extension, which is the only one we can conceive clear and distinct. In the beginning, then, God created an indefinite quantity of matter whose substantial quality is its extension. Once the matter was created, according to Descartes, God divides it by introducing motion in the universe:
Let us suppose, moreover, that
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First, Descartes contends that God’s perfection implies his immutability because a modification of his action would deny the perfection of the creation. Accordingly, Descartes says: ‘Thus, God imparted various motions to the parts of matter when he first created them, and he now preserves all this matter in the same way, and by the same process by which he originally created it’ (AT IXB, 62). The conservation of the initial conditions of the universe is possible because of God’s continual action on the universe. Finally, Descartes concludes this argument explaining that it is reasonable to think that God preserves the same quantity of motion in matter. Under these considerations, we can say that Descartes founds his physics on his metaphysical conception of God’s immutability, and it makes possible to universalize the laws of
Descartes strongly keeps the casual principle in mind for his reasoning; he realizes that a corporeal thing’s objective reality exceeds any property and would thus contradict the casual principle. Therefore, Descartes then considers three reasons for why corporeal things exist. Descartes contemplates, “ This substance is either a body, that is, a corporeal nature, in which case it will contain formally everything which is to be found objectively in the ideas; or else it is God, or some creature more noble than a body, in which case it will contain eminently whatever is to be found in the ideas (AT VII: 79; p.55).” To condense, Descartes considers corporeal things exist because of finite substances, God, or some creature. It is important to note that ‘some creature’ is thought to be, for example, an angel that is more noble than us humans but lesser than God. A body will have as much formal reality as it does in an idea’s objective reality; God and ‘some creature’ have the ability to cause properties (like ideas) in some thing, despite lacking the aforementioned
Elizabeth writes a letter to Descartes asking him to explain to her the relationship “there is between the soul, which is immaterial, and the body, which is material” (Margaret A.: p16). She seeks this clarification particularly on the aspect of how the soul influences the body movements. This question comes following a claim that Descartes had made “regarding the body and the soul” (Gordon B. and Katherine J.: p17 -19). He intimated that the body and the soul exist as single entities and that each has autonomous function. This is found in the philosophy of the dualism.
According to Descartes, the essence of material substance is simply extension, the property of filling up space. (Med. V) So solid geometry, which describes the possibility of dividing an otherwise uniform space into distinct parts, is a complete guide to the essence of body. It follows that there can be in reality only one extended substance, comprising all matter in a single spatial whole. From this, Descartes concluded that individual bodies are merely modes of the one extended being, that there can be no space void of extension, and that all motion must proceed by circular vortex. Thus, again, the true nature of bodies is understood by pure thought, without any information from the senses.
... God alone remains; and, given the truth of the principle that whatever exists has a cause, it follows, Descartes declares, that God exists we must of necessity conclude from the fact alone that I exist, or that the idea of a supremely perfect – that is of God – is in me, that the proof of God’s existence is grounded in the highest evidence” Descartes concludes that God must be the cause of him, and that God innately implanted the idea of infinite perfection in him.
René Descartes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved February 10, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes
Descartes: Philosophical Letters, translated and edited by Anthony Kenny, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1970 pp. 11f, 14f, 236f, 150f.
. Its most famous defender is Descartes, who argues that as a subject of conscious thought and experience, he cannot consist simply of spatially extended matter. His essential nature must be non-m...
Descartes proposal states hypothesizes that the world was once chaos and came to being in a very different form than it is today. It has passed through various stages, and the only permanent elements are the laws God established. These laws caused it to gradually evolve into its current form. Descartes proposal is, in part, a reaction against his scholastic education, which disappointed him. It is a reaction against the traditional Christian and scriptural understanding of the manner in which God created the world and has sustained it. Nevertheless, his conclusions also reflect his Scholastic education, maintaining the transcendence of God and the supremacy of Divine Law.
According to Descartes, “because our senses sometimes deceive us, I wanted to suppose that nothing was exactly as they led us to imagine (Descartes 18).” In order to extinguish his uncertainty and find incontrovertible truth, he chooses to “raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations (Descartes 59).” This foundation, which Descartes is certain to be the absolute truth, is “I think, therefore I am (Descartes 18).” Descartes argues that truth and proof of reality lies in the human mind, rather than the senses. In other words, he claims that the existence of material objects are not based on the senses because of human imperfection. In fact, he argues that humans, similarly to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, are incapable of sensing the true essence or existence of material objects. However, what makes an object real is human thought and the idea of that object, thus paving the way for Descartes’ proof of God’s existence. Because the senses are easily deceived and because Descartes understands that the senses can be deceived, Descartes is aware of his own imperfection. He
Descartes offers four different paths that our ideas of material objects could potentially come from, but only one of these causes stands its ground and remains a plausible way for proving the existence of material objects. In the sixth meditation Descartes explains his four possible causes for his ideas of material objects. The first is that God could have directly given him the ideas of material objects, The second is that he himself could be a cause of ideas, The third is that something else (a demon or similar) could have potentially given him these ideas, and the final possible cause are material objects themselves.
Outline and assess Descartes' arguments for the conclusion that mind and body are distinct substances.
Rene Descartes decision to shatter the molds of traditional thinking is still talked about today. He is regarded as an influential abstract thinker; and some of his main ideas are still talked about by philosophers all over the world. While he wrote the "Meditations", he secluded himself from the outside world for a length of time, basically tore up his conventional thinking; and tried to come to some conclusion as to what was actually true and existing. In order to show that the sciences rest on firm foundations and that these foundations lay in the mind and not the senses, Descartes must begin by bringing into doubt all the beliefs that come to him by the senses. This is done in the first of six different steps that he named "Meditations" because of the state of mind he was in while he was contemplating all these different ideas. His six meditations are "One:Concerning those things that can be called into doubt", "Two:Concerning the Nature of the Human mind: that it is better known than the Body", "Three: Concerning God, that he exists", "Four: Concerning the True and the False", "Five: Concerning the Essence of Material things, and again concerning God, that he exists" and finally "Six: Concerning the Existence of Material things, and the real distinction between Mind and Body". Although all of these meditations are relevant and necessary to understand the complete work as a whole, the focus of this paper will be the first meditation.
One of the ways in which Descartes attempts to prove that the mind is distinct from the body is through his claim that the mind occupies no physical space and is an entity with which people think, while the body is a physical entity and cannot serve as a mechanism for thought. [1]
Descartes is a very well-known philosopher and has influenced much of modern philosophy. He is also commonly held as the father of the mind-body problem, thus any paper covering the major answers of the problem would not be complete without covering his argument. It is in Descartes’ most famous work, Meditations, that he gives his view for dualism. Descartes holds that mind and body are com...
Therefore natural substances are capable of motion i.e. growing, gaining qualities, losing them and lastly being born and dying. In Book II of Physics and Parts of Animals Book 1, Aristotle goes on to contrast natural substances with artefacts, he states these are also capable of motion, but they move according to what they are made out of, he gives us an example of a wooden bed “if the bed sprouted, not a bed but wood would come up”3. Here Aristotle is contrasting two parts of nature – matter and form. An investigation of the principle of matter leads him to draw his important distinction between form and matter and in this essay I will explain and critically discuss why Aristotle holds that “we ought to speak of a things form and the sort of character it has as well, since the nature corresponding to the form is more important than the material nature”4.