display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
11 ideas
| 1400 | Some cause must unite the separate temporal sections of a person [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Because the entire span of one's life can be divided into countless parts, each one wholly independent of the rest, it does not follow from the fact that I existed a short time ago that I exist now, unless some cause creates and preserves me each moment. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §3.49) | |
| A reaction: How could I 'prove' that this computer is the same computer as it was five minutes ago, even after I have accepted the straightforward existence of the computer? This is the Enlightenment Project, the mad desire to prove absolutely everything. |
| 3609 | I am a thinking substance, which doesn't need a place or material support [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.33) | |
| A reaction: To me that sounds like "I concluded that I wasn't a human being", which highlights the bizarre wishful thinking that seems to have gripped the human race for the first few thousand years of its serious thinking. |
| 1401 | Since I only observe myself to be thinking, I conclude that that is my essence [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Since I do not observe that any other thing belongs necessarily to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists in this alone, that I am a thinking thing, or substance whose essence is thinking. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) | |
| A reaction: This actually appears to be my favourite confusion - of episemology with ontology. Compare 'whenever I see him he is smiling, so he must be happy'. Personally I am happy to say that my essence is thinking, as long as it needn't be conscious. |
| 2299 | I can exist without imagination and sensing, but they can't exist without me [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I can understand myself without the faculties of imagining and sensing, but not vice versa; I cannot understand them without me - a substance endowed with understanding. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §6.78) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a fundamental and important error on Descartes' part. The idea that understanding is possible without imagination (and even sensation) is wrong, and it leads to the misleading concept of 'pure' reason. |
| 6907 | For Descartes a person's essence is the mind because objects are perceived by mind, not senses [Descartes, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: For Descartes the essence of corporeal things is not an object of the senses, but only of the mind; and hence it is not the senses but the mind that is the essence of the perceiving subject, that is, of man. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641], 2) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §17 | |
| A reaction: This, of course, is why Descartes' approach can lead to idealism and solipsism, whereas the other approach leads to empiricism and animalism (Idea 6669). |
| 5017 | In thinking we shut ourselves off from other substances, showing our identity and separateness [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Because each one of us understands what he thinks, and that in thinking he can shut himself off from every other substance, we may conclude that each of us is really distinct from every other thinking substance and from corporeal substance. | |
| From: René Descartes (Principles of Philosophy [1646], I.60) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a novel argument which requires elucidation. I can 'shut myself off from every other substance'? If I shut myself off from thinking about food, does that mean hunger is not part of me? Or convince yourself that you don't have a brother? |
| 2283 | Our 'will' just consists of the feeling that when we are motivated to do something, there are no external pressures [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The will consists solely in the fact that when something is proposed to us by our intellect either to affirm or deny, we are moved in such a way that we sense we are determined to it by no external force. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.57) |
| 5010 | Our free will is so self-evident to us that it must be a basic innate idea [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It is so evident that we are possessed of a free will that can give or withhold its assent, that this may be counted as one of the first and most common notions found innately in us. | |
| From: René Descartes (Principles of Philosophy [1646], I.39) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me plausible to say that we have an innate conception of our own will (our ability to make decisions), though Hume says we only learn about the will from experience, but the idea that it is absolutely 'free' might never cross our minds. |
| 3789 | The more reasons that compel me, the freer I am [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I move the more freely towards an object in proportion to the number of reasons which compel me. | |
| From: René Descartes (Letter to Mersenne [1642]) |
| 4310 | We have inner awareness of our freedom [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: We have inner awareness of our freedom. | |
| From: René Descartes (works [1643]) | |
| A reaction: This begs a few questions. I may be directly aware that I have not been hypnotised, but no one would accept it as proof. |
| 2282 | My capacity to make choices with my free will extends as far as any faculty ever could [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I experience that the will or free choice I have received from God is limited by no boundaries whatever, …indeed it is so great in me that I cannot grasp the idea of any greater faculty. | |
| From: René Descartes (Meditations [1641], §4.56) |