display all the ideas for this combination of texts
2 ideas
| 7504 | Modern science comes from Descartes' view that knowledge doesn't need moral purity [Descartes, by Foucault] |
| Full Idea: Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and know the truth. After Descartes, direct evidence is enough, and we have a nonascetic subject of knowledge; this change makes possible the institutionalisation of modern science. | |
| From: report of René Descartes (Meditations [1641]) by Michel Foucault - On the Genealogy of Ethics | |
| A reaction: I would have thought Gassendi and the British Empiricists would be a more plausible source for this shift of attitude. Plato would relegate modern science to a lower level of knowledge. |
| 17651 | Without words or other symbols, we have no world [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Goodman seems to have a particularly extreme version of the commitment to philosophy as linguistic. Non-human animals have no world, it seems. |