Descartes' Major Tenets
Descartes Major Tenets
Descartes was one of the most well-respected thinkers of his time, and he applied his special brand of logic to a wide-variety of disciplines, most notably mathematics and philosophy. The Cartesian approach to philosophy, like many approaches to philosophy, looked at the interaction of the mind and the brain. Were the mind and the brain one united organism, did they interact with one another, was one of them superior or more powerful than the other? All of those questions were critical to Descartes' explanation of the universe.
As explained by Nonaka and Takeuchi, the body has an extension into space but cannot think. In contrast, the mind has no extension into space, but can think. Nonaka and Takeuchi used one of Descartes' most famous examples, his explanation of the qualities of honey wax, to explain his dualistic approach to the world. "As for his epistemology, Descartes argued that honey wax's qualities, such as taste, scent, color, and size, which are apparent to the senses, change if we put it near fire; therefore, wax itself cannot be sensible. Thus true knowledge about external things can be obtained by the mind, not the senses" (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 2008).
The featured example of Cartesian philosophy in the textbook only provides a brief glimpse into Descartes' philosophy. It is important to understand that there were significant shifts in Descartes' philosophy throughout his lifetime, and that experts vary somewhat significantly in how they choose to divide Cartesian philosophy (Hatfield, 2008). Descartes' new metaphysics focused on five different elements: (1) how do our minds know; (2) the mark of truth; (3) the nature of reality; (4) the mind-body relation; and (5) God and error.
The first tenet in Cartesian metaphysics is the understanding of how the mind knows. A cornerstone of Cartesian philosophy was that human beings had some innate knowledge and were capable of discovering additional facts. These facts would allow them to understand the fundamental truths about reality....
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