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Updated: May 6, 2025
The English reader may be referred, also, to Mahaffy's Descartes, 1880, in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics; to the article "Cartesianism," Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. v., by Edward Caird; and, for a complete discussion, to the English translation of Fischer's Descartes and his School' by J.P. Gordy, 1887.
Bound, like the physics of the moderns and the metaphysics of the ancients, to the cinematographical method, it ended with the conclusion, implicitly admitted at the start and immanent in the method itself: All is given. That metaphysics hesitated at first between the two paths seems to us unquestionable. The indecision is visible in Cartesianism.
The denial of substantiality to individual things, brought in by the occasionalists, is completed by Spinoza, who boldly and logically proclaims pantheism on the basis of Cartesianism and gives to the divine All-one a naturalistic instead of a theological character. Spinoza.%
It displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his readiness to follow where the argument leads. He is able already to look beyond Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man of his time was more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle. This quality of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the future.
It explains the fact that the court of Louis XIV., however corrupt, was decorous compared with the courts of Henry IV. and Louis XV.; a severe standard was set up, if it was not observed. The genius of Pascal made the fortunes of Jansenism. He outlived his Cartesianism and became its most influential spokesman.
Gratefully recognizing the suggestions from both sides, Leibnitz called Cartesianism the antechamber of the true philosophy, and atomism the preparation for the theory of monads. From the first it followed that the substances were self-acting forces; from the second, that they were immaterial units.
The two axioms which he launched upon the world the supremacy of reason, and the invariability of natural laws struck directly at the foundations of orthodoxy. Pascal was attacking Cartesianism when he made his memorable attempt to discredit the authority of reason, by showing that it is feeble and deceptive.
He was simply operating with the ideas which were all round him in a society saturated with Cartesianism, supremacy of human reason, progressive enlightenment, the value of this life for its own sake, and the standard of utility.
Has anything ever been ascribed to the agency of Satan himself which could more clearly render him an accomplice in the sins of men? From the bosom of Cartesianism two systems arose, one in principle, but widely different in their developments and ultimate results. We allude to the celebrated schemes of Spinoza and Malebranche.
When we speak of Cartesianism we do not mean the metaphysical system of the master, or any of his particular views such as that of innate ideas. We mean the general principles, which were to leave an abiding impression on the texture of thought: the supremacy of reason over authority, the stability of the laws of Nature, rigorous standards of proof.
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