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A long-lost letter by René Descartes has come to light at Haverford College, where it had lain buried in the archives for more than a century, and the discovery could revolutionize our view of one of the 17th-century French philosopher's major works.
René Descartes died not from natural causes but from a fatal dose of arsenic administered by a Catholic missionary working in Stockholm, it has been claimed.
The man so famous for thinking animals are mere machines lived on a diet of vegetables from his garden! According to his friend and biographer Andrien Baillet, at least at home he ate “vegetables and herbs all the time, such as turnips, coleworts, panado, salads from his garden, potatoes with wholemeal bread.”
'Knowledge about our own mental states seems to be the most secure thing in the world, doesn’t it? I certainly know what I feel and think right now and I know it more securely than any other thing I might know. Right? Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel begs to differ." (Edouard Machery, Psychology Today Blogs)
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But Descartes didn’t just want to establish a new science; the opening lines of the First Meditation reveal that he wanted to establish a lasting science, one that would be free from the kind of overthrow he was attempting to affect of Aristotelian science. But how can we free our science from the possibility of substantial future revisions? Given the nature of his own science, I think Descartes realized that scientific revision only occurs when new theories can be proposed that are worthy in their own right and which explain how the scientists working under the old theory came to falsely believe it to be correct, by demonstrating how things may appear to be as the old theory claimed.
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So when we talk about reason in this context we must mean something less, specifically something like the operations of the mind or pure intellect that make us simply see a connection of entailment between two ideas or propositions, such that we see one of them as necessarily following from the other (this fits with Descartes’s remark at 7:144 that certain intellectual activities give rise to spontaneous convictions in the truth of ideas, which I take to be the activity of reason). Since reason as such is primitive and innate, and not the result of a previous judgment or training, we don’t have to set it aside as dubitable as a result of the dialectic of doubt, again as mentioned in 9A:204. And we can use this understanding of what reason is to say what is dubitable as well: a claim is dubitable if and only if we can rationally entertain a scenario in which it is false. Obviously this means that the things reason compels us to believe, such as connections of entailment, are themselves indubitable, as reason won’t allow us to entertain a scenario in which they are false.
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