Difference between revisions of "Descartes"
(inclusion of neutrality) |
m |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher. | Rene Descartes was a French philosopher. | ||
| − | To write his famous ''Meditations on First Philosophy'', Descartes locked himself in a room and thought about existence, arriving at the conclusion that he, as a thinking person, must exist, because even if existence is a delusion, there must be someone to be deluded. However, he was still not sure that the things he perceived exist as well. He used a variant of [[Anselm]]'s proof of the existence of [[God]] to decide that perhaps he wasn't deluded, and perhaps things did exist after all. He thought the [[soul]] lived in the pineal gland, and when someone does something, it's just an accident because the brain doesn't control the body, God does. This "god-robot" theory of consciousness got him into arguments with [[Hobbes]]. | + | To write his famous ''Meditations on First Philosophy'', Descartes locked himself in a room and thought about existence, arriving at the conclusion that he, as a thinking person, must exist, because even if existence is a delusion, there must be someone to be deluded. However, he was still not sure that the things he perceived exist as well. He used a variant of [[Anselm]]'s proof of the existence of [[God]] to decide that perhaps he wasn't deluded, and perhaps things did exist after all. He thought the [[soul]] lived in the pineal gland, and when someone does something, it's just an accident because the brain doesn't control the body, God does. This "god-robot" theory of consciousness got him into arguments with [[Hobbes]]. He also used God and a demon in attempts to justify his sense-perceptions and why they were perceived to be as they seemed rather than as something different, which is related to Berkeley's [[idealism]] in the sense that it is the mind which has the ideas of objects, but conforms to the 'two-world' theory of John Locke. |
Revision as of 08:46, March 20, 2007
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher.
To write his famous Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes locked himself in a room and thought about existence, arriving at the conclusion that he, as a thinking person, must exist, because even if existence is a delusion, there must be someone to be deluded. However, he was still not sure that the things he perceived exist as well. He used a variant of Anselm's proof of the existence of God to decide that perhaps he wasn't deluded, and perhaps things did exist after all. He thought the soul lived in the pineal gland, and when someone does something, it's just an accident because the brain doesn't control the body, God does. This "god-robot" theory of consciousness got him into arguments with Hobbes. He also used God and a demon in attempts to justify his sense-perceptions and why they were perceived to be as they seemed rather than as something different, which is related to Berkeley's idealism in the sense that it is the mind which has the ideas of objects, but conforms to the 'two-world' theory of John Locke.