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Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Principles of Philosophy (1644), main works of French mathematician and scientist René Descartes, considered the father of analytic geometry and the founder of modern rationalism, include the famous dictum "I think, therefore I am."
A set of two perpendicular lines in a plane or three in space intersect at an origin in Cartesian coordinate system. Cartesian coordinate, a member of the set of numbers, distances, locates a point in this system. Cartesian coordinates describe all points of a Cartesian plane.
From given sets, {X} and {Y}, one can construct Cartesian product, a set of all pairs of elements (x, y), such that x belongs to {X} and y belongs to {Y}.
René Descartes, a writer, highly influenced society. People continue to study closely his writings and subsequently responded in the west. He of the key figures in the revolution also apparently influenced the named coordinate system, used in planes and algebra.
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the early version of now commonly called emotions, he goes so far to assert that he writes on his topic "as if no one had written on these matters before." Many elements in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or earlier like Saint Augustine of Hippo provide precedents. Naturally, he differs from the schools on two major points: He rejects corporeal substance into matter and form and any appeal to divine or natural ends in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of act of creation of God.
Baruch Spinoza and Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz later advocated Descartes, a major figure in 17th century Continent, and the empiricist school of thought, consisting of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, opposed him. Leibniz and Descartes, all well versed like Spinoza, contributed greatly. Descartes, the crucial bridge with algebra, invented the coordinate system and calculus. Reflections of Descartes on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought; much later, the invention of the electronic computer and the possibility of machine intelligence impelled this thought, which blossomed into the Turing test and related thought. His stated most in §7 of part I and in part IV of Discourse on the Method.
Dnf. I tried. Descartes seemed to be coming up w/ reasons to convince himself to believe things he'd already decided to believe....except that he obviously didn't actually really believe them. Thus all the circular mental effort to convince himself to believe what he'd decided. That's tedious, boring, & exhausting all at the same time. I didn't get very far into this one. Too reminiscent of neurotic, W.A.S.P.y, whiny white men for me to give a shit. I am told he used to throw animals out of windows to see if they had feelings, which doesn't make any damn sense, aside from just being a psychopathic thing to do. Idk if that's true, but he did think they were automatons without consciousness, b/c according to him they didn't have souls, & somehow souls were required for consciousness & thinking. I, on the other hand, would posit that most any animal had more conscious presence in this world than Descartes must have being as he hadn't even enough presence of mind to attempt to observe basic non-human animal behavior & make educated guesses as to their state of consciousness only after having done so. Of course, that might have screwed w/ his anthropocentric consciousness idea that made him the creation of some all-powerful, greater being.....you know, something kind of akin to Frankenstein's monster. (For that matter, the "monster" in that story was still demonstrative of more human traits, and was less apparently egocentric & narcissistic than this f'ing dull, basic-bitch, dime store psycho Descartes. I have this image of his brain as a hamster on a wheel.....poor hamster.) ------------ Yeah, so i didn't finish this. I jumped around here & there a bit before putting it down b/c i was having a hard time believing this was all the guy was going to offer. I mean, his greatest achievement seems to have been thinking that maybe one shouldn't blindly accept what other people that came before you have declared to be fact. (That, & I know he did some stuff that helped advance the field of mathematics, specifically geometry, but that doesn't relate to this book.) Sadly, instead of investigating the ideas he just decided it should all be declared bosh & tossed aside b/c surely he could deduce the whole of everything all in his own special little Descartes head. Really, guy?! Geez. Officially couldn't give a shit about Cartesian ideas. "Screw this guy," is my official summation.