Key Letter By Descartes Found After 170 Years 165
Schiphol writes of a long-lost letter by René Descartes to Marin Mersenne that has come to light at Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, where it had lain buried in the archives for more than a century. The discovery could revolutionize our view of one of the 17th-century French philosopher's major works. "[T]housands of treasured documents... vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes... Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania... The letter, dated May 27, 1641, concerns the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, a celebrated work whose use of reason and scientific methods helped to ignite a revolution in thought."
Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:4, Insightful)
Chapter 1 was great, and ended in the pinnacle of the work "I think therefore I am".
After that, he couldn't go any farther, so he decided that you couldn't trust the world without the presence of God. At which point, I lost interest.
Chapter 1: A+
Chapter >1: D
Could revolutionize? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:1, Insightful)
So you are letting your own personal belief structure rate the quality of his work. " I don't believe in God so any argument for the idea must be flawed, I will not bother reading such arguments as my mind is fixed"
It is just like Christian Right not reading Darwin Theory of Evolution, as they will not allow their minds to be open to an opposing idea.
So (Score:4, Insightful)
How did Guglielmo Libri the Italian mathematician got away with stealing 30,000 books and manuscript from France and got away with it. How did the official at the French Public Library not notice that one of their employee had made off with 30,000 items that does not belong to him.
Re:Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:2, Insightful)
P therefore P is always valid, for any value of P. It's trivial, but anything that's trivially true is valid.
P always follow from P. The implication that the Cogito is invalid is just an absurdity. What you might mean is that it's a tautology, but tautologies are always true. The Meditations makes several dozen laughable logical blunders, but this isn't one of them.
Re:meh, philosophy is dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh, what? No. An almost-chicken lays an egg with a mutated embryo (the 100%-chicken). The egg is still an almost-chickenegg, and the first chicken egg is later laid by the chicken.
Re:Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:3, Insightful)