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hTx
(:



Registered: 03/27/13
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Descartes
#22243845 - 09/15/15 10:57 PM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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I have this math professor that is really into Descartes.
So, I recently decided to research him having never really done so before...I gotta say, he has quickly become one of my favorite philosophers. He is famously known for cogito ergo sum "I think, therefore I am"
Between my class and Descartes, I'm really beginning to see the many connections between math and philosophy..and his awareness of the importance of novelty, and well, the necessity for it given the collective knowledge of his time (but seriously, any time).
"The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt." -- Descartes,
"...And so something that I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind."
Got me thinking about logic in an entirely new, and much more logical way.
-------------------- zen by age ten times six hundred lifetimes Light up the darkness.
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zzripz
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Re: Descartes [Re: hTx]
#22244450 - 09/16/15 05:48 AM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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I hate and loathe Descarte and his insane influence that still hangs as a curse over this world as his vile soul-dead, thoughtless, legacy is used to justify the incarceration and torture and murder of countless other species, including humans, and ecocide.
That fiend, the philosopher Descartes identified with his insane disembodied thinking and from there with his disembodied rational gaze objectified his own body and senses, others', including animals he thought were machines who when being tortured by he and his ghastly conformist followers would naturally cry out in pain those psychos would THINK (because they had lost soul/feeling/empathy) that the cries were like the sounds of automata. I mean you couldn't make this insane shit up!!
Because of Cartesian dualism and its influence over other 'thinkers', and civilization. 'we' now are so dissociated from our own sensual bodies, and natures, and others, and other species, and the whole natural world, and as a result we are self-destructive and ecocidal and causing the mass extinction of other species. So if I would you I would not choose this disembodied 'thinker' as your hero.
Edited by zzripz (09/16/15 05:49 AM)
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Hippocampus



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Re: Descartes [Re: zzripz]
#22244524 - 09/16/15 06:37 AM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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Dualism,, pineal gland 
Directly stimulating exposed ventral and dorsal spinal nerve roots of unanesthetized canines
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Sun King



Registered: 02/15/14
Posts: 4,069
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Re: Descartes [Re: zzripz]
#22244544 - 09/16/15 06:47 AM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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Quote:
zzripz said: I mean you couldn't make this insane shit up!!
And yet you do.
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OrgoneConclusion
Blue Fish Group



Registered: 04/01/07
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--------------------
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Rahz
Alive Again



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Re: Descartes [Re: zzripz]
#22245053 - 09/16/15 09:43 AM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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Boy, we must have been like angels prior to Descartes! Or SSDD?
-------------------- rahz comfort pleasure power love truth awareness peace "You’re not looking close enough if you can only see yourself in people who look like you." —Ayishat Akanbi
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DividedQuantum
Outer Head


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Re: Descartes [Re: hTx]
#22245054 - 09/16/15 09:43 AM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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I dunno, I think the Cartesian mindset is sort of the bane of modernity's existence at this point. And by that I mean that it seems to me the concepts of inherent duality, and the Cartesian grid, are holding us back quite a bit. Quantum theory and Relativity are both quite anti-Cartesian. I think we could do with a bit less of it.
-------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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Mental Taco



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Re: Descartes [Re: hTx]
#22245125 - 09/16/15 09:57 AM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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I enjoy Descartes theories but feel that William James has better ideas that encompass the sort of "i think therefore i am" theory.
-------------------- Did you not know that the royal hunting grounds are always forbidden?
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DividedQuantum
Outer Head


Registered: 12/06/13
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William James was outstanding.
"I have spoken as if our attention were wholly determined by neural conditions. I believe that the array of things we can attend to is so determined. No object can catch our attention except by the neural machinery. But the amount of the attention which an object receives after it has caught our attention is another question. It often takes effort to keep mind upon it. We feel that we can make more or less of the effort as we choose. If this feeling be not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result. Though it introduce no new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away." --William James
-------------------- Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici
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hTx
(:



Registered: 03/27/13
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I really just like how he connects logic and math in such a lucid way, i can say ive truly learned something from him..although i do not agree outright with such mechanical philosophy..it is proving quite useful..
-------------------- zen by age ten times six hundred lifetimes Light up the darkness.
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Kurt
Thinker, blinker, writer, typer.

Registered: 11/26/14
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Descartes' suggestion is an entanglement which it is difficult to tell what to pull on. It should unravel though, I'd say.
We might note that the method of doubt, or actively doubting was what led to interposing the idea of a mental substance, res cogitans. That, of course, becomes what we should doubt "most of all", and we bear this out with different derivative attitudes.
To say the same thing, we believe we have a deductive basis for an inductive method, thanks to Descartes' apparent "rationalism" that interposes thinking, with a kernal of doubt. Methodological doubt lays out all the provisions, and domains which we question.
The Cartesian coordinate system above all suggests physical reality is a matter of calculation and determination, in geometrical dimensions like on a Cartesian coordinate system. Descartes was truly the first philosopher of "space and time" and became the apotheosis of Bacon, in realizing a mechanical sense of physical reality, and the obsequious notion of knowledge being power. You could say, like on those cartesian coordinate systems, Descartes' "thought" is explicitly demonstrative of the sort of utility that is of combining at least two spatial dimensions.

To Descartes, and subsequently in modern philosophical history, what is observed in this extension of dimensions on a "mathematical" grid is suggestible as the material substance, res extensa.
Through Descartes' involution, "I think therefore I am" we today have completely different dualism of "material and mental substances". It is usually interpreted through, whilst concealing, the way matter was pregnant with form, in Aristotle which for clarity's sake, could be referred to as hylomorphism. Hylomorphism is the Greek dualism, that was between human and nature, and in particular contemplation of means and ends, in that sense. This is not mere pragmatism, but in the essence of craft and involvement with physical nature.
What Descartes was doing in his method (doubt), was doubting ostensible knowledge, and that was a specific questioning of the Aristotelian or Greek categories. It could be said that with some consequence, Descartes doubted hypokeimenon, namely. The meaning of which is somewhat lost to us subsequently, but hypokeimenon can be seen in the greek lexicon as what designated the "underlying thing", or "substance" which was also at the same time the singular essential "subject" of knowledge. To the Greeks knowledge was that way.
Most suggestions of hypokeimenon, are interpreted through Cartesian ontology, emphasizing something different, and it is difficult to comprehend what Aristotle meant by substantial or essential knowledge. That we still have essential subjects of knowledge, for example, like the books we read, or the subject of inquiry, something that is possible to open up, like a flower and get to, is Aristotle's suggestion, and those values do in a way live on. But we do not typically think of knowledging of an opening, or search into underlying thing, even while it is implied.
Since Descartes, we have two subjects, (something "like" two substances) the subject of knowledge, and the subject with interposes questioning of such subjects, the subject "we are", and the relationship is ultimately, without a doubt, equivocal. It is something people argue about according to older underlying considerations of matter and form, but really what they argue upon is the point of transvaluation, the turning of the historical epoch.
Subjectum, which in Descartes latin is that which is "thrown under", is the glossed translation of the essentially Greek notion hypokeimenon, as " underlying thing", in Descartes' Latin. This approximation is concealing, and it is in a way, (for instance as the word Subjectum suggests) something enacted, and as said, it is in thinking, or "throwing under". I believe it was more than a translation or isolated act, but a transvaluation as Nietzsche put it. For example, the subject is a politicized notion of servility, a being in relation "subject to" something. Pursuit of knowledge was not always thought this way.
The doubting subject we are, nonetheless, stands in relation to the subject of knowledge as substantial and essential, which was undermined. This "crisis" (as the modern phenomenologists put it) is appropriate, and arguably necessary, with whatever provisions we have to say so. Specifically, the world we are coming into is not one consisting in "things" (nor yet facts as the analytic philosopher put it) but "theories". This equivocality stands as essential finally. The most substantial basis we suggest is in the theory, and we say this is appropriate in some ways or in some circumstances, and in others not and argue out provisions that have both historical and practical bases, with little clarity, thanks to the intellectual environment.
We are namely overcoming the fascism, the "state of affairs" of the early 20th century, presently, and attempting to assume a pragmatic attitude. I hope further we can be philosophical about it. The extent that this notion of pragmatism falls back on a petty sense of mechanical utility, arbitrariness, and the simultaneous operation and calculation of reality, or the extent that we realize how little founded this specifically mechanical paradigm is, will determine the coming state of humanity, I believe. We should think on pragmatism, philosophically.
What I would point to in this direction is that the importance of Descartes is his dualism, but he was not a dualist as Aristotle was. Mental substance and material substance is not the same as form and matter in Aristotle, and this is something to think on, as how "thought" turned.
Also, in spite of Descartes' "methodological foundations", (or a sentiment for that anyway) at the same time and in some essential relation to that, he was a creationist. That is, he did not argue the mere solipsism of the thinking thing, but how the world of senses he doubted was gotten back either by the essential arbitrariness of induction, (which begs the question of what is suggestible at all through this method) or through God, and either way, (or rather as commonly in conflict) we dwell in the same values. Either way res cogitans was a secondary or privated substance, either to res extensa, or to God, or above all to the eccentricity and solipsism of modern man that is not worked out.
Modern philosophers have attempted to work relativism out, namely as the relation of the subject we are to the subjects of knowledge we can know as something in front of us, in two dimensions. Yet while we look upon this somewhat, we do not seem to question this view from above and beyond enough. As something suggested to work out by further "meditation", it strikes me as both necessary and impossible as Descartes suggested it. It suggests an involvement and removal if we are constructive.
I believe that Heidegger put it best, that the ens creatum (or the dead God) of Cartesianism is the "[url= http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/b_resources/descartes.html]implantation of baleful prejudice.[/url]".
Descartes is important, unfortunately to a large extent, for what he covers up. I think the essential split in Descartes is between Greek philosophical values in general, might be looked to, (as what Descartes is responding to), and what is a convolution of them. That they happen to suggest pragmatism, and the possibility to deal with a world of modern physics, is an accident, I'd say. And as Nietzsche put it, to a very large extent, values are what modern discourse seems to be in conflict about more than anything philosophical and so I think it is justified to see the split that way, in terms of values (not merely relativism).
This isn't just a dialogue at face value, between idealists and realists. This relativism (with various suggestible integrations of matter and form) is about values. Cartesianism - this modern "thought" - is some rather allusive notion anyway.
The hypokeimenon story
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zzripz
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Re: Descartes [Re: Kurt]
#22260037 - 09/19/15 12:30 PM (8 years, 4 months ago) |
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