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List Of Things Named After René Descartes
{{unref, date=March 2022 This is the list of things named after René Descartes (1596–1650), a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Computer science *Cartesian genetic programming *Cartesian tree Mathematics *Cartesian closed category *Cartesian geometry **Cartesian coordinate system ** Cartesian equations **Cartesian plane **Cartesian tensor * Cartesian monoid * Cartesian monoidal category **Cartesian closed category *Cartesian oval *Cartesian product *Cartesian product of graphs *Cartesian square ** Cartesian morphisms *Descartes number *Descartes' rule of signs *Descartes snark *Descartes' theorem *Descartes' theorem on total angular defect *Folium of Descartes Physics *Cartesian diver * Cartesian vortex theory * Snell–Descartes law Philosophy *Cartesian anxiety *Cartesian circle *Cartesian doubt *Cartesian dualism *Cartesian materialism *Cartesian other *Cartesian theater * Cartesian Method * Descartes' demon Robotics *Cartesian coordinate robot *Cartesian ...
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René Descartes
René Descartes ( or ; ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a deist by critics, Descartes considered himself a devout Catholic. Many elements of Descartes' philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance i ...
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Descartes' Theorem
In geometry, Descartes' theorem states that for every four kissing, or mutually tangent, circles, the radii of the circles satisfy a certain quadratic equation. By solving this equation, one can construct a fourth circle tangent to three given, mutually tangent circles. The theorem is named after René Descartes, who stated it in 1643. History Geometrical problems involving tangent circles have been pondered for millennia. In ancient Greece of the third century BC, Apollonius of Perga devoted an entire book to the topic, ''De tactionibus'' 'On tangencies'' It has been lost, and is known only through mentions of it in other works. René Descartes discussed the problem briefly in 1643, in a letter to Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate. He came up with the equation describing the relation between the radii, or curvatures, of four pairwise tangent circles. This result became known as Descartes' theorem. This result was rediscovered in 1826 by Jakob Steiner, in 1842 by Philip Beec ...
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Cartesianism
Cartesianism is the philosophical and scientific system of René Descartes and its subsequent development by other seventeenth century thinkers, most notably François Poullain de la Barre, Nicolas Malebranche and Baruch Spinoza. Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences. For him, philosophy was a thinking system that embodied all knowledge. Aristotle and St. Augustine’s work influenced Descartes's cogito argument. Additionally, there is similarity between Descartes’s work and that of the Scottish philosopher, George Campbell’s 1776 publication, titled ''Philosophy of Rhetoric.'' In his ''Meditations on First Philosophy'' he writes, " t what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, onceives affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels." Cartesians view the mind as being wholly separate from the corporeal body. Sensat ...
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Cartesian Theater
"Cartesian theater" is a derisive term coined by philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett to refer pointedly to a defining aspect of what he calls Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialism, materialist theories of the mind. Overview Descartes originally claimed that consciousness requires an immaterial soul, which interacts with the body via the pineal gland of the brain. Dennett says that, when the dualism is removed, what remains of Descartes' original model amounts to imagining a tiny theater in the brain where a homunculus (small person), now physical, performs the task of observing all the sensory data projected on a screen at a particular instant, making the decisions and sending out commands (cf. the homunculus argument). The term "Cartesian theater" was brought up in the context of the multiple drafts model that Dennett posits in ''Consciousness Explained'' (1991): See also * Ci ...
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Cartesian Other
In philosophy, the Cartesian other, part of a thought experiment, is any other than the mind of the individual thinking about the experiment. The Other includes the individual's own body. According to the philosopher Descartes, there is a divide intrinsic to consciousness, such that you cannot ever bridge the space between your own consciousness and that of another. This "other" is in essence theoretical, since one cannot ever be empirically shown such an "other." Put differently, Descartes concluded ''cogito ergo sum'', "I think, therefore I am," that is, that the presence of a self of which to speak (an "I") proves its existence to oneself; however, according to his Wax Argument The wax argument or the ball of wax example is a thought experiment that René Descartes created in the second of his ''Meditations on First Philosophy''. He devised it to analyze what properties are essential for bodies, show how uncertain our kno ..., one could never similarly demonstrate the existen ...
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Cartesian Materialism
In philosophy of mind, Cartesian materialism is the idea that at some place (or places) in the brain, there is some set of information that directly corresponds to our conscious experience. Contrary to its name, Cartesian materialism is not a view that was held by or formulated by René Descartes, who subscribed rather to a form of substance dualism. In its simplest version, Cartesian materialism might predict, for example, that there is a specific place in the brain which would be a coherent representation of everything we are consciously experiencing in a given moment: what we're seeing, what we're hearing, what we're smelling, and indeed, everything of which we are consciously aware. In essence, Cartesian materialism claims that, somewhere in our brain, there is a Cartesian theater where a hypothetical observer could somehow "find" the content of conscious experience moment by moment. In contrast, anything occurring outside of this "privileged neural media" is nonconscious. His ...
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Mind–body Dualism
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, Hart, W. D. 1996. "Dualism." pp. 265–267 in ''A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind'', edited by S. Guttenplan. Oxford: Blackwell. or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem. Aristotle shared Plato's view of multiple souls and further elaborated a hierarchical arrangement, corresponding to the distinctive functions of plants, animals, and humans: a nutritive soul of growth and metabolism that all three share; a perceptive soul of pain, pleasure, and desire that only humans and other animals share; and the faculty of reason that is unique to humans only. In this view, a soul is the hylomorphic form of a viable organism, wherein ea ...
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Cartesian Doubt
Cartesian doubt is a form of methodological skepticism associated with the writings and methodology of René Descartes (March 31, 1596Feb 11, 1650). Scruton, R.''Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey''(London: Penguin Books, 1994). Leiber, J., ed., ''A Philosophical Glossary'', Philosophy Department, University of Houston, 2001p. 88 Cartesian doubt is also known as Cartesian skepticism, methodic doubt, methodological skepticism, universal doubt, systematic doubt, or hyperbolic doubt. Cartesian doubt is a systematic process of being skeptical about (or doubting) the truth of one's beliefs, which has become a characteristic method in philosophy. Additionally, Descartes' method has been seen by many as the root of the modern scientific method. This method of doubt was largely popularized in Western philosophy by René Descartes, who sought to doubt the truth of all beliefs in order to determine which he could be certain were true. It is the basis for Descartes' statement, "' ...
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Cartesian Circle
The Cartesian circle is a potential mistake in reasoning attributed to French philosopher René Descartes. The argument Descartes argues – for example, in the third of his ''Meditations on First Philosophy'' – that whatever one clearly and distinctly perceives is true: "I now seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true" (AT VII 35). He goes on in the same Meditation to argue for the existence of a benevolent God, in order to defeat his skeptical argument in the first Meditation that God might be a deceiver. He then says that without his knowledge of God's existence, none of his knowledge could be certain. The Cartesian circle is a criticism of the above that takes this form: # Descartes' proof of the reliability of clear and distinct perceptions takes as a premise God's existence as a non-deceiver. # Descartes' proofs of God's existence presuppose the reliability of clear and distinct perceptions. Many commen ...
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Cartesian Anxiety
Cartesian anxiety refers to a dilemma that you either have a fixed and stable foundation for knowledge ''or'' you cannot escape chaos and confusion. The dilemma produces an anxiety that arises from people craving an absolute ground either in the outside world or in the mind. The dilemma emerged after René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism. Ever since, western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other". Richard J. Bernstein Richard Jacob Bernstein (May 14, 1932 – July 4, 2022) was an American philosopher who taught for many years at Haverford College and then at The New School for ...
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Snell–Descartes Law
Snell's law (also known as Snell–Descartes law and ibn-Sahl law and the law of refraction) is a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction, when referring to light or other waves passing through a boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water, glass, or air. This law was named after the Dutch astronomer and mathematician Willebrord Snellius (also called Snell). In optics, the law is used in ray tracing to compute the angles of incidence or refraction, and in experimental optics to find the refractive index of a material. The law is also satisfied in meta-materials, which allow light to be bent "backward" at a negative angle of refraction with a negative refractive index. Snell's law states that, for a given pair of media, the ratio of the sines of angle of incidence (\theta_1 ) and angle of refraction (\theta_2 ) is equal to the refractive index of the second medium w.r.t the first (n21) which is equal to the ...
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Mechanical Explanations Of Gravitation
Mechanical explanations of gravitation (or kinetic theories of gravitation) are attempts to explain the action of gravity by aid of basic mechanical processes, such as pressure forces caused by pushes, without the use of any action at a distance. These theories were developed from the 16th until the 19th century in connection with the aether. However, such models are no longer regarded as viable theories within the mainstream scientific community and general relativity is now the standard model to describe gravitation without the use of actions at a distance. Modern "quantum gravity" hypotheses also attempt to describe gravity by more fundamental processes such as particle fields, but they are not based on classical mechanics. Screening This theory is probably the best-known mechanical explanation, and was developed for the first time by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1690, and re-invented, among others, by Georges-Louis Le Sage (1748), Lord Kelvin (1872), and Hendrik Lorentz ...
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