English Science and Literature club🤓✍️📖

292.

November 15, 2024 (14259)
In his Discourse on the Method, Descartes states, “My aim here is not to teach the method that everyone must follow for the right conduct of his reason, but only to show in what way I have tried to conduct mine.” In the same book, he makes other dubious claims, for example, that it (the book that contains 60 pages) “might seem too long to read at once” or that he has “never presumed his mind to be any way more accomplished than that of the common man.”
The book was published in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, a few years after Galileo was condemned for teaching a new science. Descartes had to pretend that he was a useless idiot, though it was clear from his letters that he was driven by the intention to become the greatest thinker. Here is what he writes to Mersenne in 1641: “These six meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. But please do not tell people, for that might make it harder for supporters of Aristotle to approve them. I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognize their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle.” In terms of physics, Aristotle at that time was “the philosopher”; whoever tried to undermine his authority in Latin could easily end up being burned like Bruno. Yet the evidence that the earth was spinning and revolving around the sun was no longer possible to deny.
“The common man,” who fought for existence and thought in Latin in Descartes’ mind, has never accepted a new science. That’s probably why Descartes cultivated a social role of the greatest thinker in his mind primarily in French. He had to stop thinking in French while he was studying at Jesuit college and the University of Poitiers to master Latin. But then, he didn’t “abandon altogether the study of letters”; he abandoned the study of Latin and began mastering French.

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6 viewsVladimir Svetashev, Nov 15 at 09:59

292.

November 15, 2024 (14259)
In his Discourse on the Method, Descartes states, “My aim here is not to teach the method that everyone must follow for the right conduct of his reason, but only to show in what way I have tried to conduct mine.” In the same book, he makes other dubious claims, for example, that it (the book that contains 60 pages) “might seem too long to read at once” or that he has “never presumed his mind to be any way more accomplished than that of the common man.”
The book was published in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, a few years after Galileo was condemned for teaching a new science. Descartes had to pretend that he was a useless idiot, though it was clear from his letters that he was driven by the intention to become the greatest thinker. Here is what he writes to Mersenne in 1641: “These six meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. But please do not tell people, for that might make it harder for supporters of Aristotle to approve them. I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognize their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle.” In terms of physics, Aristotle at that time was “the philosopher”; whoever tried to undermine his authority in Latin could easily end up being burned like Bruno. Yet the evidence that the earth was spinning and revolving around the sun was no longer possible to deny.
“The common man,” who fought for existence and thought in Latin in Descartes’ mind, has never accepted a new science. That’s probably why Descartes cultivated a social role of the greatest thinker in his mind primarily in French. He had to stop thinking in French while he was studying at Jesuit college and the University of Poitiers to master Latin. But then, he didn’t “abandon altogether the study of letters”; he abandoned the study of Latin and began mastering French.

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