Quotes about René Descartes

75 Sourced Quotes

This mental activity, at first involuntary under the pressure of illness and suffering, gradually became second nature and led me finally to recognize that I was but an automaton devoid of free will in thought and action and merely responsible to the forces of the environment. Our bodies are of such complexity of structure, the motions we perform are so numerous and involved and the external impressions on our sense organs to such a degree delicate and elusive, that it is hard for the average person to grasp this fact. Yet nothing is more convincing to the trained investigator than the mechanistic theory of life which had been, in a measure, understood and propounded by Descartes three hundred years ago.

There you are: Mysterious and Unknown Descartes. Highland plains. Apollo 16 is gonna change your image. I'm sure glad they got ol' Brer Rabbit, here, back in the briar patch where he belongs.

John Young (astronaut)

Let us not be attached to systems, but to truth; and when Nature speaks, let us listen to her voice in preference to that of a Stahl or a Lavoissier, a Descartes or a Newton. Whatever may be the result of our experiments, we shall profit by them: as we run the risqué of losing nothing but error, let us hasten to subject ourselves to that loss.

Christopher Girtanner

I had a friend in college who loved to say: 'If you can dream it, you can do it.' It became my mantra. I assumed it was a pearl of wisdom from some great thinker, a philosopher perhaps, like Descartes. It turned out to be Walt Disney, which in no way diminishes the wisdom of the advice. Anyone who can build a Magic Kingdom deserves to be listened to.

I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of
Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before.

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

James Mark Baldwin

For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.

The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of today, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.

The system of Descartes... seemed to give a plausible reason for all those phenomena; and this reason seemed more just, as it is simple and intelligible to all capacities. But in philosophy, a student ought to doubt of the things he fancies he understands too easily, as much as of those he does not understand.

After Descartes' daughter died,
he took to the sea. They say he went
so mad with grief he remade her
as automaton. A wind-up cog and lever
elegy hidden in the cargo hold.

Kathryn Nuernberger

It is difficult to say who it is who first recognized the advantage of always equating to zero in the study of the general equation. It may very likely have been Napier, for he wrote his De Arte Logistica before 1594, and in this there is evidence that he understood the advantage of this procedure. Bürgi also recognized the value of making the second member zero, Harriot may have done the same, and the influence of Descartes was such that the usage became fairly general.

David Eugene Smith

As for negative numbers... most mathematicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not accept them... In the fifteenth century Nicolas Chuquet and, in the sixteenth, Stifel both spoke of negative numbers as absurd numbers....Descartes accepted them, in part....he had shown that, given an equation, one can obtain another whose roots are larger than the original one by any given quantity. Thus an equation with negative roots could be transformed into one with positive roots. Since we can turn false roots into real roots, Descartes was willing to accept negative numbers. Pascal regarded the subtraction of 4 from zero as utter nonsense.

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

Bertrand Russell

Do not close the circle. Leave it open. Descartes closes the circle. Pascal leaves it open. Rousseau's triumph over the encyclopedists is to have left his circle open when they closed theirs.

Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.

Arthur Schopenhauer

In formulating any philosophy the first consideration must always be: What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything? Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, 'My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.

Every age has ridiculed the one before it, and accused it of having generalized too quickly and too naively. Descartes pitied the lonians; Descartes, in his turn, makes us smile. No doubt our children will someday laugh at us.

Henri Poincaré

The law which asserts that the equation X = 0, complete or incomplete, can have no more real positive roots than it has changes of sign, and no more real negative roots than it has permanences of sign, was apparently known to Cardan; but a satisfactory statement is possibly due to Harriot (died 1621) and certainly to Descartes.

David Eugene Smith

Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him.... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.

The term middle-aged, invented by Descartes, comes from the Latin, medeus, meaning 'not really old' and ageis, meaning 'if you look at it in a certain way.

Marilyn Suzanne Miller

Descartes' immortal conclusion cogito ergo sum was recently subjected to destruction testing by a group of graduate researchers at Princeton led by Professors Montjuic and Lauterbrunnen, and now reads, in the Shorter Harvard Orthodoxy:
(a) I think, therefore I am; or
(b) Perhaps I thought, therefore I was; but
(c) These days, I tend to leave that side of things to my wife.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method

Nicholas Murray Butler

By a pardonable abridgment of history, the Rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon's hopes and the neglect of the scepticism of Descartes; modem Rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.

Michael Oakeshott

Newton's proof of the law of refraction is based on an erroneous notion that light travels faster in glass than in air, the same error that Descartes had made. This error stems from the fact that both of them thought that light was corpuscular in nature.

[The mathematical character of Descartes' physics lies in its methodological nature, namely, the] axiomatic structure of the whole system, in the establishment of indubitable foundations and the deduction of the phenomena.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis

But understanding and explaining motives does not compromise freedom; nor does even predicting acts necessarily do so. A person committed to a political cause may vote predictably, and intelligibly in an election. He does not vote less freely than someone that flips a coin at the last minute. So if we find comparison with animals any help in understanding motives, it will not mean that conduct is not free. And since animals are not (as Descartes supposed) automata, the issue of freedom does not make comparing man with any other species and downgrading irrelevance.

Philosophers have always tried to show that we are not like other animals, sniffing their way uncertainly through the world. Yet after all the work of Plato and Spinoza, Descartes and Bertrand Russell we have no more reason than other animals do for believing that the sun will rise tomorrow.

What appeared to be lacking was not inspiration or even methodical habits of inquiry, but a consciously formulated technique of research, an art of interpretation, a method whose rules had been written down. And the project of making good this want was the occasion of the unmistakable emergence of the new intellectual character I have called the Rationalist. The dominating figures in the early history of this project are, of course, Bacon and Descartes, and we may find in their writings intimations of what later became the Rationalist character.

Michael Oakeshott