Why I Love Descartes - No Fluff Just Stuff

Why I Love Descartes

Posted by: Robert Fischer on January 2, 2010

He’s a philosopher who hates on philosophy.

Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I:

Of philosophy I will say nothing, except that when I saw that it had been cultivated for many ages by the most distinguished men, and that yet there is not a single matter within its sphere which is not still in dispute, and nothing, therefore, which is above doubt, I did not presume to anticipate that my success would be greater in it than that of others; and further, when I considered the number of conflicting opinions touching a single matter that may be upheld by learned men, while there can be but one true, I reckoned as well-nigh false all that was only probable.


Comments

  • January 3, 2010, Brian wrote: Heh. St. Thomas Aquinas says something similar- in talking about whether philosophy alone is sufficient, he basically says (I'm paraphrasing heavily here) that philosophy (by itself) never manages to draw a conclusion.
  • January 5, 2010, Hamlet D'Arcy wrote: The original title of "Discourse on Method" was "Why Philosophy Sucks" but he was forced to change it when a bunch of philosophers complained it was too negative.

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Robert Fischer

About Robert Fischer

Robert Fischer is a multi-language open source developer currently specializing in Groovy in Grails. In the past, his specialties have been in Perl, Java, Ruby, and OCaml. In the future, his specialty will probably be F# or (preferably) a functional JVM language like Scala or Clojure.

Robert is the author of Grails Persistence in GORM and GSQL, a regular contributor to GroovyMag and JSMag, the founder of the JConch Java concurrency library, and the author/maintainer of Liquibase-DSL and the Autobase database migration plugin for Grails.

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