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“ ”And what more am I? I look for aid to the imagination. [But how mistakenly!] I am not that assemblage of limbs we call the human body; I am not a subtle penetrating air distributed throughout all these members; I am not a wind, a fire, a vapor, a breath or anything at all that I can image. I am supposing all these things to be nothing. Yet I find, while so doing, that I am still assured that I am a something.
René Descartes (March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650) was a highly influential French philosopher, mathematician, physicist and writer. He is known for his influential arguments for substance dualism, where mind and body are considered to have distinct essences, one being characterized by thought, the other by spatial extension. He has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy" and the "Father of Modern Mathematics." He is also known as Cartesius.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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We should totally focus the vision of natural intelligence on the smallest and easiest things, and we should dwell on them for a long time, so long, until we have become accustomed to intuiting the truth distinctly and perspicuously.
Καλό είναι να έχουμε κάποιες γνώσεις για τα ήθη των διαφόρων λαών, έτσι ώστε να κρίνουμε τα δικά μας πιο δίκαια και να μη θεωρούμε πως οτιδήποτε διαφέρει από τις δικές μας συνήθειες είναι γελοίο και αντίθετο προς τη λογική, όπως κάνουν όσοι δεν έχουν δει τίποτα.
Finally, if there still are men who have not been sufficiently persuaded
of the existence of God and of their soul by means of the reasons I have
brought forward, I very much want them to know that all the other things
of which they think themselves perhaps more assured, such as having a
body, that there are stars and an earth, and the like, are less certain. For
although one might have a moral assurance about these things, which is
such that it seems one cannot doubt them without being extravagant, still
when it is a question of metaphysical certitude, it seems unreasonable for
anyone to deny that there is not a sufficient basis for one's being completely
assured about them, when one observes that while asleep one can, in the
same fashion, imagine that one has a different body and that one sees
different stars and a different earth, without any of these things being
the case. For how does one know that the thoughts that come to us in
dreams are any more false than the others, given that they are often no
less vivid and explicit? And even if the best minds study this as much as
they please, I do not believe they can give any reason sufficient to remove
this doubt, unless they presuppose the existence of God. For first of all,
even what I have already taken for a rule, namely that the things we very
clearly and very distinctly conceive are all true, is assured only for the
reason that God is or exists, and that he is a perfect being, and that all
that is in us comes from him.