Skip to main content

Cartesian Physics: A New Book


Plate

A new book by Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore offers us a view of Descartes' philosophy of the material world, the hypothetical PHYSICS within his metaphysics, that is more sympathetic than many of the other recent takes on it.

Here's a link to a review by John Carriero, of UCLA.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/descartes-and-the-ontology-of-everyday-life/

Carriero starts by discussing the Cartesian view of everyday objects. Since extension is the essence of matter, space and matter are one and the same. But for Descartes types of matter differentiate themselves by size. Some are very small, and here Descartes allows for such microscopic realities as may in the course of time be discovered, though he didn't accept atomism -- the idea that there is an absolutely bottom rung of the ladder of scale. Some objects, those of everyday life, are medium size, large globules, and these include the bodies from within which your soul and mine look out at the world. Some objects are really big -- planets and stars.

All diversity, strangeness, and beauty in the world is due to motion, rest, and these differences of scale. And things cause each other to move by pushing each other around. There is no action at a distance. The way things circle one another is an artifact of the simplicity of the circle, or a "vortex," as Descartes liked to say. Objects pushing each other around tend to fall into circular patterns, and the moon circles the earth for no reason other than this.

It sounds depressingly reductionistic to many. Apparently not to Brown or Normore, though.


Labels:

Comments

  1. LoansJuly 10, 2020 at 8:46 AM

    JOIN THE ILLUMINATI BROTHERHOOD TODAY AND BECOME RICH AND FAMOUS WITH IN 24 HOURS.! WhatsApp: +2349023046719 The illuminati brotherhood offers you Riches, Powers and Fame. You can achieve all your dreams by becoming a member today. Note: The illuminati do not accept human sacrifices and no sharing of human bloods, if you are really interested contact us today via: WhatsApp: +2349023046719
    BENEFITS GIVEN TO NEW MEMBERS AS FOLLOW
    *A Cash Reward Of $50,000,000.00 USD.
    *A New CAR Valued At $400,000.00 USD.
    *A Dream House Bought In The Country Of Your Choice.
    *Monthly Payment Of $350,000USD Into Your Bank Account Every Month As A Member, If You Are Really Interested Contact Us Today On via: WhatsApp: +2349023046719, or Email: andysonbeata@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more