To: average joe who wrote (96101 ) 10/30/2012 7:46:23 PM From: Robin Plunder Read Replies (1) | Respond to Ponokee...do you mine for gold? deliberately undermining the Aristotelian heritage that he received from his Scholastic education. "Archimedes, to move the earth from its orbit and place it in a new position, demanded nothing more than a fixed and immovable fulcrum...". [1] "...since the destruction of the foundation necessarily involves the collapse of the edifice, I shall first attack the principles upon which all my former opinions were founded. Everything which I have thus far accepted as entirely true has been acquired from the senses or by means of the senses. " [2] Whether his intentions were good or evil, Descartes deliberately inverted the Aristotelian metaphysics to reflect a primacy of consciousness. And his fulcrum worked: in the eyes of his contemporaries, he successfully discredited the validity of the senses, and diverted philosophical inquiry for centuries. This false foundation undermined the theories of thought, ethics, politics, and art that were derived from it. [1] Meditations on First Philosophy, R. Descartes, L. J. Lafleur trans., Bobbs-Merrill, 2nd Ed, 1975, p23.[2] Ibid., p 22.truth of all knowledge depends solely on the knowledge of the true God, so that before I knew him I could not know any other thing perfectly. And now that I know him, I have the means of acquiring clear and certain and perfect knowledge about an infinity of things, not only about God himself and about other intellectual matters, but also about that which pertains to corporeal nature, insofar as it can be the object of pure mathematics - that is, of the demonstrations of geometricians who are not concerned with its existence." [1] [1] Meditations on First Philosophy, R. Descartes, Bobbs-Merrill, L. Lafleur trans., 1975, p67.
