Bøger af Rene Descartes

El buen sentido es lo que mejor repartido está entre todo el mundo, pues cada cual piensa que posee tan buena provisión de él, que aun los más descontentadizos respecto a cualquier otra cosa, no suelen apetecer más del que ya tienen. En lo cual no es verosímil que todos se engañen, sino que más bien esto demuestra que la facultad de juzgar y distinguir lo verdadero de lo falso, que es propiamente lo que llamamos buen sentido o razón, es naturalmente igual en todos los hombres; y, por lo tanto, que la diversidad de nuestras opiniones no proviene de que unos sean más razonables que otros, sino tan sólo de que dirigimos nuestros pensamientos por derroteros diferentes y no consideramos las mismas cosas. No basta, en efecto, tener el ingenio bueno; lo principal es aplicarlo bien. Las almas más grandes son capaces de los mayores vicios, como de las mayores virtudes; y los que andan muy despacio pueden llegar mucho más lejos, si van siempre por el camino recto, que los que corren, pero se apartan de él.

René Descartes wrote a philosophical and autobiographical work titled Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, which was published in 1637. The most well-known use of it is as the inspiration for the idiom "Je pense, donc Je Suis," which appears in Part IV of the work. Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) contains a similar argument but without this same language, and Principles of Philosophy contains a Latin translation of the identical claim, Cogito, ergo sum (1644). One of the most influential books in the history of contemporary philosophy, Discourse on the Method is crucial to the advancement of the natural sciences. Descartes addresses the issue of skepticism in this work, which was previously researched by other philosophers. Descartes adapted the methods of some of his predecessors and contemporaries while addressing a fact that he believed to be indisputable; in order to observe the world honestly and without any bias, he started out on his line of reasoning by doubting everything. The book's initial printing took place in Leiden, Netherlands. Dioptrique, Météores, and Géométrie were the three works that the book was meant to provide as an introduction.

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (French: Discours de la Méthode Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences) is a philosophical and autobiographical treatise published by René Descartes in 1637. It is best known as the source of the famous quotation 'Je pense, donc je suis' (English: 'I think, therefore I am', or 'I am thinking, therefore I exist'), which occurs in Part IV of the work. The similar Latin statement, Cogito, ergo sum, is found in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Principles of Philosophy (1644). Discourse on the Method is one of the most influential works in the history of modern philosophy, and important to the development of natural sciences. In this work, Descartes tackles the problem of skepticism, which had previously been studied by Sextus Empiricus, Al-Ghazali and Michel de Montaigne. Descartes modified it to account for a truth he found to be incontrovertible. Descartes started his line of reasoning by doubting everything, so as to assess the world from a fresh perspective, clear of any preconceived notions.The book was originally published in Leiden, in the Netherlands. Later, it was translated into Latin and published in 1656 in Amsterdam. The book was intended as an introduction to three works: Dioptrique, Météores and Géométrie. La Géométrie contains Descartes's initial concepts that later developed into the Cartesian coordinate system. The text was written and published in French rather than the language in which philosophical and scientific texts were most frequently written and published in at the time, namely, Latin. Most of Descartes' other works were written in Latin.Together with Meditations on First Philosophy, Principles of Philosophy and Rules for the Direction of the Mind, it forms the base of the epistemology known as Cartesianism. The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things, the knowledge of which is competent to man, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another.