Posts Tagged ‘Descartes’
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”*…
… or so it must seem to Patrick Andrews, who has, since 2006, been creating and posting (with a rhythm close to your correspondent’s heart, that’s to say, roughly daily) an “Invention of the Day.”
His website…
… is intended as an outlet for the force-four brainstorm which rages in the background of my mind, much of the time. It seems to result, most days, in some kind of invention. Many of these ideas are naive, impractical or just unoriginal. Occasionally, a good one appears (eg www.scenereader.com). In any case, disclosure here of anything clever or original will make patenting it impossible**; which is probably a healthy situation…
The obvious thing to do is to forget patents and move straight to manufacturing and selling your own products. With desktop manufacture and online marketing, this is becoming a real possibility in some cases. I recognise, however, that I won’t have enough time and money to develop and launch the majority of the ideas here in the marketplace.
Please therefore feel free to read, mock and/or exploit commercially any which take your fancy. If they make you rich, do let me know (Donating to Unicef is a good idea, even if you haven’t yet made a mint)…
Consider, for example, #2302- “the Collareel”:
Today’s invention is a dog lead with the added benefit that when your animal is off-lead, it carries the whole thing itself.
A small, spring-loaded reel of strong cord is clipped to the ordinary lead. It is shaped to fit closely to the collar and thus be impossible for the dog to remove or for it to tear off while crashing about the undergrowth.
When you want to reign in your canine, first catch it and then pull the lead out to normal length.
Browse the bounty of his brainstorms at “Invention of the Day.”
* Mary Shelly
** Sadly, as of March 16, no longer true in the U.S.
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As we await the illumination of the bulbs above our heads, we might tip the plumed birthday bonnet to Rene Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematician who thought and therefore was. He was born on this date in 1596.
Many contemporaries (perhaps most notably, Pascal) rejected his famous conclusion, the dualist separation of mind and body; more (Voltaire, et al.), since. But Descartes’ emphasis on method and analysis, his disciplined integration of philosophy and physical science, his insistence on the importance of consciousness in epistemology, and perhaps most fundamentally, his the questioning of tradition and authority had a transformative– and lasting– effect on Western thought, and has earned him the “title” of Father of Modern Philosophy.
“In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.”
– Rene Descartes
Frans Hals’ portrait of Descartes, c. 1649
Your correspondent is headed again behind The Great Firewall, where the undependability of connectivity (even, these days, via VPNs) means a hiatus in these missives. Regular service should resume by April 10 or so.
Vin Extraordinaire…
As if Vietnamese snake wine—prepared by steeping a snake (preferably a venomous one) in rice wine—weren’t disconcerting enough, there’s snake bile wine. The forbidding drink is prepared by mixing rice wine with the greenish-black bile taken from the gallbladder of a freshly sliced cobra.
More oenophilic out-of-the-ordinariness at Food & Wine’s “World’s Weirdest Wines.”
As we reconsider temperance, we might recall that it was on this date in 1619, after the Vigil of the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, that Rene Descartes had his famous dream (actually a series of three dreams that night)– that ignited his commitment to treat all systems of thought developed to date, especially Scholasticism, as “pre-philosophical,” and– starting from scratch (“Cogito, ergo sum”)– to create anew.
Of these three dreams, it is the third that best expresses the original thought and intention of Rene Descartes’ rationalism. During the dream that William Temple aptly refers to as, “the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe,” Descartes saw before him two books. One was a dictionary, which appeared to him to be of little interest and use. The other was a compendium of poetry entitled Corpus Poetarum in which there appeared to be a union of philosophy with wisdom. Moreover, the way in which Descartes interpreted this dream set the stage for the rest of his life-long philosophical endeavors. For Descartes, the dictionary stood merely for the sciences gathered together in their sterile and dry disconnection; the collection of poems marked more particularly and expressly the union of philosophy with wisdom. He indicates that one should not be astonished that poets abound in utterances more weighty, more full of meaning and better expressed, than those found in the writings of philosophers. In utterances which appear odd when coming from a man who would go down in history as the father of Rationalism, Descartes ascribes the “marvel” of the wisdom of the poets to the divine nature of inspiration and to the might of phantasy, which “strikes out” the seeds of wisdom (existing in the minds of all men like the sparks of fire in flints) far more easily and directly than does reason in the philosophers. The writings of the professional philosophers of his time, struck Descartes as failing to supply that certitude, human urgency, and attractive presentation which we associate with a wise vision capable of organizing our knowledge and influencing our conduct. (Peter Chojnowski)
And so was born the Modern Age in the West, and the particular form of Rationalism that characterizes it.
Many scholars suggest that Descartes probably “protests too much” when he insists in his autobiographical writings that he had abstained from wine for some time before the night of his oh-so-significant slumber.
Rene Descartes (source)
Great minds…
From College Binary, a series of “Three Minute Philosophy” lessons….
Consider this refresher on the thinking of Rene Descartes:
From Aristotle to Kant, illuminations awaits one at Three Minute Philosophy.
(Warning number one: some of the language is… well, decidedly non-academic. Warning number two: our instructor is from Brisbane– so readers should brace themselves for an Australian accent… thus warned, watch away– they’re quite wonderful.)
As we console ourselves that we think, therefore we are, we might recall that it was on this date in 1875 that Black Bart (Charles Bolles), a poet with a fondness for Wells Fargo, robbed his first stagecoach, the Sonora to Milton stage, in Calaveras County, California — the same stage line he targeted in his last heist (his 29th) in 1883– after which he left a taunting verse in the empty money box.
Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
And everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will, I’ll try it on,
My condition can’t be worse;
And if there’s money in that box
‘Tis munny in my purse.
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”…
Mark Twain’s quip has found an altogether modern kind of expression on the web, where entrepreneurs and enthusiasts have expanded from the how-to space (c.f. Instructables, …for Dummies, et al.) to arenas that were until recently the undisputed province of the traditional educational establishment. Two of your correspondent’s favorites:
Khan Academy is–literally– the brainchild of Salmon Khan, a 33 year-old who has no PhD and has never taught. Khan quit his job as a financial analyst and began to produce short simple videos on the sorts of topics covered in advanced high school and college classes. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, Khan has posted over 1400 videos on YouTube, covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance.
Squashed Philosophy is the work of Glyn Hughes: “The books which defined the way we think now.
Their own ideas, in their own words, neatly honed into little half-hour or so reads”… and so they marvelously are.
(TotH to reader PR for the CHE reference.)
As we resolve to improve ourselves, we might recall that today is the birthday of scholar and critic Adrien Baillet; he was born on this date in 1649. While Baillet was on the faculty at the college of Beauvais, served as librarian to François-Chrétien de Lamoignon, and was advocate-general to the Parlement de Paris, he is best remembered as the biographer of René Descartes.
Oh, the places we’ll go…
The Atlas Obscura, “A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica”… Consider, if you will:
The Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum
Featuring dead bugs dressed as celebrities and historical figures, this just might be the one time in your life that a cockroach puts a smile on your face.
On your visit, you’ll see cockroach displays featuring “Liberoachi,” “The Combates Motel,” and “David Letteroach,” among dozens of others.
See the Fremont Troll, the Wunderkammer, the Harmonic bridge and dozens of others, here.
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As we re-plot our itineraries, we might offer a tip of the birthday beret to Blaise Pascal, born on this date in 1623. Pascal was an extraordinary polymath: a mathematician, physicist, theologian, inventor of arguably the first digital calculator (the “Pascaline”), the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe. His principle of empiricism (“Experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against Descartes (whose dualism was rooted in his ultimate trust of reason). Pascal also attacked from the other flank; his intuitionism (Pensées) helped kick-start Romanticism, influencing Rousseau (and his notion of what Dryden called the “noble savage”), and later Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson. But perhaps most impactfully, his correspondence with Pierre de Fermat (the result of a query from a gambling-addicted nobleman) led to development of probability theory.
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