Rene Descartes Quotes on Mind
Descartes's Meditations gave the modern philosophy of mind its founding statement. The cogito establishes the indubitable existence of the thinking self; the real distinction between mind and body, rigorously argued in the Sixth Meditation, presents the human person as a thinking substance contingently united to an extended substance. The mind-body problem in its modern form follows directly: how can two such radically different substances causally interact, and how does the apparent unity of conscious experience emerge from their union?
Quotes
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“I think, therefore I am.”
Je pense, donc je suis. -
Attributed to Rene Descartes:
“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”
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Attributed to Rene Descartes:
“Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.”
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Attributed to Rene Descartes:
“Cogito, ergo sum.”
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Attributed to Rene Descartes:
“Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.”
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Attributed to Rene Descartes:
“The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.”
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Attributed to Rene Descartes:
“Conquer yourself rather than the world.”
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Attributed to Rene Descartes:
“Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.”
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“M. Desargues puts me under obligations on account of the pains that it has pleased him to have in me, in that he shows that he is sorry that I do not wish to study more in geometry, but I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions which serve only to exercise the mind , and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature... You know that all my physics is nothing else than geometry.”
Letter to Marin Mersenne (July 27, 1638) as quoted by Florian Cajori , A History of Mathematics (1893) letter dated in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 3, The Correspondence (1991) ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch