Round Table: Descartes vs. Aristotle: a Comparative picture of the World.
Victor V. Rozen, Saratov State University
Abstract
Round Table: Descartes vs. Aristotle: a Comparative picture of the World
Descartes managed to create a system of natural philosophy that could replace Aristotle's understanding of the universe. Unlike Aristotle, who believed that true knowledge was derived from sensory experience through intuition and abstraction, Descartes based his method on the ability of the mind to directly perceive clear and distinct truths, which should be combined with reliable deduction. In Descartes' philosophy, nature is presented as the cause of itself. In accordance with this, the teleological approaches of Antiquity, according to which everything that happens in the world is the realization of predetermined goals, are replaced by a mechanical construct. It was Descartes who first formulated the concept of a universe governed by laws rather than the will of supernatural forces. Therefore, he sought to construct a mechanistic model of the world in which everything could be explained using mathematics.
Formulated by Descartes, the philosophical concept of the universe as an atomistic system governed by the laws of mechanics, and therefore accessible to science, was developed by Newton and led to the creation of a mechanistic picture of the World. Descartes' ideas about motion and extension as the essences of real objects, the reduction of natural phenomena to purely physical ones, and his belief in the unlimited potential of the human mind and the invariability of the laws of nature all had a decisive impact on the emerging scientific thinking of the modern era. The mechanistic view of nature, which was based on Descartes, proved to be extremely fruitful. It led to the development of hydrodynamics, elasticity theory, the mechanical theory of heat, and the molecular-kinetic theory, which explained the motion of liquids and gases, the generation and transfer of heat, and a number of other phenomena.
Speaker
Victor V. Rozen
Saratov State University
Russia
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