ERROR in this message! We are meeting Friday Oct 5. Thanks!
We'll meet to discuss Meditation 2 this Thursday, Oct 4, 1.00 pm in Cafe Pariso. Bonnie will open discussion.
In the meantime, here is some advice from Goethe about what to do each day, as partial means towards the good life: look at a good painting, listen to a fine piece of music, read a thoughtful poem and try to say something reasonable. Descartes would have approved. My friend Amy, a Descartes scholar, changed the last recommendation to "try to say something outrageous." I'd try to do both. I'd also add, back up your data.
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This is Molly's blog from last week, she is having trobule logging in :)
I am a little confused on where I should be posting; it seemed this would be the most appropriate spot since my presentation was Sep. 21.
Synthesis vs. Analysis as a Cartesian method
Analysis: The process of separating the constituents of a whole and discerning how they are interrelated.
Synthesis: Combining separate parts into a unified whole working from one axiom to create a theory.
Descartes’ used the method of analysis in the Meditations. The project is to find what we can know through clear and distinct perception and from that prove the existence of God. In the First Meditation Descartes takes the over-arching set of constituents that are assumed to be based in knowledge and separates them. Once the constituents are separated they can be analyzed and further broken down. An example: sensory perception seems to give us knowledge about our environment, but we can doubt the certainty of sensory perception because sometimes our senses deceive us (a square tower in the distance may appear round). Through analysis Descartes arrives at the conclusion that the only thing we can clearly and distinctly perceive is that “I think” thus “I exist”.
He uses analysis in the Meditations to promote the reader to adopt his reasoning. Synthesis involves being forced into the line of argument because the reader is expected to assume the axiom in order to follow the argument. Descartes wanted to be in agreement with all of the steps and not be forced into agreeing with a provided axiom. If one has carefully considered the steps of analysis in the first and second Meditations, one cannot help but arrive at “I think” thus “I exist”. This method is also very much in line with the religious meditations of the time. The meditater separated grand ideas until he/she could focus in on what he/she was concerned with.
Descartes makes mention that he used the method of synthesis in The Principles in “the conversation with Burman” in The Replies. The Principles present the rules as axioms that the reader must accept. Synthesis is analogous to Euclid’s Geometry in that an axiom of simple mathematics is assumed and from that an entire theorem is built.
The Meditations does not seem to be strictly in the method of analysis in that Descartes stops and questions his propositions and backtracks. He seems to use some synthetic method when he criticizes his previous claim and then builds a stronger one.
Descartes claims that both analysis and synthesis depend on “what has gone before”. Every step must be proved and linked to the next step. He also says that analysis is a priori and synthesis is a posteriori. I found that seventeenth century philosophers defined a priori and a posteriori different that we do today. A priori= argument proceeding from cause to effect and a posteriori = proceeding from effect to cause.
*trouble I am a lousy speller.
David, this is the reminder you asked for regarding our meeting on Friday! (We are having it at espresso art, right?)
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