RHETOR 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Deductive Reasoning, Intuit, Well-Order
Document Summary
A discourse on method refers to descartes" unpublished works, which contain theories of the material world that he has left unsaid due to extraordinary disagreement with the current mode of thought. Descartes says that even fictional worlds can be observed, because they are created. Peter dear points out that deductive logic and its mathematical analogues were the inferences that mattered to descartes and newton. The aim of our studies should be to direct the mind with a view to forming true and sound judgements about whatever comes before it. We should attend only to those objects of which our minds seem capable of having certain and indubitable cognition. Concerning objects proposed for study, we ought to investigate what we can clearly and evidently intuit or deduce with certainty, and not what other people have thought or what we ourselves conjecture. For knowledge can be attained in no other way.
