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The Search for Truth by Natural Light [1] (La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle) is an unfinished philosophical dialogue by René Descartes “set in the courtly culture of the ‘ honnête homme ’ and ‘ curiosité ’.” [2] It was written in French (presumably after the Meditations was completed [3]) but that was lost around 1700 and remained lost until a partial copy ...
Descartes' Le Monde, 1664 The World, also called Treatise on the Light (French title: Traité du monde et de la lumière), is a book by René Descartes (1596–1650). Written between 1629 and 1633, it contains a nearly complete version of his philosophy, from method, to metaphysics, to physics and biology.
Page of Descartes' La dioptrique with the wine vat example. The first discourse captures Descartes' theories on the nature of light.In the first model, he compares light to a stick that allows a blind person to discern his environment through touch.
This theory came to dominate the conceptions of light in the eighteenth century, displacing the previously prominent vibration theories, where light was viewed as "pressure" of the medium between the source and the receiver, first championed by René Descartes, and later in a more refined form by Christiaan Huygens. [1]
Descartes briefly sketches how in an unpublished treatise (published posthumously as Le Monde) he had laid out his ideas regarding the laws of nature, the sun and stars, the moon as the cause of "ebb and flow" (meaning the tides), gravitation, light, and heat. Describing his work on light, he states:
Descartes is not the first to use the mechanical analogies but because he clearly asserts that light is only a mechanical property of the luminous body and the transmitting medium, Descartes's theory of light is regarded as the start of modern physical optics.
For Descartes, ethics was a science, the highest and most perfect of them. Like the rest of the sciences, ethics had its roots in metaphysics. [96] In this way, he argues for the existence of God, investigates the place of man in nature, formulates the theory of mind–body dualism, and defends free will.
Descartes was a substance dualist, and argued that reality was composed of two radically different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on the other. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other.