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Le visible et l’invisible dans la pensée cartésienne : figuration, imagination et vision dans la philosophie naturelle de René Descartes
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Bellis, Delphine Julie |
| Copyright Year | 2010 |
| Abstract | My aim, in this dissertation, is to explore the various aspects of the process of figuration in Descartes’ philosophy, particularly with respect to the knowledge of natural bodies. Moving from Descartes’ early to his more mature works, we find that the notion of figure (or shape) played a variety of roles: it possessed a methodological function, as a conventional representation of the relations between our notions, but also designated, respectively, a geometrical object, a mode of extension assigned by metaphysics to the reality of bodies, and an external delimitation of sensible bodies or of invisible corpuscles in physics. In analyzing these different functions, my aim is to understand how Descartes’ thought evolved from the Regulae to later texts, while trying to answer a new problem that did not exist for the scholastics, namely that of the knowledge of the shape of determined bodies. This problem arose partly because Descartes’ metaphysics had established shape as an essential mode of bodily extension, while at the time refusing a priori to appeal to sensation for knowledge, but it also emerged for purely epistemological reasons in the process of constituting a new physics. In my thesis, I argue that one key to this problem is to be found in the theory of vision, presented in the Dioptrique, a text that moves, however, towards a corpuscular physics that relies on a specific use of imagination and experience. From this analysis of the notion of figure or shape, we are able to shed a different light on what so far has been considered an integral aspect of the 17th century’s mathematisation of nature. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://lettres.sorbonne-universite.fr/IMG/article_PDF/article_a12216.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
