Talk of reason and rationality has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of science in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes' analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of reason as nothing other than authorized judgment.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Michael LeBuffe;
(2015)
The Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms: Miracles, Monotheism, and Reason in Spinoza
(/isis/citation/CBB525797691/)
Article
Ott, Walter;
(2008)
Régis's Scholastic Mechanism
(/isis/citation/CBB000930744/)
Chapter
Garber, Daniel;
(2009)
Leibniz, Theology and the Mechanical Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB001021830/)
Book
Fabrizio Baldassarri;
(2024)
René Descartes’s Natural Philosophy and Particular Bodies
(/isis/citation/CBB923571073/)
Book
Garber, Daniel;
(2009)
Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad
(/isis/citation/CBB001032997/)
Article
Walmsley, J. C.;
(2006)
Locke, Mechanism and Draft B: A Correction
(/isis/citation/CBB000640347/)
Book
Robertson, Neil G.;
McOuat, Gordon;
Vinci, Thomas C.;
(2007)
Descartes and the Modern
(/isis/citation/CBB001035169/)
Book
Ott, Walter R.;
(2009)
Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB001033000/)
Book
Nolan, Lawrence;
(2011)
Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
(/isis/citation/CBB001035171/)
Article
Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine;
(2013)
La question des passions chez Regius et Descartes. Premiéres éléments d’interpretation
(/isis/citation/CBB224148914/)
Book
Broughton, Janet;
Carriero, John Peter;
(2008)
A Companion to Descartes
(/isis/citation/CBB001035168/)
Article
Mariafranca Spallanzani;
(2011)
Descartes e il 'paradosso' degli animali-macchina
(/isis/citation/CBB729063793/)
Chapter
Guicciardini, Niccolo;
(2007)
“Mechanica Rationalis” and “Philosophia Naturalis” in the Auctoris Praefatio to Newton's Principia
(/isis/citation/CBB001032046/)
Article
Antonio Clericuzio;
(2018)
Gassendi and the English Mechanical Philosophers
(/isis/citation/CBB990799390/)
Article
Walmsley, Jonathan;
(2003)
The Development of Locke's Mechanism in the Drafts of the Essay
(/isis/citation/CBB000831411/)
Article
Emanuela Scribano;
(2021)
I sociniani, Leibniz e Gassendi. Concorso divino e materia eterna
(/isis/citation/CBB624163581/)
Article
Andrea Strazzoni;
(2018)
The Medical Cartesianism of Henricus Regius: Disciplinary Partitions, Mechanical Reductionism and Methodological Aspects
(/isis/citation/CBB716660711/)
Article
Lorenzo Bianchi;
(2011)
Rorario tra Naudé e Bayle
(/isis/citation/CBB157477355/)
Chapter
Smith, Justin E. H.;
(2009)
Descartes and Henry More on Living Bodies
(/isis/citation/CBB001021836/)
Book
Arthur, Richard;
(2014)
Leibniz
(/isis/citation/CBB001510059/)
Be the first to comment!