And, moreover, not accidentally, but systematically and regularly, these two worlds that have absolutely nothing in common, nothing identical? a term such as might be included in the series of definitions of the idea and of the existence of things outside consciousness, outside thought. Such is the essence of the famous psychophysical problem, in which it is not difficult to see the specifically concrete and therefore historically limited formulation of the central problem of philosophy. Before I can compare my idea of a thing with the thing, I must also be aware of the thing, i.e. Is there, in general, a ‘third’ thing in which they are ‘one and the same’, in spite of all their directly visible differences? What is being represented in the piece b. God is the ‘third’ which, as the ‘connecting link’, unites and brings into agreement thought and being, ‘soul’ and ‘body’, ‘concept’ and ‘object’, action in the plane of signs and words and action in the plane of real, geometrically defined bodies outside the head. Having come directly up against the naked dialectical fact that ‘thought’ and ‘being outside thought’ are in absolute opposition, yet are nevertheless in agreement with one another, in unity, in inseparable and necessary interconnection and interaction (and thus subordinated to some higher law – and moreover, one and the same law), the Cartesian school capitulated before theology and put the inexplicable (from their point of view) fact down to God, and explained it by a ‘miracle’, i.e. How then can the two worlds conform with one another? by the direct intervention of supernatural powers in the causal chain of natural events. In order to understand such self-evident things clearly, and to take them into consideration, it is not generally necessary to have Descartes’ mind; but it is necessary to have its analytical rigour in order to define the fact that thought and the world of things in space are not only and not simply different phenomena, but are also directly opposite. And if, all the same, we want to compare steaks and squares, then we will no longer be comparing ‘steak’ and ‘square’ but two objects both possessing a geometrical, spatial form. They are free, as it were, to penetrate and permeate each other, nowhere encountering a boundary. PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). If there is no such common substance, expressed by different means in an idea and in a thing, it is impossible to establish any intrinsically necessary relationship between them. If the existence of things is determined through their extension and if the spatial, geometric forms of things are the sole objective forms of their existence outside the subject, then thinking is not disclosed simply through its description in forms of space. Subject Matter and Content Design. In what special ‘space’ can they be contrasted, compared, and differentiated? There is nothing common between thought and extension that could be expressed in a special definition. next chapter. Descartes, the founder of analytical geometry, could therefore not explain in any rational way whatever the reason for the algebraic expression of a curve by means of an equation ‘corresponding’ to the spatial image of this curve in a drawing. How does it come about that a trajectory, drawn by thought in the plane of the imagination, for example a curve described in its equation, proves to be congruent with the geometrical contours of the same curve in real space? The problem of the theoretical understanding of thought (logic), consequently, and hence not of the rules of operating with words or other signs, comes down to solving the cardinal problems of philosophy, or of metaphysics, to put it in a rather old-fashioned way. In view of the absence of such a boundary, thought cannot limit the extended thing, nor the thing the mental expression. But in the case of the relationship between an idea and reality there is yet another difficulty. At best we can ‘see’ only an external relation in the nature of that which was once established between the position of luminaries in the heavens and events in personal lives, i.e. Everyone knows that it is one thing to have a hundred roubles (or pounds, or dollars) in one’s pocket, and another to have them only in one’s dreams, only in one’s thoughts. That which is an idea is not being, and vice versa. How do they determine, i.e. Since they interpreted objective reality in an abstract, geometrical way (i.e. Man can consciously control his spatially determined body among other such bodies, his mental impulses are transformed into spatial movements, and the movements of bodies, causing alterations in the human organism (sensations) are transformed into mental images. relations between two orders of quite heterogeneous events, each of which proceeds according to its own, particular, specific laws. And that assumes mastering the culture of the genuinely theoretical thinking represented by the classical philosophers, who not only knew how to pose problems with maximum clarity, but also knew how to solve them. Test. One thing ‘only’ is rejected, the possibility of verifying whether or not such things are ‘in reality’ as we know and understand them. Descartes | Thought and being cannot in general come into contact with one another, since their boundary (the line or even the point of contact) would then also be exactly that which simultaneously both divides them and unites them. Flashcards. It was not a matter, of course, of indicating to which ‘department’ the theoretical understanding of thought ‘belonged’, but of a definite way of approaching the solution of an essential philosophical problem. And the difficulty constantly facing every theoretician lies in understanding what it is that links knowledge (the totality of concepts, theoretical constructions, and ideas) and its subject matter together, and whether the one agrees with the other, and whether the concepts on which a person relies correspond to something real, lying outside his consciousness? The two subjects sometimes are the same as in: Here, both the subjects are "I" and no other. The emasculated ‘Aristotelean logic’ therefore also became discredited in the eyes of all leading scientists and philosophers of the new times, which is the reason why most of the philosophers of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries generally avoided using the term ‘logic’ as the name for the science of thought intellect, and reason. Thus we equalise them as being both existences of space, and only after having them equalised sub specie spatii [under the aspect of space] we distinguish them as different points of space. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy », Subjects: An affirmative answer, for all its seeming obviousness, is not quite so simple to prove, and as for a negative answer, it proves possible to back it up with very weighty arguments, such as that, since an object is refracted in the course of its apprehension through the prism of the ‘specific nature’ of the organs of perception and reason, we know any object only in the form it acquires as a result of this refraction.