Epistemology and Mathematics

[billcu1]

I know the church doesn’t follow Rene Decarte’s philosophy but he was to supposedly used mathematics to come a form of Epistemology. Has anyone read the discourses or the meditations? This is post Aristolole So I don’t know if a Catholic philosophy forum is right for this. But we are concerned with truth and beliefs.

 

[JuanFlorencio]

I know the church doesn’t follow Rene Decarte’s philosophy but he was to supposedly used mathematics to come a form of Epistemology. Has anyone read the discourses or the meditations? This is post Aristolole So I don’t know if a Catholic philosophy forum is right for this. But we are concerned with truth and beliefs.

Rene Descartes had the idea to create a “universal mathematics”, not in the sense that he wanted to compute everything, but in the sense that for any given field he could start with a limited number of axioms and from them obtain any relevant theorem (the Ethica more geometrico demonstrata, by Baruch Spinoza, would be an example of such intent). Then, his development of the analytical geometry was just a particular example of the application of his method.

 

[billcu1]

Rene Descartes had the idea to create a “universal mathematics”, not in the sense that he wanted to compute everything, but in the sense that for any given field he could start with a limited number of axioms and from them obtain any relevant theorem (the Ethica more geometrico demonstrata, by Baruch Spinoza, would be an example of such intent). Then, his development of the analytical geometry was just a particular example of the application of his method.

So is it or has it been successful ?

 

[JuanFlorencio]

So is it or has it been successful ?

Well, it was successful with his analytical geometry; not very successful in his physics, and very unsuccessful in his philosophical discourses.