“Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism.”

Methodical Realism

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism." by Étienne Gilson?
Étienne Gilson photo
Étienne Gilson 22
French historian and philosopher 1884–1978

Related quotes

Ogden Nash photo

“Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of proven criminals?”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"Good-by, Old Year, You Oaf or Why Don't They Pay the Bonus?" in The Primrose Path (1935)

Tom Robbins photo

“I'm descended from a long line of preachers and policemen.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

High Times interview (2002)
Context: I'm descended from a long line of preachers and policemen. Now, it's common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way as to convince otherwise rational people that they're factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally. Moreover, I grew up in the rural South, where, although television has been steadily destroying it, there has always existed a love of colorful verbiage.

James P. Hogan photo
J. C. R. Licklider photo

“[The computer is also the direct descendant of the telegraph as it enables one… to] "transmit information without transporting material"”

Source: Libraries of the future, 1965, p. 6 as cited in: Rodney James Giblett (2008) Sublime communication technologies. p. 175.

Immanuel Kant photo
Immanuel Kant photo

“I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.”

Variant translation: I freely admit: it was David Hume's remark that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my enquiries in the field of speculative philosophy.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783)

Vitruvius photo

“Let the directions of your streets and alleys be laid down on the lines of division between the quarters of two winds. On this principle of arrangement the disagreeable force of the winds will be shut out from dwellings and lines of houses.”

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VI, Sec. 7-8
Context: Let the directions of your streets and alleys be laid down on the lines of division between the quarters of two winds. On this principle of arrangement the disagreeable force of the winds will be shut out from dwellings and lines of houses. For if the streets run full in the face of the winds, their constant blasts rushing in from the open country, and then confined by narrow alleys, will sweep through them with great violence. The lines of houses must therefore be directed away from the quarters from which the winds blow, so that as they come in they may strike against the angles of the blocks and their force thus be broken and dispersed.

Bernhard Riemann photo

“Let us imagine that from any given point the system of shortest lines going out from it is constructed; the position of an arbitrary point may then be determined by the initial direction of the geodesic in which it lies, and by its distance measured along that line from the origin. It can therefore be expressed in terms of the ratios dx0 of the quantities dx in this geodesic, and of the length s of this line. …the square of the line-element is \sum (dx)^2 for infinitesimal values of the x, but the term of next order in it is equal to a homogeneous function of the second order… an infinitesimal, therefore, of the fourth order; so that we obtain a finite quantity on dividing this by the square of the infinitesimal triangle, whose vertices are (0,0,0,…), (x1, x2, x3,…), (dx1, dx2, dx3,…). This quantity retains the same value so long as… the two geodesics from 0 to x and from 0 to dx remain in the same surface-element; it depends therefore only on place and direction. It is obviously zero when the manifold represented is flat, i. e., when the squared line-element is reducible to \sum (dx)^2, and may therefore be regarded as the measure of the deviation of the manifoldness from flatness at the given point in the given surface-direction. Multiplied by -¾ it becomes equal to the quantity which Privy Councillor Gauss has called the total curvature of a surface. …The measure-relations of a manifoldness in which the line-element is the square root of a quadric differential may be expressed in a manner wholly independent of the choice of independent variables. A method entirely similar may for this purpose be applied also to the manifoldness in which the line-element has a less simple expression, e. g., the fourth root of a quartic differential. In this case the line-element, generally speaking, is no longer reducible to the form of the square root of a sum of squares, and therefore the deviation from flatness in the squared line-element is an infinitesimal of the second order, while in those manifoldnesses it was of the fourth order. This property of the last-named continua may thus be called flatness of the smallest parts. The most important property of these continua for our present purpose, for whose sake alone they are here investigated, is that the relations of the twofold ones may be geometrically represented by surfaces, and of the morefold ones may be reduced to those of the surfaces included in them…”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Richard Dawkins photo

Related topics