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Rene Descartes
(1596-1650)
Rene Descartes is labelled as
the first modern philosopher. Born in La Haye in Central France he was left
an annual income for life by his father who was a prosperous lawyer. His
early education was from the Jesuits which he then went on to gain degrees
in Civil and Church law at the University of Poitiers. He is most famous
for his statement of principal of certainty and validity, "I think therefore
I am." His main argument was that God did not create people with unreliable
senses, which we conclude Descartes believed "sense" information is an individuals
only accurate depiction of the environment. Descartes always maintained
that the role of the brain was to be a transitional agent between spiritual
energies of the mind and physical forces of bodily mechanics. When he died
in 1663 all his books were placed in The Index of Forbidden Books by the
church. Cartesian dualism (the interaction between Mind and Body) asserts
all human activity excluding thinking and feeling come under the heading
of Bodily Physiology and can be said to be the study of the psychophysilogical.
He is credited for directly stimulating the founding of psychology which
in turn now gives us the discipline known as parapsychology. Although many
psychologists have difficulty in applying some of the theories of parapsychology
to psychology, as both of them rely heavily on scientific (statistical)
data.
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