This volume preserves the format in which Discourse on Method was originally published: as a preface to Descartes's writings on optics, geometry, and meteorology. In his introduction, Olscamp discusses the value of reading the Discourse alongside these three works, which sheds new light on Descartes's method. Includes an updated bibliography.

Two works from the father of modern philosophy. In Discourse on Method, he formulated a scientific approach comprising four principles, including to accept only what reason recognizes as "clear and distinct." In Meditations, he explores the mind/body distinction, the nature of truth and error, the existence of God, and the essence of material things.

"It is not enough to have a good mind; it is more important to use it well" René Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In his Discourse on Method he outlined the contrast between mathematics and experimental sciences, and the extent to which each one can achieve certainty. Drawing on his own work in geometry, optics, astronomy and physiology, Descartes developed the hypothetical method that characterizes modern science, and this soon came to replace the traditional techniques derived from Aristotle. Many of Descartes’ most radical ideas—such as the disparity between our perceptions and the realities that cause them—have been highly influential in the development of modern philosophy. This edition sets the Discourse on Method in the wider context of Descartes’ work, with the Rules for Guiding One’s Intelligence in Searching for the Truth (1628), extracts from The World (1633) and selected letters from 1636-9. A companion volume, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, is also published in Penguin Classics.

This edition features reliable, accessible translations; useful editorial materials; and a straightforward presentation of the Objections and Replies, including the objections from Caterus, Arnauld, and Hobbes, accompanied by Descartes' replies, in their entirety. The letter serving as a reply to Gassendi--in which several of Descartes' associates present Gassendi's best arguments and Descartes' replies--conveys the highlights and important issues of their notoriously extended exchange. Roger Ariew's illuminating Introduction discusses the Meditations and the intellectual environment surrounding its reception.

A literary, historical and philosophical discussion of attitudes to blindness by the sighted, and what the blind 'see'Why has there been a persistent fascination by the sighted, including philosophers, poets and the public, in what the blind 'see'? Is the experience of being blind, as Descartes declared, like 'seeing with the hands'? What happens on the rare occasions when surgery allows previously blind people to see for the very first time? And how did evidence from early experimental surgery inform those philosophical debates about vision and touch? These questions and others were prompted by a question that the Irish scientist, Molyneux, asked an English philosopher, Locke, in 1688, but which was to have implications for British empiricism, French sensationism, and the beginnings of psychology that outlasted the long tail of the Enlightenment. Through an unfolding historical and philosophical narrative the book follows up responses to this question in Britain and France, and considers it as an early articulation of sensory substitution, the substitution of one sense (touch) for another (vision). This concept has influenced attitudes towards blindness, and technologies for the blind and vision impaired, to this day.Key FeaturesUnfolds the history of 'blindness' from 17th century that shades into the beginnings of psychologyQuestions the assumed centrality of vision and the eye in Enlightenment philosophy and scienceTraces the core idea of 'sensory substitution' from hypothetical speculations in the 17th century to present day technologies for the blind and vision impaired

The surprising roles of instruments and experimentation in acquiring knowledge In Philosophical Instruments Daniel Rothbart argues that our tools are not just neutral intermediaries between humans and the natural world, but are devices that demand new ideas about reality. Just as a hunter's new spear can change their knowledge of the environment, so can the development of modern scientific equipment alter our view of the world. Working at the intersections of science, technology, and philosophy, Rothbart examines the revolution in knowledge brought on by recent advances in scientific instruments. Full of examples from historical and contemporary science, including electron scanning microscopes, sixteenth-century philosophical instruments, and diffraction devices used by biochemical researchers, Rothbart explores the ways in which instrumentation advances a philosophical stance about an instrument's power, an experimenter's skills, and a specimen's properties. Through a close reading of engineering of instruments, he introduces a philosophy from (rather than of) design, contending that philosophical ideas are channeled from design plans to models and from model into the use of the devices.

The sampling lattice used to digitize continuous image data is a signi?cant determinant of the quality of the resulting digital image, and therefore, of the e?cacy of its processing. The nature of sampling lattices is intimately tied to the tessellations of the underlying continuous image plane. To allow uniform sampling of arbitrary size images, the lattice needs to correspond to a regular - spatially repeatable - tessellation. Although drawings and paintings from many ancient civilisations made ample use of regular triangular, square and hexagonal tessellations, and Euler later proved that these three are indeed the only three regular planar tessellations possible, sampling along only the square lattice has found use in forming digital images. The reasons for these are varied, including extensibility to higher dimensions, but the literature on the rami?cations of this commitment to the square lattice for the dominant case of planar data is relatively limited. There seems to be neither a book nor a survey paper on the subject of alternatives. This book on hexagonal image processing is therefore quite appropriate. Lee Middleton and Jayanthi Sivaswamy well motivate the need for a c- certedstudyofhexagonallatticeandimageprocessingintermsoftheirknown uses in biological systems, as well as computational and other theoretical and practicaladvantagesthataccruefromthisapproach. Theypresentthestateof the art of hexagonal image processing and a comparative study of processing images sampled using hexagonal and square grids.