Cartesianism

[kahr-tee-zhuhn-iz-uhm]

noun

1. Cartesian thought or philosophy.

Example Sentences

It is easy to regard Cartesianism, with its insistence that magnets, corkscrews and even what we now call gravity always push and never pull, as something of a joke, but recent work has shown that Descartes carried out some subtle and beautiful experiments, and his vortex theory was still viable well into the eighteenth century.

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Cartesianism, by making an unambiguous divide between the material and the immaterial, left it unclear how angels and demons might be present in the world.

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In other respects, Cartesianism sat uncomfortably with traditional belief, since Descartes was prepared to imagine a universe which was completely unplanned, once the fundamental laws of nature had been established, and various forms of irreligious argument were developed out of Cartesianism, above all by Spinoza.

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To Cartesians, Newton’s theory of gravity made no sense; but in England, where Cartesianism had never been adopted without reservations, and where arguments from design were widely accepted, resistance to the theory was much weaker.

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Even a philosophically ignorant American recognizes an antiquated Cartesianism rearing its head in both, in marked contrast to the optimistic American feminism of, for example, Our Bodies, Ourselves, devoted as it was to undoing the old mind-body dualism the Deneuve document wishes to reinstate.

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