D’s list of the various subjects he studied and their merits is really quirky. They strike me as being the sort of thing someone who barely studied those subjects might say about them, in a sparknotes kind of way. Weird.
I don’t know if it’s just me, or if D meant it to sound that way, and if he did, what point he was trying to make.
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Timothy Chow on the NF consistency proof and Lean
21 hours ago
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In this paragraph, Descartes says," that the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most honorable people of the past ages...even like a set conversation in which they reveal to us only the best of their thoughts..." I feel that when reading this book, that we are honoring him and actually hearing his thoughts, but this also goes back to what was discussed in class about if I am thinking one idea and telling you about it, are you really understanding what I am actually thinking? Is this 'conversation' we are having with Descartes really what he is taking about?
I also feel like he just whipped through those school subjects quickly in this paragraph because he feels like when we are younger we HAVE to learn about all of these particular things in school, whereas, now we are able to think on our own and study what we want to actually learn about. His being life and the reasoning for it.
In reading that passage I thought that Descartes was trying to be kind of naive and cute with how he explained the courses he had studied but that he had done so on purpose. Almost as if he had admired those courses so much that he had to talk about them in such a way.
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