Tag: Rene Descartes
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Deserving but unrecognized: the forty-first seat
Marshall A. LichtmanRochester, New York, United States The Nobel Prizes Each year on December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish royal family recognize the individuals deemed to have made the greatest achievements in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and literature; and the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognizes “the person…
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Human heart in Descartes’s De Homine
The famous philosopher René Descartes had an interest in physiology. But although he is known to have carried out dissections and even vivisections, he was a theoretician and not an experimentalist. In 1643 he wrote that having read William Harvey’s 1628 De Moto Cordis he agreed with the theory that the blood circulated through the…
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Pushing back into chaos
Kyra McComas Salt Lake City, Utah, United States The pathway of pain according to René Descartes: “Particles of heat” (A) close to the foot (B) contact the skin and pull threads (C) up the body, that “open the pores” (D, E) and allows “animal spirits to flow from a cavity (F) into the muscles,”…
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Nature telling her secrets: the Kepler–Descartes connection
Ronald Fishman Chicago, Illinois, United States Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) Nature tells us one secret in terms of another, and she may refuse to disclose one secret until another has been laid bare. – T.S. Kuhn1 In 1604, Johannes Kepler solved the problem of how light is refracted within the eye to produce an image on the…