User:Ssstephen/Reading/Descartes was Here
< User:Ssstephen | Reading
This comes from some pages I found loose beside the printer. I sat down at the coffee table and several copies of it were spread in front of me. It seems to start mid paragraph in a description of a surveying tool maybe called a Dutch circle.
this method reliably projected boundaries and allowed for the sale of land before it emerged from the water... a land-based private investment vehicle that produced a perfect grid landscape just as Descartes arrived in the Netherlands.
how far is it from Alkmaar to Breda?
Descartes became buddies with a guy called Constantijn Huygens, whose son Christiaan would later invent the pendulum clock and thereby exact time.
the grid allowed an embrace of complexity: curved lines that could be described by mathematical formulas, and thereby were not a sign of chaos but an expression of the divine mathematical order assumed to be underlying nature.
What if I'm not? Lets doubt of our existence, while we are doubting.
scientific truth was equated with absolute certainty
This one is gone at least.
the Cartesian grid, trialed in the beemster polder, spread over the globe, rendering space measurable and governable, without bothering about places and particularities, allowing for land to be sold before anyone had even seen it
Further reading: Descartes, Passions of the Soul