The author is a historical materialist, and naturally always thinks that an important thought of Descartes, a French philosopher, mathematician and scientist, belongs to idealism. But after reading Descartes' guide recently, you will update your knowledge structure. Because "I think, therefore I am" is not an idealistic proposition, but the content of pure epistemology. This explanation is also a highlight of Mr. Yuan, a doctor of philosophy in Peking University and an expert in general education.

"I think the academy? This book, one of the series of travel guides, is not one of the choices that readers should make to increase their knowledge, although this series, this book is intended to provide practical and available humanities general reading materials for young readers? This book is divided into ten lectures, focusing on Descartes' life and thoughts. In his first speech, he talked about his life. In his life, what impressed me the most was that he was a master of picking up girls. For example, his admiration and praise for the princess, the dedication to the princess in Principles of Philosophy is such a beautiful love poem, especially the sentence "In terms of your appearance and age, it is more suitable to represent one of the virtues than the goddess of literature or wisdom". "Even if you win the title of philosopher, you might as well be happy as a devout servant in Shu Jing." This persistence also shows that Descartes also has the temperament of a poet.

In addition, naturally, for Descartes, his life is not only about philosophy and science, but also includes his deeds. In memory of him, people carved poems praising him on his crown.

When I came to the second lecture, I talked about his skepticism in Principles of Philosophy, or his biased view of "a world full of prejudice". Starting from my own case, the author cites a preconceived example-the landlord is a bad person to illustrate the harm of prejudice. However, in the end, Descartes' doubt does not make everyone fall into skepticism, but doubts for affirmation. "The process of doubt is such a process of removing floating sand and finding a solid foundation." However, we should not be skeptical at the same time, which is a dialectical method of Descartes' thought.

Therefore, due to the existence of doubt, the author talked about the problem of "thinking" in the third lecture, because the existence of "thinking" is beyond doubt, which shows that he confirmed the legitimacy of human knowledge from this point. This is the opposite statement, which shows the importance of thinking. Then, how to deal with the relationship between thinking and existence has become a problem to be solved by modern European philosophy. This makes the study of Descartes' first philosophy show that Descartes' first philosophy is the source of western philosophy, although it is contradictory.

Because of the existence of "thinking", in the fourth lecture, the author tells a philosophical conclusion of Descartes: everything we can imagine clearly and obviously is true. It is because of this self-evident that Descartes deduced the existence of God and everything, and gradually became the part of idealism in Descartes' philosophy that we know today. In this part of Descartes' idealism, we know that in Descartes' view, God is like a craftsman, but also powerful and perfect. The thoughts he produced cannot be purely illusory or absurd, but must be true. These are very important contents for readers to understand Descartes idealism.

In the seventh lecture, it is particularly important that Descartes regards man as spiritual rather than material existence, and regards him as the essence of man, which clearly illustrates Descartes' idealism philosophy. In the "primary energy" part, although this primary energy is an imaginary physiological phenomenon, a philosopher with scientific spirit has set foot in anatomy to find out what the human body really is. He once dissected the human body and drew a beautiful anatomical map of the human body, which also showed his genius painting skills. Although in fact, even now, we can't dissect animal brains and explore them or their imagination and memory, Descartes' pioneering experiments have made him a great scientist and philosopher in our human mind.

In addition, in the seventh lecture, Descartes' continuous experiments, he thinks that the body and mind are connected through the pineal gland. This magical pineal gland is located in the center of the brain, which seems to find a material basis for Descartes' idealism philosophy. Then with the progress of the times, we humans did discover the pineal gland, an organ in the brain. This substance involves the biological clock and will delay our aging. Is this a magical effect that will create immortality? That is something in the future, but in Descartes and our time, the existence of this kind of thing shows the argument that thinking and matter can be unified.

The eighth lecture is about Descartes' willpower. In Descartes' philosophy, will is equal to all people, such as wanting money and knowledge, but getting more or less intellectual decision, because intelligence is unequal. If Descartes has any truth, it is "we are too cautious … conceited". The author's point of view here is: don't think that your understanding is absolutely correct, and don't think that you can understand the essence of the world.

In the ninth lecture, we talked about the characteristics of God, among which the biggest characteristic is that there is no organ, which is another important content in Descartes' idealism philosophy. In addition, the book also analyzes what is the essence of God, which deserves our in-depth understanding. Last time I talked about the universe and the mysterious "bearer". Here, the author gives an example of how to define an apple to illustrate that the bearer of this mysterious substance, "Apple", as we know it, is what Descartes called an entity, which has two characteristics: it must exist and cannot be perceived. In addition, in this lecture, Descartes also talked about two properties of matter, namely universality and parity. With regard to Descartes' philosophy that everything is a mental image, the author also lists the same Buddhist idealism of the Three Realms and Wang Yangming's example of nothing outside the mind, both of which are philosophical thoughts that everything is a mental image. Finally, Descartes attaches importance to the laws of nature. For example, he thinks that it is the laws of nature that make our world orderly and make everything in the universe exist and move in an orderly way.

As we know, people carved a sentence on Descartes' tombstone: "Descartes, the first person who fought for and guaranteed rational rights for mankind since the European Renaissance." This is his highest honor. Because he is not only the father of analytic geometry, but also one of the founders of modern western philosophy and the pioneer of modern idealism, he put forward the idea of "universal doubt", which also laid the foundation for the development of European rationalism philosophy.

I think what is more valuable is that as far as the content of human epistemology is concerned, his famous saying "I think therefore I am" means: "The only thing I can be sure of is the existence of my own thoughts, because when I doubt others, I can't doubt my own thoughts at the same time". Descartes' famous saying of "universal doubt" clearly proves the legitimacy of human knowledge, because we can't doubt and prove the non-existence of my thinking, so I think therefore I am. On the proposition of pure epistemology, the author agrees that it is neither materialism nor idealism.