Nicole Perez
April 20 2010
LBST 401

From my understanding cartesianism is where people believed that the mind is completely separate from the body. What a person feels and what a person sees is not real, and is simply an illusion. The real truth is what you find in your mind. Balthasar Bekker, was a person who made it his responsibility to show that magic and witches was fake and only caused by superstition. I agree with the idea that if people were not so superstitious, black magic would simply not exist. The idea that God is above nature also came out during this time. “God or nature,” was the sides you had to choose from. This shows that God simply created nature for the people. However, many tended to believe that nature had something to do with some kind of magic. A man who moved toward natural reason, rather than religious views of nature was Herman Boerhaave. He tended to focus on descriptive facts rather than their actual causes. Be believed that the best way to understand why and how things are the way they are, is by experiencing and observing things themselves. From my understandings of the readings, he had actually taken a position similar to Descartes. It was the idea that only on truths that could be known through the senses and natural reason. Be had believed that metaphysics was not a good foundation for an understanding of the teachings of the sacred writings. His hopes of becoming a member in the church had diminished after many noticed his interest in the study of natural bodies and forming a judgment of a person by the things they say. Since his dreams of being placed high in the church were gone he went on and took a position in medicine. With his work, he only started with the facts and used natural reason to determine their meanings. He believed that the mind and body are related but both have a mind of its own, and cannot control each other. He tended to stress the what’s and how’s of medicine rather than the why’s. Bernard Mandeville was born a year after Boerhaave, and was much more radical. He was very interested in philosophical cartesianism through his medical studies. He believed that it is vanity and all its vices that make a society function and prosper. He felt that in a state of nature. People pursue their own desires without even thinking of the consequences for others. The characteristic that makes people fit for society is the value they place on themselves and their own wish for people to think highly of them.