Descartes’ indubitable ‘I’ redirected philosophy inward toward certainty of the self.

Evidence

‘I think, therefore I am’ makes mind more certain than matter, and my mind (for me) more certain than the minds of others. There is thus, in all philosophy derived from Descartes, a tendency to subjectivism, and to regarding matter as something only knowable, if at all, by inference from what is known of mind. — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2069 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

It was supposed, on the basis of mathematics, that thought is superior to sense, intuition to observation. If the world of sense does not fit mathematics, so much the worse for the world of sense. — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 203 (#expands, via linked claim)

Native scholars in the country Lyautey was seeking to colonise did not share this conception of human personhood. They did not conceive of the person as possessing a mind in this sense – that strange myth of a separate, non-spatial entity within which occur the ‘mental processes’ of representation. They shared with other Muslim scholars what used to be the common scholarly conception of personhood throughout the Mediterranean world, going back to Aristotle. They conceived of the person as possessing reason, a power or faculty. Reason was the power of grasping universals amid particulars, the unchanging sameness amid differences. It was one among numerous human faculties, albeit the most important since it was the mark or resemblance within human beings connecting them with the universal and the unchanging. For Muslim scholars, knowledge was a question of increasing this power of reason, deepening the grasp of universals. For Descartes, on the other hand, knowledge became the quest for certainty, understood as the correct modelling of an ‘external reality’ in the internal exhibit of the mind. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 548 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Occultism’s spiritualism severs body and soul more cleanly than Descartes did — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 264; Descartes grounded certainty in thought, establishing mind as primary over matter. — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2069; Mathematical certainty led philosophers to suppose thought is superior to sense — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 203 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Descartes grounded certainty in thought, establishing mind as primary over matter. #corroborates (0.90) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2069
• Mathematical certainty led philosophers to suppose thought is superior to sense #expands (0.75) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 203
• Pre-Cartesian Mediterranean thought conceived personhood as possessing reason, not a representing mind #complicates (0.70) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 548