Word: cartesian
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Chagall learned some of the discipline of the cubists. But he resisted their dissection of form. "Let them eat their fill of their square peas on their triangular tables!" he wrote. Nevertheless, something of Cartesian logic crept into his fantasies; his pictures took on orderly geometry; his images lost traditional figure-ground relationships and, instead, flattened against the picture plane in search of purely visual values. Said Chagall: "For me, a painting is a surface covered with representations of things- objects, animals, human beings- in a certain order in which logic and illustration have no importance...
...faith to drop off to sleep each night, even tiny grins of comfort are very welcome. It was therefore good to see that Muscovites are lining up to purchase their copies of Izvestia's interview with President Kennedy. Not because Russian citizens will immediately and clearly (in some Goldwatery, Cartesian manner) perceive the truth of the American cause, but because such interchanges are much preferable to the kind of scary Cold War bluster that has characterized the present world crisis...
...Philosophy, if not the root of science, is at least the soil in which it grows," Alexandre Koyre, eminent historian of science, maintained at the annual Horblitt lecture last night. To substancetiate this view he analyzed Newton's philosophical objections to Cartesian science...
Newton, however, did not recognize the strategic value of the Cartesian definition, Koyre pointed out. Newton asserted that the "vulgar" concept of motion as something of absolute significance provides the necessary metaphysical foundation for scientific progress...
Descartes termed space "indefinite," reserving the word "infinite" to describe a void. In Newton's mind, though, infinity lacked the Cartesian aura of perfection...