Yet, about his profound, nay decisive indebtedness to Plato there can be no doubt. This influence efficiently directed his thought not only during his formative years but even more so during a later epoch, in part conveyed through the Augustinian preoccupations of the friends he made during his sojourn in Paris, and in part as a consequence of the increasingly mathematical orientation of his philosophy, which naturally approached him of the Platonic tradition and partially eclipsed the Aristotelian facet of his (...) thought produced by his scholastic education. (shrink)

The three hundred and fiftieth birthday of René Descartes and the three hundredth of G. W. Leibniz, both being commemorated this year, recall to mind an epoch which, in many respects, resembled our own more than any other period of modern history. The Thirty Years' War during which Descartes served four years in the armies of the Dukes of Nassau and Bavaria and the aftermath of which determined many circumstances of Leibniz's life and work, was largely an ideological war leaving (...) Europe in a state of tension, which the Peace of Westphalia did little to allay. As a matter of fact, the strife continued in many changing forms up to the time of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, if it can be said at all to have been terminated by these events. (shrink)

La philosophie de Malebranche a servi de cadre à la systématisation des mathématiques du xvie siècle, desquelles elle s’inspire. Éléments qui ont facilité ce rôle : la vérité conçue comme rapport de grandeur, intelligible et réel, entre idées ; la déduction, combinaison de rapports ; la mathématique représente l’ordre et non la substance des choses ; distinction entre comprendre et concevoir, et théorie de l’infini. Le parallélisme mathématico-théologique et la vision en Dieu de l’étendue et des nombres.