 Even more important for the Logic is Descartes’ attitude toward formal logic. In his early, incomplete Rules for the Direction of the Native Intellect (c. 1628) and the well-known Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes eschewed traditional logic in favor of techniques for acquiring knowledge in the first place. Syllogisms rarely accomplish that; they serve instead as a means of presenting what is already known. His view of deductive inference was accordingly based on his theory of the mind’s perceptions. From our contemporary perspective, it could be said that Descartes’ philosophical system replaced formal logic with epistemology and the philosophy of mind. The Logic does devote considerable space to a treatment of formal techniques, but the reader is repeatedly reminded that this is of secondary importance. The full title of the book is Logic, or the Art of Thinking, not the art of reasoning or the art of inferring. The book also contains a wealth of examples meant to illustrate moral and religious norms and