Theorists and their Theory- Philosophy and the Philosopher

René Descartes

René DescartesFRENCH MATHEMATICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER

  René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Dubbed the father of modern Western philosophy, much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day.  

René Descartes, (born March 31, 1596, , Touraine, France—died February 11, 1650, , Sweden), French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he was one of the first to abandon scholastic , because he formulated the first modern version of , from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he promoted the development of a grounded in observation and experiment, he has been called the father of modern philosophy. Applying an original system of methodical doubt, he dismissed apparent knowledge derived from authority, the senses, and reason and erected new epistemic foundations on the basis of the that, when he is , he exists; this he expressed in the dictum "I think, therefore I am" (best known in its Latin formulation, "," though originally written in French, "Je pense, donc je suis"). He developed a that distinguishes radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions. Descartes's is rationalist, based on the postulation of of mind, matter, and God, but his physics and physiology, based on sensory experience, are mechanistic and empiricist.

Early Life And Education

Although Descartes's birthplace, La Haye (now Descartes), , is in Touraine, his family connections lie south, across the Creuse River in Poitou, where his father, Joachim, owned farms and houses in Châtellerault and Poitiers. Because Joachim was a councillor in the Parlement of Brittany in , Descartes inherited a modest rank of nobility. Descartes's mother died when he was one year old. His father remarried in Rennes, leaving him in La Haye to be raised first by his maternal grandmother and then by his great-uncle in Châtellerault. Although the Descartes family was Roman Catholic, the Poitou region was controlled by the Protestant , and Châtellerault, a Protestant stronghold, was the site of negotiations over the (1598), which gave Protestants freedom of worship in France following the between Protestant and Catholic forces in France. Descartes returned to Poitou regularly until 1628.

In 1606 Descartes was sent to the Jesuit college at La Flèche, established in 1604 by (reigned 1589–1610). At La Flèche, 1,200 young men were trained for careers in , the judiciary, and . In addition to classical studies, science, , and metaphysics— was taught from scholastic commentaries—they studied acting, music, poetry, dancing, riding, and fencing. In 1610 Descartes participated in an imposing ceremony in which the heart of Henry IV, whose assassination that year had destroyed the hope of religious tolerance in France and Germany, was placed in the cathedral at La Flèche.

In 1614 Descartes went to Poitiers, where he took a law degree in 1616. At this time, Huguenot Poitiers was in virtual revolt against the young King (reigned 1610–43). Descartes's father probably expected him to enter Parlement, but the minimum age for doing so was 27, and Descartes was only 20. In 1618 he went to Breda in the Netherlands, where he spent 15 months as an informal student of mathematics and military architecture in the peacetime army of the Protestant stadholder, Prince (ruled 1585–1625). In Breda, Descartes was encouraged in his studies of science and mathematics by the physicist Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), for whom he wrote the Compendium of Music (written 1618, published 1650), his first surviving work.

Descartes spent the period 1619 to 1628 traveling in northern and southern Europe, where, as he later explained, he studied "the book of the world." While in Bohemia in 1619, he invented geometry, a method of solving geometric problems algebraically and algebraic problems geometrically. He also devised a universal method of , based on mathematics, that is applicable to all the sciences. This method, which he later formulated in Discourse on Method (1637) and (written by 1628 but not published until 1701), consists of four rules: (1) accept nothing as true that is not self-evident, (2) divide into their simplest parts, (3) solve problems by proceeding from simple to complex, and (4) recheck the reasoning. These rules are a direct application of mathematical procedures. In addition, Descartes insisted that all key notions and the limits of each problem must be clearly defined.