René Descartes (31 March 1596-11 February 1650) was a French-born philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who spent a large portion of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces.
One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy.
Many elements of Descartes's philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena.
In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God's act of creation. Refusing to accept the authority of previous philosophers, Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers who preceded him.
In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic as if no one had written on these matters before. His best known philosophical statement is cogito, ergo sum found in Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy (1644).
More information: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Descartes has often been called the father of modern philosophy, and is largely seen as responsible for the increased attention given to epistemology in the 17th century. He laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Spinoza and Leibniz, and was later opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
In the 17th-century Dutch Republic, the rise of early modern rationalism -as a highly systematic school of philosophy in its own right for the first time in history- exerted an immense and profound influence on modern Western thought in general, with the birth of two influential rationalistic philosophical systems of Descartes, who spent most of his adult life and wrote all his major work in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and Spinoza -namely Cartesianism and Spinozism.
It was the 17th-century arch-rationalists like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz who have given the Age of Reason its name and place in history. Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes were all well-versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.
Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments.
Descartes's influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry -used in the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.
More information: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
René Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, Province of Touraine (now Descartes, Indre-et-Loire), France, on 31 March 1596.
By 1649, Descartes had become one of Europe's most famous philosophers and scientists.
That year, Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to her court to organize a new scientific academy and tutor her in his ideas about love. She was interested in and stimulated Descartes to publish the Passions of the Soul, a work based on his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth. Descartes accepted, and moved to Sweden in the middle of winter.
Descartes arranged to give lessons to Queen Christina after her birthday, three times a week at 5 am, in her cold and draughty castle. It soon became clear they did not like each other; she did not care for his mechanical philosophy, nor did he share her interest in Ancient Greek. By 15 January 1650, Descartes had seen Christina only four or five times. On 1 February, he contracted pneumonia and died on 11 February.
Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences.
In his Discourse on the Method, he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called hyperbolical/metaphysical doubt, also sometimes referred to as methodological scepticism: he rejects any ideas that can be doubted and then re-establishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.
Descartes built his ideas from scratch. He relates this to architecture: the topsoil is taken away to create a new building or structure. Descartes calls his doubt the soil and new knowledge the buildings.
More information: Spark Notes
it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt,
as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes
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