RENÉ DESCARTES

“The Father of Modern Philosophy”

March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650

I. Life
- Born on March 31, 1596 in La Haye en Touraine, a small town in France.
- At age 8, rené was sent to boarding school at the Jesuit college of Henri
IV in La Fiéche for seven years.
- The subject he studied was rhetoric, logic and the “mathematical arts”,
which include music, astronomy, metaphysics, natural philosophy and
ethics that equipped him well for his future as a philosopher.
- He spent the next 4 years earning a baccalaureate in law at the University
of Poitiers.
- Descartes later added theology and medicine to his studies. But he
eschewed all of this, “resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of
which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world”, he
wrote much later in Discourse on the Method of Righty Conducting the
Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, published in 1637.
- He traveled, joined the army for a brief of time, saw some battles and was
introduced to Dutch scientist and philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who
would become for Descartes a very influential teacher. A year after
graduating from Poitiers, Descartes credited series of three very powerful
dreams or visions with determining the course of his study for the rest of his
life.
- Descartes never married, but he did have a daughter named Francine,
but died of a fever at age 5.
- Descartes lived in the Netherlands for more than 20 years but died
because of pneumonia at age 53 at Stockholm, Sweden on February 11,
1650. He had moved there less than a year before, at the request of
Queen Christina, to be her philosophy tutor.
- Sweden was a Protestant country, so Descartes, as a catholic, was buried
in a graveyard primarily for unbaptized babies. Later, his remains were
taken to the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest church in Paris.
The remains were moved during the French Revolution --- Although, urban
legend has it that only his heart is there and the rest is buried in the
Panthéon.

II. Major Works and Contributions

A. CARTESIAN DOUBT
- Descartes begins his Mediation on First Philosophy by “doubting
everything there was to doubt”. The purpose of this was to strip all
knowledge that could possibly held in doubt as genuine order to arrive at
something that could be determined to be known at absolute certainty.
Descartes determines that because his senses can be fooled, he has no
reason to believe in the findings of science, the existence of the external
world or even that his own body exists. He postulates that reality may be a
dream and that he would have no way of knowing whether he was
dreaming.

He outlined four main rules for himself in his thinking:

 Never accept anything except clear and distinct ideas
 Divide each problem into as many parts are needed to
solve it.
 Order your thoughts from the simple to complex
 Always check thoroughly for oversights.

Descartes also uses thought experiment called the “evil demon” which
consist of a being that exist only to fool his senses.