The first modern philosopher, René Descartes believed science and mathematics could explain and predict events in the physical world.

 

 

 

 

Descartes developed the Cartesian coordinate system for graphing equations and geometric shapes. Modern maps use a grid system that can be traced back to Cartesian graphing techniques.

 

French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician. Because he was one of the first to abandon scholastic Aristotelianism, because he formulated the first modern version of mind-body dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he promoted the development of a new science grounded in observation and experiment, he has been called the father of modern philosophy.

 

Descartes was the son of a minor nobleman and belonged to a family that had produced a number of learned men. At the age of eight he was enrolled in the Jesuit school of La Flèche in Anjou, where he remained for eight years. Besides the usual classical studies, Descartes received instruction in mathematics and in Scholastic philosophy, which attempted to use human reason to understand Christian doctrine. Roman Catholicism exerted a strong influence on Descartes throughout his life.

 

Upon graduation from school, he studied law at the University of Poitiers, graduating in 1616. He never practiced law, however; in 1618 he entered the service of Prince Maurice of Nassau, leader of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, with the intention of following a military career. In succeeding years Descartes served in other armies, but his attention had already been attracted to the problems of mathematics and philosophy to which he was to devote the rest of his life. One of the important influences on Descartes during this period was Dutch mathematician Isaac Beeckman, who encouraged him to pursue his studies. Descartes made a pilgrimage to Italy from 1623 to 1624 and spent the years from 1624 to 1628 in France. While in France, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy and also experimented in the science of optics.

 

In 1628, having sold his properties in France, Descartes moved to The Netherlands, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Descartes lived for varying periods in a number of different cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Deventer, Utrecht, and Leiden.

 

Residence in the Netherlands

 

Descartes said that he went to the Netherlands to enjoy a greater liberty than was available anywhere else and to avoid the distractions of Paris and friends so that he could have the leisure and solitude to think. (He had inherited enough money and property to live independently.) The Netherlands was a haven of tolerance, where Descartes could be an original, independent thinker without fear of being burned at the stake—as was the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619) for proposing natural explanations of miracles—or being drafted into the armies then prosecuting the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In France, by contrast, religious intolerance was mounting. The Jews were expelled in 1615, and the last Protestant stronghold, La Rochelle, was crushed—with Bérulle's participation—only weeks before Descartes's departure. In 1624 the French Parlement passed a decree forbidding criticism of Aristotle on pain of death. Although Mersenne and the philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) did publish attacks on Aristotle without suffering persecution (they were, after all, Catholic priests), those judged to be heretics continued to be burned, and laymen lacked church protection. In addition, Descartes may have felt jeopardized by his friendship with intellectual libertines such as Father Claude Picot (d. 1668), a bon vivant known as “the Atheist Priest,” with whom he entrusted his financial affairs in France.

 

In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664), Descartes learned that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei had been condemned in Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because this Copernican position is central to his cosmology and physics, Descartes suppressed The World, hoping that eventually the church would retract its condemnation. Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church doctrine and be taught in Catholic schools.

 

It was probably during the first years of his residence in the Netherlands that Descartes wrote his first major work, Essais philosophiques (Philosophical Essays), published in 1637. The work contained four parts: an essay on geometry, another on optics, a third on meteors, and Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), which described his philosophical speculations. Discourse on Method is one of the first important modern philosophical works not written in Latin. Descartes said that he wrote in French so that all who had good sense, including women, could read his work and learn to think for themselves. He believed that everyone could tell true from false by the natural light of reason.

 

Descartes attempted to apply the rational inductive methods of science, and particularly of mathematics, to philosophy. Before his time, philosophy had been dominated by the method of Scholasticism, which was entirely based on comparing and contrasting the views of recognized authorities. Rejecting this method, Descartes stated, “In our search for the direct road to truth, we should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certitude equal to that of the demonstration of arithmetic and geometry.” He therefore determined to hold nothing true until he had established grounds for believing it true. The single sure fact from which his investigations began was expressed by him in the famous words Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”

 

From this postulate that a clear consciousness of his thinking proved his own existence, he argued the existence of God. God, according to Descartes's philosophy, created two classes of substance that make up the whole of reality. One class was thinking substances, or minds, and the other was extended substances, or bodies.

 

Even during Descartes's lifetime there were questions about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.

 

These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because other than the published works, all the other papers, letters, and manuscripts are now lost.

 

In 1667 the Roman Catholic church made its own decision by putting Descartes's works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”)

 

Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too much of God. He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware of—though he tried to conceal—the atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes exulted in the power of human reason to understand the cosmos and to promote happiness, and he rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things. Instead, when we cannot change the world, we must change ourselves.

 

Extracts from:

Richard A. Watson

Encyclopædia Britannica