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Dec 3, 2008 · René Descartes (1596–1650) was a creative mathematician of the first order, an important scientific thinker, and an original metaphysician. During the course of his life, he was a mathematician first, a natural scientist or “natural philosopher” second, and a metaphysician third.
Descartes, influenced by the automatons on display at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, investigated the connection between mind and body, and how they interact. His main influences for dualism were theology and physics.
- Early Life
- Concept of Doubt & Rationalism
- Works
- Philosophy
- Criticism & Atheism
- Death & Legacy
René Descartes was born on 31 March 1596 in La Haye, France. His father was a landowner and councilor for the Parliament of Brittany. Beginning at the age of the ten, the young Descartes received his education from the Jesuits at the College de La Flèche in the French province of Anjou - a school founded by Henry IV of France (r. 1589-1610) and con...
During the early 17th century, Europe was undergoing a crucial change in the area of both scienceand philosophy. Before Descartes' assertion on the concept of doubt and the transition into rationalism, Aristotelean philosophy and scholasticism dominated Western thought, but science initiated a break from this traditional ideology to one based on an...
From 1629 to 1649 he would produce his greatest works on philosophy, including: 1. Le Monde(1633) - a defense of the heliocentric view of the solar system 2. Discourse on Method (1637) - the preface to his Optics 3. Meditations (1641) - a discussion of his Cartesian theory and God's existence 4. Principles of Philosophy(1644) - an examination of th...
While his Discourse laid the foundations for both his epistemology and metaphysics, his Meditationswould revolutionize philosophical thought and introduce a new school of thought: rationalism. In rationalism, knowledge of the world is acquired through the use of reason, not based on the unreliability of the senses. In his Discourse, he wrote of his...
Descartes took the question of doubt to areas later described in his Cartesian dualism as well as ontological proof of the existence of God. It is these areas where he received the majority of his criticism. To Descartes, an individual is a combination of mind and body. Both of these are necessary for perception, memory, imagination, and emotion. H...
In 1649 at the request of Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes moved to Stockholm to teach her philosophy. Unfortunately, the queen was an early riser which was contrary to Descartes who preferred to sleep late - a practice he had maintained since his days at the College of de Le Flèche. Rising at 5:00 in the morning for the lessons (three times a ...
- Donald L. Wasson
Dec 3, 2008 · The British philosopher Henry More at first followed Descartes but subsequently turned against him. Other major philosophers, including Benedict de Spinoza and G. W. Leibniz, were influenced by Descartes' thought but developed their own, distinct systems.
Descartes argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism or duality proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion.
Rene Descartes, often hailed as the father of modern philosophy, made equally groundbreaking contributions to the field of mathematics. His work laid the foundations for the development of modern geometry and influenced the evolution of calculus and algebra.
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Jul 6, 2018 · Rene Descartes contributed significantly to the development of modern physics. Most importantly, he provided the first distinctly modern formulation of laws of nature.
