Search Results - Descartes, René, 1596-1650

René Descartes

René Descartes ( , ; ; }} 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was paramount to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, and later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age.

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. He also 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 "" ("I think, therefore I am"; ).

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. The rise of early modern rationalism as a systematic school of philosophy in its own right exerted an influence on modern Western thought in general. It was the 17th-century 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, with Descartes and Leibniz additionally contributing to a variety of scientific disciplines.

Descartes was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution. His ''Meditations on First Philosophy'' and other philosophical works continue to be studied. His influence in mathematics is equally apparent, being the namesake of the Cartesian coordinate system. He is credited as the father of analytic geometry, which facilitated the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Provided by Wikipedia