Descartes
1) His Biography:
On March 31, 1596, Descartes was born at La Haye in Touraine, a small town in central France that has since been renamed in his honour. He was the youngest of three children, and Jeanne Brochard passed away before he became a year old. The children were transferred to live with their maternal grandmother by their father, Joachim, a council member in the provincial parliament. They stayed there even after he remarried a few years later. However, he sent René in boarding school at the Jesuit institution of Henri IV in La Flèche, several kilometres to the north, for seven years at the age of eight since he was particularly worried about a proper education.
Descartes was a good student, yet it’s speculated that he might have been ill since he didn’t have to adhere to the demanding schedule of the school and was instead permitted to sleep in until midday. He was well prepared for his career as a philosopher by the disciplines he studied, such as rhetoric and logic, the “mathematical arts,” which included music and astronomy, as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics. So did spending the following four years at the University of Poitiers obtaining a baccalaureate in law. Some academics think he might have experienced a nervous breakdown at this time.
Later, Descartes expanded his education to include theology and medicine. In his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, published in 1637, he claimed that he rejected all of this and resolved to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in himself or otherwise in the big book of the world. So he travelled, briefly serving in the army, witnessing some conflicts, and meeting Isaac Beeckman, a Dutch physicist and philosopher who would later become one of Descartes’ most important teachers. A year after earning his degree from Poitiers, Descartes claimed that the series of three extremely potent dreams or visions that followed guided his life’s work.
Descartes never wed, although in 1635 his daughter Francine was born in the Netherlands. His mother was a maid in the house where he was staying, and he had come there in 1628 since life in France was too hectic for him to focus on his profession. He had made arrangements for the young girl to live with family so that she could attend school in France, but when she was five years old, she passed away from a fever.
Descartes spent more than 20 years of his life in the Netherlands before passing away on February 11, 1650, in Stockholm, Sweden. He had relocated there less than a year earlier at Queen Christina’s invitation to serve as her philosophy tutor. His ongoing ill health was a carryover from his early years. The queen insisted on lessons at 5 am despite his habit of spending mornings in bed where he continued to honour his dream life and incorporate it into his waking techniques in conscious meditation. This caused him to develop pneumonia from which he never fully recovered. He was 53.
Descartes, a Catholic, was interred in a cemetery that was largely for un-baptized infants because Sweden was a Protestant nation. Later, his bones were transported to Paris’s oldest church, Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey. Although urban lore claims that only his heart remains there and the rest is interred in the Pantheon, they were relocated during the French Revolution but returned later.
2) Main Works:
Discourse on the Method:
Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method was printed in 1637. The book was divided into six sections: considerations for understanding natural sciences; rules defining the author’s method; maxims and morals accepted as the foundation of the method; proof of the existence of a soul and a deity; and understanding of physics, the human heart and soul of all living things. Three supplementary essays—on dioptrics, meteors, and geometry—were also included in the book.
La Géométrie:
The ground-breaking mathematical work of Descartes is La Géométrie (Geometry). It was released in 1637 as a part of Discourse on the Method’s appendices. Descartes first proposed in La Géométrie that each point in two dimensions can be defined by two numbers on a plane, with the first number indicating the point’s horizontal location and the second indicating the point’s vertical location.
As a result, he created the Cartesian coordinate system, the basis of analytical geometry. It also offers geometric explanations for various other areas of mathematics, including group theory, multivariate calculus, differential geometry, complex analysis, and linear algebra. Descartes also introduced the lowercase letters a, b, and c for known quantities and x, y, and z for unknown quantities in La Géométrie, which subsequently came to be known as the standard algebraic notation.
Dioptrique:
In this treatise he made many contributions to modern physics. He created the first formulation of the natural laws that was distinctly modern. His first law argues that everything always remains in the same state; hence, when it is moved once, it always continues to move, and his second law states that all movement is, of itself, along straight lines. Later, Newton’s first law of motion included these two Descartes laws. The third law of Descartes discusses how bodies behave when they collide. A precursor to the law of conservation of mechanical momentum was discovered by Descartes in addition to these other principles. Through his work Dioptrique, he also made significant advances to the study of optics.
He discovered the Snell-Descartes law of refraction, also known as the law of refraction. He used it to demonstrate that a rainbow’s angular radius is 42 degrees. Descartes also independently discovered the law of reflection, which was originally printed in his essay Dioptrique.
Meditations on First Philosophy:
Rene Descartes wrote his philosophical work Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641. Six meditations make up the book, in which Descartes attempts to establish what may be understood with certainty after first abandoning all trust in things that are not absolutely. certain. A methodical procedure of becoming sceptical about the veracity of one’s views is known as methodic doubt or Cartesian doubt. Descartes thus changed the topic of discussion from “what is true” to “of what can I be certain?” This would suggest that humanity takes over from God as the last arbiter of truth. Descartes’ first two Meditations are regarded as an essential starting point for all contemporary philosophical thought.
3) Main Themes in his Writings:
Skepticism:
Descartes’ philosophy is infused with a fundamental cynicism regarding the nature of reality. This sequence of investigative meditations is driven by a scepticism that predates postmodernism by centuries and forces Descartes to cast doubt on everything he learns from his senses and construct reality from the ground up. The only thing in whose existence Descartes can fervently believe in this kind of radical scepticism is his own intellect. Throughout the course of his Discourse on the Method, he struggles with this scepticism and only succeeds in developing a cogent metaphysical explanation towards the conclusion.
Dualism:
His work exhibits a pervasive dualism, one in which Descartes definitely believes: the separation of the mind from the body (which would come to be known as Cartesian dualism). He believed that the only component of the self that can be proven to exist is the mind, and that the state of the mind is more real and true than any physical form (echoing a bit of Platonic philosophy there). The physical world and the intellectual/spiritual world are clearly separated from one another. The senses belong in the physical world, according to Descartes, and their only purpose is to help a person navigate this constricting world. Real truth, on the other hand, can be found in reason and in God.
God:
Descartes goes on to formalise the necessity of God’s existence after establishing the logical existence of himself. Although it appears that this belief has been present from the start of the book, albeit latently, he says so in the Third Meditation. Every aspect of Descartes’ philosophy, especially the pseudo-Platonic dualism, is influenced by his belief that God is both the ultimate cause of and the final destination for humanity (which has had a significant impact on the development of theology, one that might be construed as somewhat detrimental in some instances). God is the only other prominent character in Descartes’s reductionistic experiment, but religion nonetheless dominates his main work.
4) Descartes and Rationalism:
Most people agree that René Descartes is credited as originating modern philosophy. He was the forerunner of the intellectual movement known as rationalism, which promoted the use of reason as a tool for information acquisition. Rationalism was one of the primary philosophical currents of the Enlightenment, a cultural movement that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and altered the Western world. Empiricism, which emphasises the use of sensory perception rather than pure reason, was another. Descartes, along with thinkers like John Locke, John Hobbes, and Voltaire, encouraged society to re-examine its norms and structures, which resulted in a great deal of social upheaval. Enlightenment ideals served as the foundation for both the American and French Revolutions, and it was during this time that science, math, philosophy, and our conceptions of the self underwent significant change.
5) His Influence in Philosophy:
Descartes is usually regarded as the founder of modern philosophy because of how far from the more intuitive knowledge of the early 17th century his theories diverged. Although certain aspects of his theory weren’t entirely original, his method was. Descartes was a firm believer in starting over by essentially throwing out all previous ideas and inherited beliefs. He then advocated reintroducing one by one the things that were certain, which for him started with the proclamation “I exist.” His most well-known adage, “I think, therefore I am,” originated from this.
Descartes, who held that all truths were ultimately interconnected, attempted to understand the meaning of the natural world using science and mathematics in a way that was in some ways an extension of the position Sir Francis Bacon had taken in England a few decades before. Descartes authored several more works outside Discourse on the Method, such as Meditations on First Philosophy and Principles of Philosophy.
Despite the fact that philosophy is where Descartes spent the most of the 20th century—each century has concentrated on a different area of his work—his studies in theoretical physics led many academics to believe that he was a mathematician before anything else. Through his laws of refraction, he developed an empirical understanding of rainbows. He also proposed a naturalistic account of the formation of the solar system, though he felt he had to suppress much of that in light of Galileo’s treatment by the Inquisition. Cartesian geometry, which incorporates algebra, was also introduced by him. His worries were justified; later, Pope Alexander VII added Descartes’ writings to the list of prohibited books.
When faced with theological questions, Descartes’ method of using mathematics, logic, and philosophy to explain the physical world took a metaphysical turn. This led him to reflect on the nature of existence and the mind-body duality, identifying the pineal gland as the body’s point of contact with the soul. Additionally, it inspired him to define dualism as the meeting of matter and non-matter. This idea sparked debate because man’s prior intellectual framework had provided him with the means to define knowledge of what is true. We are all now philosophers thanks to Descartes’ invention of methodological scepticism, sometimes known as Cartesian doubt.
