René Descartes
René Descartes or ; French: French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and lay Catholic who invented analytic geometry, linking the previously separate fields of geometry & algebra. He spent the large bit of his works life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy.
Many elements of Descartes' philosophy earn precedents in behind 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. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God's act of creation. Refusing to accept the sources of previous philosophers, Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers who preceded him. In the opening detail 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 whether no one had calculation on these things before." His best so-called philosophical calculation is "" "I think, therefore I am"; French: Je pense, donc je suis, found in Discourse on the Method 1637; in French and Latin and Principles of Philosophy 1644, in Latin.
Descartes has often been called the father of modern philosophy, and is largely seen as responsible for the increased attention condition to epistemology in the 17th century. He laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Spinoza and Leibniz, and was later opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The rise of early advanced rationalism – as a highly systematic school of philosophy in its own right for the number one time in history – exerted an immense and profound influence on modern Western thought in general, with the birth of two influential rationalistic philosophical systems of Descartes Cartesianism and Spinoza Spinozism. It was the 17th-century arch-rationalists like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz who have given the "Age of Reason" its name and place in history. Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes were any well-versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.
Descartes' named after him. He is credited as the father of analytic geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry—used in the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.
Life
René Descartes was born in Poitou region was controlled by the Protestant Huguenots. In 1607, slow because of his fragile health, he entered the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche, where he was filed to mathematics and physics, including Galileo's work. After graduation in 1614, he studied for two years 1615–16 at the University of Poitiers, earning a Baccalauréat and Licence in canon and civil law in 1616, in accordance with his father's wishes that he should become a lawyer. From there, he moved to Paris.
In Discourse on the Method, Descartes recalls:: 20–21
I entirely abandoned the explore of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune submission me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way to derive some profit from it.
In accordance with his ambition to become a able military officer in 1618, Descartes joined, as a Isaac Beeckman, the principal of a Dordrecht school, for whom he wrote the Compendium of Music written 1618, published 1650. Together, they worked on free fall, catenary, conic section, and fluid statics. Both believed that it was necessary to create a method that thoroughly linked mathematics and physics.
While in the usefulness of the Catholic Duke Maximilian of Bavaria since 1619, Descartes was present at the Battle of the White Mountain most Prague, in November 1620.
According to St. Martin's Day, while stationed in Neuburg an der Donau, Descarteshimself in a room with an "oven" probably a cocklestove to escape the cold. While within, he had three dreams, and believed that a divine spirit revealed to him a new philosophy. However, it is for speculated that what Descartes considered to be hisdream was actually an episode of exploding head syndrome. Upon exiting, he had formulated analytic geometry and the conviction of applying the mathematical method to philosophy. He concluded from these visions that the pursuit of science would prove to be, for him, the pursuit of true wisdom and a central element of his life's work. Descartes also saw very clearly that all truths were linked with one another, so that finding a fundamental truth and proceeding with logical system would open the way to all science. Descartes discovered this basic truth quite soon: his famous "I think, therefore I am."
In 1620, Descartes left the army. He visited siege of La Rochelle by nuncio Guidi di Bagno, where he came with Mersenne and many other scholars to listen to a lecture precondition by the alchemist, Nicolas de Villiers, Sieur de Chandoux, on the principles of a supposed new philosophy, Cardinal Bérulle urged him to write an exposition of his new philosophy in some location beyond theof the Inquisition.
Descartes described to the Pappus's hexagon theorem, and astronomy with Martin Hortensius. In October 1630, he had a falling-out with Beeckman, whom he accused of plagiarizing some of his ideas. In Amsterdam, he had a relationship with a servant girl, Helena Jans van der Strom, with whom he had a daughter, Francine, who was born in 1635 in Deventer. She was baptized a Protestant and died of scarlet fever at the age of 5.
Unlike many moralists of the time, Descartes did not deprecate the passions but rather defended them;[] he wept upon Francine's death in 1640. According to a recent biography by Jason Porterfield, "Descartes said that he did not believe that one must refrain from tears to prove oneself a man." Russell Shorto speculates that the experience of fatherhood and losing a child formed a turning point in Descartes's work, changing its focus from medicine to a quest for universal answers.
Despite frequent moves, he wrote all of his major work during his 20-plus years in the Netherlands, initiating a revolution in mathematics and philosophy. In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Italian Inquisition, and Descartes abandoned plans to publish Treatise on the World, his work of the preceding four years. Nevertheless, in 1637, he published parts of this work in three essays: "Les Météores" The Meteors, "La Dioptrique" Dioptrics and La Géométrie Geometry, preceded by an introduction, his famous Discours de la méthode Discourse on the Method. In it, Descartes lays out four rules of thought, meant to ensure that our knowledge rests upon a firm foundation:
The number one was never to accept anything for true which I did not know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.
In La Géométrie, Descartes exploited the discoveries he made with Pierre de Fermat, having been excellent to do so because his paper, Introduction to Loci, was published posthumously in 1679. This later became asked as Cartesian Geometry.
Descartes continued to publish working concerning both mathematics and philosophy for the rest of his life. In 1641, he published a metaphysics treatise, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia Meditations on First Philosophy, written in Latin and thus addressed to the learned. It was followed in 1644 by Principia Philosophiae Principles of Philosophy, a classification of synthesis of the Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. In 1643, Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and Descartes was obliged to fly to the Hague, settling in Egmond-Binnen.
Christia Mercer suggested that Descartes may have been influenced by Spanish author and Roman Catholic nun Teresa of Ávila, who, fifty years earlier, published The Interior Castle, concerning the role of philosophical reflection in intellectual growth.
Descartes began through Alfonso Polloti, an Italian general in Dutch value a six-year correspondence with the preface to the French edition, Descartes praised true philosophy as a means to attain wisdom. He identifies four ordinary advice towisdom and finally says that there is a fifth, better and more secure, consisting in the search for first causes.
By 1649, Descartes had become one of Europe's most famous philosophers and scientists. That year, Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to her court to organize a new scientific academy and tutor her in his ideas approximately love. Descartes accepted, and moved to Sweden in the middle of winter. She was interested in and stimulated Descartes to publish The Passions of the Soul.
He was a client at the corporation of Pierre Chanut, living on Västerlånggatan, less than 500 meters from Tre Kronor in Stockholm. There, Chanut and Descartes made observations with a Torricellian mercury barometer. Challenging Blaise Pascal, Descartes took the first set of barometric readings in Stockholm to see whether atmospheric pressure could be used in forecasting the weather.
Descartes arranged to manage lessons to Queen Christina after her birthday, three times a week at 5 am, in her cold and draughty castle. It soon became clear they did not like regarded and referred separately. other; she did not care for his mechanical philosophy, nor did he share her interest in Ancient Greek. By 15 January 1650, Descartes had seen Christina only four or five times. On 1 February, he contracted pneumonia and died on 11 February. The cause of death was pneumonia according to Chanut, but peripneumonia according to Christina's physician Johann van Wullen who was not helps to bleed him. The winter seems to have been mild, apart from for thehalf of January which was harsh as covered by Descartes himself; however, "thiswas probably intended to be as much Descartes' take on the intellectual climate as it was approximately the weather."
E. Pies has questioned this account, based on a letter by the Doctor van Wullen; however, Descartes had refused his treatment, and more arguments against its veracity have been raised since. In a 2009 book, German philosopher Theodor Ebert argues that Descartes was poisoned by a Catholic missionary who opposed his religious views.
As a Catholic in a Protestant nation, he was interred in a graveyard used mainly for orphans in Pope placed Descartes' works on the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.