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|Summary='''Rene Descartes''' (1596-1650) was French mathematician and philosopher. He is widely regarded as the founder of modern philosophy because Because he rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic world view embraced for most of the previous two thousand years, and laid down new foundations for knowledge, he is widely regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. [[CiteRef::Russell (1945)|p.524]][[CiteRef::Newman (2016)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1993)]] He put forward this new approach to knowledge in his ''Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences'' (''Discourse on Method''), first published in 1637[[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]]. Descartes posited a scientific methodology whereby a proposition is acceptable only if it can be clearly and distinctly perceived by the intellect beyond all reasonable doubt or follows deductively from such propositions.[[CiteRef:: Newman (2016)]] Rejecting the Aristotelian world of forms, substances, and teleology, he posited a mechanical world in which matter possessed only spatial extension and interacted only by contact. This allowed him to advance a mathematical a priorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiry.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]]|Historical Context=Descartes’ work developed as a response to the The Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition that had come to form formed the centerpiece of the contemporary mosaic in the early seventeenth-centurymosaic. Descartes had been was well educated in this tradition over when he attended the course of his education at prestigious Jesuit La Fleche where College between the ages of ten and eighteen. There he studied a traditional Scholastic curriculum of logic, grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and theology under Jesuit instruction. The primary goal of Jesuit education was to renew Catholic Christian faith and to combat heresy. [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 38-61]] The mosaic of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was based primarily on the works of Aristotle and some later Hellenistic natural philosophers, reconciled in various ways with Christian theology by scholars in the high middle ages. It included elements such as Christian theology, humoral physiology, astrology, Ptolemean astronomy, and Christian (Catholic, in many but not all communities contemporaneous with Descartes) theology.[[CiteRef::Haldane (1905)]]
Notably, Descartes’ major writings are either contemporaneous with or shortly successive to periods of significant social and intellectual upheaval in Europe. Descartes was a participant in the Thirty Years War before writing his major works and travelled traveled extensively around Europe at a time when the continent was embroiled in both reformation and counter-reformation, both of which were a wellspring of new thought in theology and philosophy.[[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] Philosophically, Descartes was immediately preceded by Bacon, whose contributions to epistemology helped to weaken the foundations of the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic.[[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]] Scientifically, a number of new advancements had been made in optics, astronomy, and physiology during or shortly prior to Descartes’ lifetime; he commented on the trial of Galileo and was familiar with the works of Copernicus and Kepler, the latter of whose work was already celebrated at La Fleche College when Descartes was attending.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]] Although Descartes was critical of Galileo’s methodology it is clear that he nevertheless had read and was familiar with his work, which was instrumental in weakening the various communities’ confidence in the salience of the Aristotelian mosaic.[[CiteRef::Ariew (1986)]] Also notable is that Descartes’ most prominent teacher was the Calvinist natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman, whose work directly conflicted with the Aristotelian tradition by positing atomism and by rejecting plenism.[[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]] These and other factors place Descartes in a historical context rife with revolutionary change and immense scholarly interest in the changing landscape of academic inquiry.
In terms of his methodology Descartes was largely responding to what he perceived as the dogmatism and marked lack of progress he perceived in the Scholastic tradition within which he was schooled at La Fleche. His motivations for undertaking his investigations in the way he did are well documented in his writings and correspondences. He was unsatisfied with the education he received in college and frustrated with the conservatism of his instructors. In part one of the Discourse on the Method he writes “there is nothing at stake for the scholar except perhaps that the further his conclusions are from common sense the prouder he will be of them because he will have had to use so much more skill and ingenuity in trying to make them plausible!”[[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]] His weariness with the largely dialectical scholastic method is what led him to develop the highly systematized epistemology and metaphysics for which he would come to be known.