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|Summary='''Rene Descartes''' (1596-1650) was French mathematician and philosopher. Descartes rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic world view accepted 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 (2014)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1993)]] Descartes put forward his 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 (2014)]] 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=The [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific 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. This '''Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic''' included Christian theology, humoral physiology, astrology, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Christian (Catholic, in many but not all communities contemporaneous with Descartes) theology.[[CiteRef::Haldane (1905)]] Descartes was well educated in this tradition through his attendance at the prestigious Jesuit La Fleche College between the ages of ten and eighteen. He studied a traditional scholastic curriculum of logic, grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Natural philosophy was taught from the works of Aristotle as interpreted by Christian scholars. He is known to have excelled at math.[[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|pp. 38-61]][[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]]
Descartes’ major writings came in a time of social and intellectual upheaval in Europe. He was a participant in the Thirty Years War before writing his major works and 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. The community of the time was engaged with major challenges to the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. There were new developments in optics, astronomy, and physiology.[[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] Aristotle's earth-centered cosmology had been challenged by the work of Nicolaus Copernicus(1473-1543), Johannes Kepler(1571-1630), and Galileo Galilei(1564-1642), which Descartes was familiar with.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]][[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]] Although he 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 Aristotelian mosaic.[[CiteRef::Ariew (1986)]]
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, and his excitement with the new mechanical natural philosophy. 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.
|Major Contributions=Descartes was instrumental new methodology and mechanical natural philosophy were of revolutionary importance. They became accepted at Cambridge University in England by 1680, [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 211]] and in revolutionizing France by about 1700, displacing the Aristotelian-medieval system of theories from the [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific mosaic ]]. These theories ultimately fully displaced by those of seventeenth-century Europe Descartes and by proposing a new methodology, new core scientific the later theories in physics and mathematics, and new understandings of epistemology and metaphysicsIssac Newton (1642-1726). [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p.167]]
===Cartesian Method===
