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His strategy was, first, to reject all knowledge that he cannot be certain of, and accept only those propositions of which he is certain. He would deduce other knowledge from such axioms using reason. By this method Descartes hoped to produce a kind of systematized knowledge that could be universally accepted. In his 'Meditations on First Philosophy', [[CiteRef::Descartes (2004)]] Descartes identified the sole indubitable proposition upon which he would build his entire philosophical system: he was certain of his own existence as a thinking being, or in latin, '''‘Cogito, Ergo Sum’''' (also styled ‘Dubito, Ergo Cogito, Ergo Sum’ or simply as ‘the Cogito’); “I think, therefore I am.” From the foundation of his own existence, Descartes deduced that he must be a created being, that this requires a creator, that creator being God, the benevolent nature of God, and the consequent reliability of his senses and of the God-given ability of his reason to form clear and distinct ideas. It was therefore possible to use his senses and reason to gain knowledge of an external world. This reasoning formed the foundation of his systematized scientific worldview.[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]]
Descartes maintained some aspects of the Scholastic-Aristotelian methodology – namely an axiomatic-deductive, epistemic-foundationalist structure of investigation. But the critical difference in his methodology was the shift in the method of theory choice. It jettisoned the Aristotelian expectation that a theory must be experientially based and intuitively obvious for it to be acceptable, and although his system, as it ended up, allowed for knowledge that was both experiential and intuited,[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]] the ultimate justification for knowledge claims was human reason and the absence of doubt. Descartes was both a '''rationalist''' and an '''a priorist''', in that his epistemology and metaphysics allows for the existence of synthetic a priori propositions.
===Cartesian Natural Philosophy===