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|Historical Context=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. 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 under Jesuit instruction. Natural philosophy was taught from the works of Aristotle. 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. There were major new developments in optics, astronomy, and physiology. [[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] The community of the time was engaged with major challenges to the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. Aristotle's earth-centered cosmology had been challenged by the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, 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)]] Descartes was immediately preceded by Francis Bacon. Bacon rejected Aristotelian cosmology and praised Democritus and other pre-Socratic atomists. His empiricist epistemology challenged Aristotelian-Scholastic methods.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]]
After leaving La Fleche, Descartes' first sustained confrontation with an alternative to the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition