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|First Name=ReneRené

|SummaryBrief='''Rene Descartes''' (1596-1650) was a French mathematician and natural philosopher. ; who is today considered one of the most influential figures in modern philosophy|Summary=Descartes rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic world view medieval mosaic accepted for most of the previous two thousand years, and laid down new the foundations for knowledge. He is widely regarded as the founder of modern philosophya new mechanistic mosaic.[[CiteRef::Russell (1945)|p. 524]][[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1993)]] Descartes put forward his new approach Aristotelians had maintained that intuition schooled by experience was the route to knowledge . Descartes, 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 put forward a rationalist scientific methodology whereby in which 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)]] This allowed him to advance a mathematical a priorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiry.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]] 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 In mathematics he developed techniques that made possible analytic geometry. In natural philosophy, he was co-framer of the sine law of light refraction, developed a mathematical theory of the rainbow, and formulated a priorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiryprecursor of the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Clarke Hatfield (19922016)]]|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, . This was reconciled in various ways with Christian theology by scholars in the High Middle Ages. This '''Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic ''' included Christian theologyPtolemaic astronomy, astrology, 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 Aristotleas interpreted by Christian scholars. He is known to have Descartes also received an education in mathematics that was unusual for the Aristotelian tradition, and excelled at math.[[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|pp. 38-61]][[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]]

Descartes’ major writings came in a time of social and intellectual upheaval in Europe. He Before writing his major works, he was a participant in the Thirty Years War before writing his major works and traveled . He travelled extensively around Europe at a time when the continent was embroiled in both reformation and counter-reformation, both of which were both a wellspring of new thought in theology and philosophy. The community of the time was engaged with major challenges to the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. These came from varied sources, including varieties of Platonism, Hermeticism, and the chemical philosophy of Paracelsus, among other movements.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]] 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 Nicolaus Copernicus(1473-1543), Johannes Kepler(1571-1630), and GalileoGalilei(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)]]

Corpuscularism After leaving La Fleche, in 1618,Descartes became involved in a collaboration with the Dutch Calvinist natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman (1588-1687), who valued him for his mathematical skills. They worked together on several mathematical problems in natural philosophy. [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 68]] Beeckman was a supporter of the '''mechanical natural philosophy'''. This was a [[Theory Pursuit|pursued ]] radical alternative to Aristotelian cosmology, embraced by some supporters of Copernican heliocentrism. [[CiteRef::Luthy, Murdoch, and Newman (2001b)]][[CiteRef::Chalmers (2014)]][[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 69-73]] It rejected the Aristotelian fundamentals of form, substance, and teleology, and the idea that matter is continuous. Instead of explaining the properties of visible bodies in terms of form, it maintained that the world consisted of invisibly tiny particles of matter and that all the observable properties of the natural world visible bodies were a consequence of these particles and their interactions with one another. The particles interacted were held to interact mechanically, by contact, and it was often supposed that they this rendered natural phenomena potentially explainable in geometrical and mathematical terms. Corpuscularism derived from It can be traced to the Ancient Greek '''atomism ''' of Democritus (circa 460-370 BCE) and later Epicurean philosophers. Atomism was reintroduced into European thought in the fifteenth century with the rediscovery of the Roman poet Lucretius's ''De rerum natura''. Part of its appeal lay in the fact that unlike Aristotle's physics, the mechanical philosophy was compatible with a moving planetary Earth. In the decades before Descartesearly seventeenth century, it was championed by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Nicolas Hill (1570-1610?), Sebastian Basso (1573-1625?), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose empiricist epistemology challenged Aristotelian-scholastic methods, and Galileo Galilei.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Klein (2012)]] and in the speculative cosmology of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). [[CiteRef::Gatti (2001)]][[CiteRef::Luthy, Murdoch, and Newman (2001b)]].

After leaving La Fleche, Descartes became involved and Beeckman worked together on several mathematical problems in a collaboration with the Dutch Calvinist natural philosopher Isaac philosophy. Beeckman, who valued him for his mathematical skills is almost certainly the first person in Europe to attempt to explain macro-geometrical regularities in terms of micro-mechanical models. [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 6870]]For the most part, applying mathematics to physical problems was not part of the Aristotelian tradition. Descartes adopted Beeckman led to Descartes' adoption of s mathematical corpuscularism and introduction to became part of a community of corpuscularist thinkers which besides Beeckman and Descartes included Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), and Walter Charleston (1620-1707). They all knew each other and reacted to each other's work. [[CiteRef::Osler (2001)]] The decade after Descartes met Beeckman was the most philosophically productive of his life. [[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]]

whose work directly conflicted with <blockquote>“But no sooner had I completed the Aristotelian tradition by positing atomism and by rejecting plenismwhole course of study that normally takes one straight into the ranks of the ‘learned’ than I completely changed my mind about what this education could do for me.[[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]] These For I found myself tangled in so many doubts and other factors place Descartes in errors that I came to think that my attempts to become educated had done me no good except to give me a historical context rife with revolutionary change and immense scholarly interest in the changing landscape steadily widening view of academic inquiry.my ignorance!”</blockquote>

In terms of Descartes concluded that if his methodology Descartes goal was largely responding to what he perceived as attain certain knowledge about the dogmatism and marked lack of progress he perceived in world,the Scholastic tradition within which he was schooled at La Fleche. His motivations accepted methodology for undertaking his investigations in the way he did are well documented in his writings doing so must be rejected, and correspondencesa new one formulated. He was unsatisfied with the education he received Methodology held a central place in college and frustrated with the conservatism of his instructors. In part epistemology; in fact, one of the Discourse on the Method he writes “there is nothing at stake for the scholar except perhaps Descartes’ criticisms of Galileo was that the further his conclusions are from common sense the prouder he will be of them because he will have had failed to produce a fully developed methodology to use so much more skill justify his discoveries, and ingenuity in trying to make them plausible!”had simply explained particular physical phenomena.[[CiteRef::Descartes Ariew (20071986)]] His weariness with the largely dialectical scholastic method is what led him to develop the highly systematized epistemology Rather than experience and metaphysics for which he would come to be known.|Major Contributions=intuition, Descartes ' '''methodological skepticism''' was instrumental in revolutionizing based on reason and on the mosaic of seventeenth-century Europe by proposing capacity to doubt. The harder a new methodologyproposition was to doubt, new core scientific theories in physics and mathematics, and new understandings of epistemology and metaphysicsthe greater its certainty. This was an epistemological innovation.

The most notable Descartes maintained some aspects of the Scholastic-Aristotelian methodology – namely an axiomatic-deductive, epistemic-foundationalist structure of Descartes’ contributions investigation. But the critical difference in his methodology was his introduction the shift in the method of theory choice. He jettisoned the Aristotelian expectation that a new method theory must be experientially based and intuitively obvious for it to be acceptable, and although his system, as it ended up, allowed for pursuing knowledge in that was both experiential and intuited,[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]] the science that ultimate justification for knowledge claims was distinct from human reason and the previously accepted method inherited from Aristotleabsence of doubt. Descartes had become frustrated with was both a '''rationalist''' and an '''a priorist''', in that his epistemology and metaphysics allows for the previous method existence of synthetic a priori propositions. Although an argument for God's existence was at the Scholastic European tradition and its dialectical approach foundation of his system, Descartes' rationalism was nonetheless a formidable challenge to knowledgethe accepted theological methodology which had been comprehensively expressed by the Catholic saint, Thomas Aquinas (1225-seeking1274) more than three hundred years earlier. Aquinas saw human reason as limited, which he charged with plunging him into skeptical doubts whereby he could never and always to be sure what was true exercised in the context of, and what was notsubject to the authority of, the divine revelation of the Bible. He writes in Discourse Descartes, by contrast, sought to develop his epistemology and theology on the Methodbasis of human reason alone. [[CiteRef::Hyman (2007)]]

“But no sooner had I completed ===Cartesian Natural Philosophy===Descartes scientific theories about the natural world were grounded in a metaphysical foundation, in turn deduced by the whole course application of study his rationalist methodology. He wrote that normally takes one straight into "the ranks whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the ‘learned’ than I completely changed my mind about what this education could do for me. For I found myself tangled in so many doubts trunk is physics, and errors that I came to think that my attempts to become educated had done me no good except to give me a steadily widening view of my ignorance!”[[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]]Descartes concluded that if his goal was to attain certain knowledge about the world then branches emerging from the trunk are all the presently accepted method was insufficient and that a new one would other sciences, which may be required reduced to satisfy his aims. Method was a central theme in Descartes’ writing three principle ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and held a central place in Descartes’ epistemology; in fact, one of Descartes’ criticisms of Galileo was that he failed to produce a fully developed method to justify his discoveriesmorals".[[CiteRef::Ariew Clarke (19861992)|p. 271]] To that end he embraced his sceptical doubts and devised One ought to construct a method metaphysics first, based on methodological scepticism; a method whereby he rejects all knowledge that he cannot be certain criteria independent of, accepts only those propositions which he can accept as certainobservation, and proceed deductively from those axioms according to reasonsubsequently consider physical theories consistent with the metaphysical foundation. By this method Descartes hoped His natural philosophy was in stark contrast to produce a kind of systematized knowledge that could be universally acceptable. As it happened the sole indubitable proposition upon which he would build the entire rest of his philosophical system was his famous ‘Cogito, Ergo Sum’ (also styled ‘Dubito, Ergo Cogito, Ergo Sum’ or simply as ‘the Cogito’); “I think, therefore I amaccepted Aristotelianism.” From this foundation Descartes deduced his being In Aristotelian natural philosophy all objects were a created thingcompound of form and matter, his requiring a creator, that creator being God, the nature of Godconcept called hylomorphism. Form gives material bodies their distinctive properties, and the reliability of his senses makes them different from one another. It explains why fire rises and reason, stones fall. Matter is what all of which would form the broader foundation of his systematized scientific worldviewmaterial bodies share in common. All things have teleological goals or purposes.[[CiteRef::Newman Shields (20142016)]]

Although In Descartes maintained some methodological aspects of the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic – namely the axiomatic-deductive' mechanical corpuscular natural philosophy, by contrast, epistemic-foundationalist structure there are just two kinds of investigation – one critical difference substance that are entirely different from each other in Descartes’ methodology kind: mental substance and physical substance. The fundamental property of '''mental substance''' was thought, and Descartes equated it with the shift in the method rational soul of theory choiceGod and humans. According to Barseghyan, the accepted method The fundamental feature of the Scholastic-Aristotelian method '''physical substance''' was that a theory is acceptable “if it grasps the nature of a thing through intuition schooled by experienceextension in space. He rejected Aristotle's distinction between form and matter, or if it is deduced from general intuitive principlesincluding Aristotle's four elements.”[[CiteRef::Barseghyan Ariew (20151992)]] The keywords in this formulation of Cartesian mechanics rejects the void posited by atomists; instead matter fills the Scholastic-Aristotelian method are intuition and experienceuniverse as a plenum. If all matter is extended, both of which are necessary conditions for one to Descartes reasoned that there can be justified in accepting a propositionno space without extended matter. Descartes’ methodology Also unlike atomism, matter is notable in infinitely divisible, though visible things are composed of tiny corpuscles that it jettisons both interact with one another by physical contact. The corpuscular composition of those conditions; a proposition need be neither experientially based nor intuited for it material body, rather than its Aristotelian form, determines its properties. Since corpuscles are too small to be acceptabledirectly observed, their size and although his system shape must be hypothesized, though observation can allow us to infer the plausibility of our guesswork. Our senses, Descartes maintained, do not inform us of the mechanical world as it ended up allowed for knowledge that was both experiential is, but provide us with sensations which are mere signs of their objective causes. Only extended matter and intuited,motion exist apart from our minds. [[CiteRef::Newman Clarke (20141992)]] the ultimate justification for knowledge claims Descartes completed a manuscript that was human reason. In this way Descartes is both to be a rationalist and an aprioristcomprehensive expression of his mechanical natural philosophy, called ''The World''. He withdrew his plans to publish it upon learning of the condemnation of Galileo in Rome in that 1633. The work never appeared during his epistemology lifetime, but two major fragments, the ''Treatise on Light'', and the ''Treatise on Man'' were published posthumously. The first dealt with physics, and metaphysics allows for the existence second put forward a theory of synthetic a priori propositionsphysiology, nervous system function, and the mind/brain relationship.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Descartes (2003)]]

===In Descartes cosmology, the universe is essentially mechanical in character. Copernican heliocentrism is accepted, and planetary motion is explained in terms of a swirling '''vortex''' of material particles around the central sun. Earth, as a moving planet, is the center of its own smaller vortex. The Cartesian Revolution particles of the vortex push larger bodies towards its center and this explains gravity without supposing, as did Aristotle, that the sphere of earth was at rest in Natural Philosophy===its natural place; the center of the universe. It also made it reasonable to suppose that other planets had their own attractive vorticies, and were thus other worlds. [[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]]

{{#evtDescartes also challenged Aristotelian physiology. Aristotle's theory of physiology posited three souls or vital principles; the nutritive soul, responsible for nutrition and reproduction, comprised the entirety of the soul in plants. The sensitive soul, responsible for perception, locomotion, imagination, and desire, was added to the sensitive soul in animals. A third component, the intellectual soul, was found uniquely in human beings. [[CiteRef::Shields (2016b)]][[CiteRef::Van der Eijk (2000)]] Descartes rejected the nutritive and sensitive souls, supposing their functions were instead performed by corpuscular mechanisms, the nature of which he outlined in his ''Treatise on Man''. [[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]] Descartes' mental substance served roughly the same role as Aristotle's intellectual soul. Animals, according to Descartes, are complex automata composed of physical substance only and cannot be said to think in the way that human beings or God can; these properties being made possible by mental substance. [[CiteRef::Des Chene (2001)]][[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]][[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]] Descartes posited a mental substance for theological, metaphysical, and scientific reasons. He supposed that thought could not be mechanized, since all the machines known to him were specialized to perform one particular function, but human reason was a general purpose instrument.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (1992)]][[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]]service=youtubeDescartes mechanical natural philosophy fostered a radical change in how natural philosophers gained new knowledge. The Aristotelian-medieval methodology accorded a very limited role for experiments in scientific investigation. This is because a strict distinction was made between natural and artificial things. Every natural thing behaved in accordance with its nature; acorns grow on oak trees, because that is what their nature dictates. Artificial things have an external source of change. The cogs and springs of a clock are constructed so that they no longer behave according to their respective natures (which is simply to fall towards their natural place at the center of the universe, rather than function as parts of a machine that tells time for humans). A thing cannot reveal its true nature under the artificial conditions of experimentation, because the experimental set up necessarily puts things under artificial conditions. To gain knowledge, things must be observed in their natural undisturbed state. Descartes' mechanical natural philosophy rejected the natural/artificial distinction along with its rejection of forms and teleology. Matter always obeyed the same set of mechanical laws regardless of its situation. Thus,under the mechanical natural philosophy experimentation was often a good source of knowledge about nature, and its adherents often became practitioners. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|id=yFH7i3Lx7IAp.181-182]] The challenge to the Aristotelian tradition, even in places where Cartesianism was rejected and the community maintained Aristotelianism, forced the academic community in Europe to reconsider and defend the Aristotelian mosaic in ways that had never before been encountered. Though the dialectical approach to scholarship throughout the medieval period saw scholars constantly questioning various aspects of the Aristotelian worldview, Descartes’ wholesale rejection of huge swaths of the mosaic and its central concepts were unprecedented. Theories like hylomorphism (that being is a compound of matter and form), which had been a given in the mosaic of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and had endured through multitudes of adjustments, reconciliations, and dialectic criticism, but had never before faced complete overhaul that Descartes's mechanical natural philosophy threatened. Although Descartes' theories would eventually be supplanted by those of Newton, he made the critical first steps to replacing the Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]]|alignmentCriticism=rightDescartes’ ideas saw widespread criticism in his time and shortly after from all manner of sources, including Scholastic vanguards, religious authorities, and other philosophers. One common early criticism was that his new views were threatening to the Catholic and Christian faith.[[CiteRef::Jolley (1992)]] In 1663, his works were placed on the Catholic Church's ''Index of Forbidden books'', and in 1671 his conception was officially banned from schools in the Catholic world. In the early modern period, theological propositions and natural philosophical propositions were not seen as belonging to separate domains, but rather formed parts of an integrated [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific mosaic]]. Aristotelian natural philosophy had been carefully adapted to render it consistent with Catholic faith. Descartes' novel natural philosophy introduced many inconsistencies that needed to be [[The Zeroth Law|reconciled]] before his theories could be [[Theory Acceptance|description=Hakob accepted]]. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan(2015)|p. 190-196]] One specific theological criticism of Cartesian natural philosophy had to do with the Catholic sacrament of the holy Eucharist, in which bread and wine are said to be transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The dogma of the ''Real Presence'' maintained that in this sacrament, Christ is really (as opposed to metaphorically or symbolically) present in the bread and wine. Thomas Aquinas had posited an Aristotelian explanation for the ''Real Presence'' which had become the accepted Catholic ''doctrine of transubstantiation''. The doctrine held that in the Eucharist, the Aristotelian substance of the bread and wine were replaced by the body and blood of Christ, while their forms (that of bread and wine) remaining unchanged. In Descartes' corpuscularism, bread and wine differed from flesh and blood because they had a different arrangement of corpuscles. There is no obvious way that one could appear as the other. The Anglican church, the state church of England following its break with the Catholic papacy in the 1530's lecture did not accept the ''doctrine of transubstantiation''. Thus Cartesianism did not face objections based on Cartesian Worldviewit, and became accepted at Cambridge University by 1680. Catholic Paris didn't accept it until 1700. Many solutions reconciling Cartesianism and the ''Real Presence'' had, by then, been proposed. Barseghyan speculates that the one accepted by the Parisian community was that proposed by Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) in 1671, in which Christ's presence in the Eucharist was due to a miracle beyond human comprehension, and outside the ordinary course of nature described by Cartesianism.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|container=frame }}p. 194]]

Descartes played a pivotal role Critics in the transition away from the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaicDecartes' era were also concerned that corpuscular explanation involved hypothetical unobservable entities, and his physicalthe supposition that this invisibly small world could be understood by analogy with larger objects. Descartes countered that "there is nothing more in keeping with reason that we judge about those things that we do not perceive, physiological, psychologicalbecause of their small size, by comparison and biological theories are too numerous to be adequately treated here.contrast with those that we see" [[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]][[CiteRef::Garber Clarke (1992)|p. 267]] That said, He felt that a number of his theories are worth exploring in briefplausible model, in particular those that were fundamental departures from though potentially incorrect due to the accepted mosaic unobservability of the early sixteenth centuryits fundamental parts, was better than none at all. The first and most dramatic role of these is Descartes’ rejection of hylomorphism and the form-matter distinction which would be the foundation for Descartes’ rejection of most of the prior physics. In place of the hylomorphic theory of substance Descartes proposed that there are unobservably small entities in fact two kinds of substances that are entirely different from each other in composition and kind: mental substance and physical substance. Descartes equated the former with the rational soul of God and humans and the latter with all physical sciences was to remain a matter, the fundamental feature of which he considered to be extensionprolonged debate. Descartes deduced his scientific theories about the natural world from this basically metaphysical foundation (all of which he deduces by application of his method). For example the central concept in Cartesian mechanics is that all material interactions are interactions between matterIn modern science, which fills the universe (plenism also followed from Descartes’ position of matter as extension because if all matter it is extended then there can be no space without extended matter, i.e. a vacuum). Descartes also considered the universe to be essentially mechanical in character except for mental substance – animals according to Descartes, as being constituted solely of material substance an accepted and without mental substance, are mere automata and cannot be said to think, feel, or love in the way that human beings or God cancentral practice.[[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]]

The details of the Cartesian school of natural philosophy are not as important however as the impact that the school would have on subsequent scientific inquiry. The overthrow of the Aristotelian tradition, even in places where Cartesianism was rejected and the community maintained Aristotelianism, forced the academic community in Europe to reconsider and defend the Aristotelian mosaic in ways that had never before been encountered. Though the dialectical approach to scholarship throughout the medieval period saw scholars constantly questioning various aspects of the Aristotelian worldview Descartes’ wholesale rejection of huge swaths of the mosaic and its central concepts were unprecedented. Theories like hylomorphism, which had been a given in the mosaic of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and had endured through multitudes of adjustments, reconciliations and dialectic criticism had never before faced complete overhaul as Descartes threatened. Although Descartes would eventually be supplanted by Newton he made the critical first steps to replacing the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]]|Criticism=Descartes’ ideas saw widespread criticism in his time and shortly after from all manner of sources, including Scholastic vanguards, religious authorities, and other philosophers. By 2016 almost all of Descartes’ ideas have been consigned to the graveyard of ideas, but it is worth noting some criticisms Descartes faced in his lifetime or shortly thereafter that are of historical interest. The most notable objection Descartes would end up facing would be the more mathematically precise and more explanatorily powerful physical theory given by Newton half a century later, but there existed objection to Descartes even earlier. One particularly Another notable objection came from Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia(1618-1680), who questioned Descartes’ theory of substance in a letter dated the tenth of May, 1643. In it, she asks “Given that the soul of a human being is only a thinking substance, how can it affect the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary actions?”[[CiteRef::Descartes (2009)]] Descartes would never gives a satisfactory answer to this central question over the course of the correspondence. In 1747, in his ''L'Homme machine''(''Machine Man'') Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) raised another simple, but devastating objection to Descartes' supposition that human reason must be due to an immaterial mental substance. He noted that reason can become impaired by material causes such as drunkenness and fever. [[CiteRef::De La Mettrie (1996)]]. In the single example highlights how troubling nineteenth century, Princess Elizabeth's objection became far more poignant with the formulation of the law of the conservation of energy, which implied causal closure of the issues left open physical world to influence by Descartes’ system are for a mental substance. In the early twentieth century, the integrity mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) showed that it was possible to construct a general purpose machine capable of performing any possible mathematical computation, thereby demonstrating that systema general purpose machine was possible and refuting Descartes' core argument against a mechanical understanding of human reason. Elizabeth’s objection raises reasonable (significantBy the end of the twentieth century, even) doubts about whether or not the theory relevant scientific communities of neuroscience and cognitive science had rejected the idea of a mental substance around which Descartes bases and sought a significant portion of his scientific theories can hold watermechanistic physical explanation for the mind [[CiteRef::Bechtel (2008)]], though there was still no agreement as to whether consciousness could be explained in this fashion. [[CiteRef::Chalmers (1996)]]

One Descartes' physical natural philosophy did not fare nearly so well. Within fifty years, Isaac Newton (1642-1726) formulated a more mathematically precise and explanatorily powerful physical theory, which became the accepted theory of the most powerful objections to arise after Descartes’ death in 1650 came physical world. It rejected a generation later with the emergence major tenet of the philosophy Descartes' corpuscularism by positing a gravitational force that acted at a distance. Newton's laws of John Locke motion, however, bore important similarities to those formulated earlier by Descartes. [[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]] As practicing scientists, researchers like Newton and the British Empiricists. LockeRobert Boyle (1627-1691) did not, despite being an admirer of as did Descartes, was highly critical seek certain knowledge of his methodology and in particular was critical the real essences of his methodological scepticismmaterial objects. Instead, they sought an ordering of phenomenal experience which Locke regarded as a non-starterwould enable them to predict nature's course with the best available theory.[[CiteRef::Uzgalis Osler (20161970)]]

Other objections were political, theological, Descartes' method itself was criticized by two sympathetic figures; Antoine Arnauld and personal objections brought by various interest groups who Marin Mersenne. Their criticism had some stake in to do with Descartes demonstration of the existence of God, which is the academic status quolinchpin of his method. In many places Descartes’ work was banned, Descartes claimed that our belief in more even discussion the reliability of the clear and distinct perceptions of the human intellect depends on our knowledge of the existence of God as the source of Descartes’ work was bannedthat capacity. Official condemnations came down But how could that knowledge be established in the first place? If we answer that we can prove God's existence from Universities premises we clearly and Church authoritiesdistinctly perceive, none then the argument collapses into circularity. Descartes' argument that it is possible for us to have certain scientific knowledge of which were effective at stopping the spread world fails with it, since it depends on God to underwrite the reliability of our senses and intellect. This criticism, called the '''Cartesian ideasCircle''', was never successfully countered. Within a generation, Descartes quest for certainty in scientific knowledge was widely recognized to have failed.[[CiteRef::Jolley Cottingham (1992)]] In 1650, [[John Locke]] and the British Empiricists brought forth a new conception of scientific knowledge that was more modest than Descartes' failed quest for certainty. The empiricists argued for experience, rather than a priori reason, as the basis for human knowledge, and sought a philosophy of science more in keeping with scientific practice. [[CiteRef::Uzgalis (2016)]][[CiteRef::Osler (1970)]]

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