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|Summary=Rene Descartes (1596CE-1650CE) was French mathematician and philosopher. In A History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell calls Descartes the “founder of modern philosophy” for his rejection of the scholastic foundations of his predecessors.<refname="Russell (1946)>[Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1946. E-Book.]</ref>[[CiteRef:: Russell (1946)|p.524]] Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (full title Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences), first published in 1637, laid down the foundation for a break with the Aristotelian methodology that had pervaded through the better part of the previous two-thousand years. [[CiteRef:: Garber (1993)]] Descartes posited a normative 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. Descartes advanced a mathematical, apriorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiry.[[CiteRef:: Garber (1993)]]
|Historical Context=Descartes’ work developed as a response to the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition that had come to form the centerpiece of the contemporary mosaic in the early seventeenth-century. Descartes had been well educated in this tradition over the course of his education at La Fleche where he studied a traditional Scholastic curriculum of logic, grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and theology under Jesuit instruction. 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::Harber (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 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 (1637)]] 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.
The most notable of Descartes’ contributions was his introduction of a new method for pursuing knowledge in the science that was distinct from the previously accepted method inherited from Aristotle. Descartes had become frustrated with the previous method of the Scholastic European tradition and its dialectical approach to knowledge-seeking, which he charged with plunging him into skeptical doubts whereby he could never be sure what was true and what was not. He writes in Discourse on the Method:
“But no sooner had I completed the whole 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. For I found myself tangled in so many doubts 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 (1637)]]
Descartes concluded that if his goal was to attain certain knowledge about the world then the presently accepted method was insufficient and that a new one would be required to satisfy his aims. Method was a central theme in Descartes’ writing 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 discoveries.[[CiteRef::Ariew (1986)]] To that end he embraced his sceptical doubts and devised a method based on methodological scepticism; a method whereby he rejects all knowledge that he cannot be certain of, accepts only those propositions which he can accept as certain, and proceed deductively from those axioms according to reason. By this method Descartes hoped 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 am.” From this foundation Descartes deduced his being a created thing, his requiring a creator, that creator being God, the nature of God, and the reliability of his senses and reason, all of which would form the broader foundation of his systematized scientific worldview.[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]]
Although Descartes maintained some methodological aspects of the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic – namely the axiomatic-deductive, epistemic-foundationalist structure of investigation – one critical difference in Descartes’ methodology was the shift in the method of theory choice. According to Barseghyan Barsegyen the accepted method of the Scholastic-Aristotelian method was that a theory is acceptable “if it grasps the nature of a thing through intuition schooled by experience, or if it is deduced from general intuitive principles.”[[CiteRef::Barseghyan Barseghyen (2015)]] The keywords in this formulation of the Scholastic-Aristotelian method are intuition and experience, both of which are necessary conditions for one to be justified in accepting a proposition. Descartes’ methodology is notable in that it jettisons both of those conditions; a proposition need be neither experientially based nor intuited 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. In this way Descartes is both a rationalist and an apriorist, in that his epistemology and metaphysics allows for the existence of synthetic a priori propositions.
===The Cartesian Revolution in Natural Philosophy===