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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.[[CiteRef::Russell (1945)|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 (1992)]]
|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::Haldane (1905)]]