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|Summary='''Rene Descartes''' (1596-1650) was French mathematician and philosopher. Descartes rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic world view embraced accepted for most of the previous two thousand years, and laid down new foundations for knowledge. He is widely regarded as the founder of modern philosophy.[[CiteRef::Russell (1945)|p. 524]][[CiteRef::Newman (2016)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1993)]] Descartes put forward his new approach to knowledge 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 a 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.[[CiteRef::Newman (2016)]] 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 a mathematical a priorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiry.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]]
|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)]]