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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)]]
Corpuscularism was a pursued radical alternative to Aristotelian cosmology. [[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 it maintained that the world consisted of invisibly tiny particles of matter and that all the observable properties of the natural world were a consequence of these particles and their interactions with one another. The particles interacted mechanically, by contact, and it was often supposed that they rendered natural phenomena potentially explainable in geometrical and mathematical terms. Corpuscularism derived from 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''. In the decades before Descartes, it was championed by Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose empiricist epistemology challenged Aristotelian-scholastic methods, [[CiteRef::Klein (20142012)]] 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 in a collaboration with the Dutch Calvinist natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who valued him for his mathematical skills [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 68]]. Beeckman led to Descartes' adoption of corpuscularism and introduction to 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)]]