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|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. Natural philosophy was taught from the works of Aristotle as interpreted by Christian scholars. He is known to have excelled at math.[[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|pp. 38-61]][[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]].

Corpuscularism The '''mechanical natural philosophy''' was a pursued radical alternative to Aristotelian cosmology, embraced by many 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 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. Unilike Unlike Aristotle's physics, it was compatible with a moving planetary Earth. Corpuscularism This '''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 (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 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 corpuscularist who attempted to explain macro-geometrical regularities in terms of micro-mechanical models. He is almost certainly the first person in Europe to pursue this approach in detail. [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 70]] Descartes adopted Beeckman's mathematical corpuscularism and 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)]]

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, and his excitement with the new corpuscularismmechanical natural philosophy. 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.