René Descartes

René Descartes (31 March 1596 – 10 February 1650) was a French natural philosopher; who is today considered one of the most influential figures in modern philosophy. 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<ref name="test". 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 . 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.

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. 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. Philosophically, Descartes was immediately preceded by Bacon, whose contributions to epistemology helped to weaken the foundations of the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic . 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. 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 . 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. 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!” 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.

Major Contributions

Hakob Barseghyan's lecture on Cartesian Worldview

Descartes was instrumental in revolutionizing the mosaic of seventeenth-century Europe by proposing a new methodology, new core scientific theories in physics and mathematics, and new understandings of epistemology and metaphysics. Cartesian Method 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 sceptical 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!” 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. 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. 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 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.” 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 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 Descartes played a pivotal role in the transition away from the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic, and his physical, physiological, psychological, and biological theories are too numerous to be adequately treated here. That said, a number of his theories are worth exploring in brief, in particular those that were fundamental departures from the accepted mosaic of the early sixteenth century. The first and most dramatic of these is Descartes’ rejection of hylomorphism and the form-matter distinction which would be the foundation for Descartes’ rejection of most of the prior physics. In place of the hylomorphic theory of substance Descartes proposed that there are in fact two kinds of substances that are entirely different from each other in composition and kind: mental substance and physical substance. Descartes equated the former with the rational soul of God and humans and the latter with all physical matter, the fundamental feature of which he considered to be extension. Descartes deduced his scientific theories about the natural world from this basically metaphysical foundation (all of which he deduces by application of his method). For example the central concept in Cartesian mechanics is that all material interactions are interactions between matter, which fills the universe (plenism also followed from Descartes’ position of matter as extension because if all matter is extended then there can be no space without extended matter, i.e. a vacuum). Descartes also considered the universe to be essentially mechanical in character except for mental substance – animals according to Descartes, as being constituted solely of material substance and without mental substance, are mere automata and cannot be said to think, feel, or love in the way that human beings or God can. The details of the Cartesian school of natural philosophy are not as important however as the impact that the school would have on subsequent scientific inquiry. The overthrow of the Aristotelian tradition, even in places where Cartesianism was rejected and the community maintained Aristotelianism, forced the academic community in Europe to reconsider and defend the Aristotelian mosaic in ways that had never before been encountered. Though the dialectical approach to scholarship throughout the medieval period saw scholars constantly questioning various aspects of the Aristotelian worldview Descartes’ wholesale rejection of huge swaths of the mosaic and its central concepts were unprecedented. Theories like hylomorphism, which had been a given in the mosaic of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and had endured through multitudes of adjustments, reconciliations and dialectic criticism had never before faced complete overhaul as Descartes threatened. Although Descartes would eventually be supplanted by Newton he made the critical first steps to replacing the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic.

Criticism

Descartes’ ideas saw widespread criticism in his time and shortly after from all manner of sources, including Scholastic vanguards, religious authorities, and other philosophers. By 2016 almost all of Descartes’ ideas have been consigned to the graveyard of ideas, but it is worth noting some criticisms Descartes faced in his lifetime or shortly thereafter that are of historical interest. The most notable objection Descartes would end up facing would be the more mathematically precise and more explanatorily powerful physical theory given by Newton half a century later, but there existed objection to Descartes even earlier. One particularly notable objection came from Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who questioned Descartes’ theory of substance in a letter dated the tenth of May, 1643. In it, she asks “Given that the soul of a human being is only a thinking substance, how can it affect the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary actions?” Descartes would never gives a satisfactory answer over the course of the correspondence, and the single example highlights how troubling the issues left open by Descartes’ system are for the integrity of that system. Elizabeth’s objection raises reasonable (significant, even) doubts about whether or not the theory of substance around which Descartes bases a significant portion of his scientific theories can hold water. One of the most powerful objections to arise after Descartes’ death in 1650 came a generation later with the emergence of the philosophy of John Locke and the British Empiricists. Locke, despite being an admirer of Descartes, was highly critical of his methodology and in particular was critical of his methodological scepticism, which Locke regarded as a non-starter. Other objections were political, theological, and personal objections brought by various interest groups who had some stake in the academic status quo. In many places Descartes’ work was banned, in more even discussion of Descartes’ work was banned. Official condemnations came down from Universities and Church authorities, none of which were effective at stopping the spread of Cartesian ideas.

Publications

Here are the works of Descartes included in the bibliographic records of this encyclopedia:

• Descartes (2017): Descartes, René. (2017) Principles of Philosophy. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/descartes.
• Descartes (2009): Descartes, René. (2009) Correspondence with Princess Elizabeth. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1643.pdf.
• Descartes (2007): Descartes, René. (2007) Discourse on the Method. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf.
• Descartes (2004): Descartes, René. (2004) Meditations on First Philosophy. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1641.pdf.
• Descartes (2003): Descartes, René. (2003) Treatise on Man. Prometheus Books.

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Related Topics

Method
Methodology