Rene Descartes 1596 – 1650

Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist often called the father of modern philosophy. In the Meditations on First Philosophy he applied methodic doubt to establish a foundational certainty in the cogito, captured by the formula I think, therefore I am. He defended a dualist account of mind and body and developed analytic geometry, linking algebra and Euclidean geometry. His mechanistic view of nature influenced the trajectory of European science. His work set the agenda for rationalist philosophy in the seventeenth century.

René Descartes (1596–1650) is conventionally described as the father of modern philosophy. Born in La Haye en Touraine and educated by the Jesuits at La Flèche, he served briefly as a soldier before settling in the Dutch Republic, where he wrote almost all of his philosophical work in deliberate distance from French ecclesiastical authority.

Descartes's project was to find a single indubitable starting point for human knowledge and to reconstruct philosophy and the natural sciences from it. The method of systematic doubt in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) leads to the cogito — the indubitable existence of the thinking self — from which Descartes derives the real distinction between mind and body, the existence of God, and the reliability of clear and distinct ideas. The Discourse on the Method (1637) introduces the same project for a wider audience.

Descartes was also a mathematician and natural philosopher of the first rank. His Geometry founded the analytic tradition that bears his name, and his physical works developed a corpuscular alternative to Aristotelian natural philosophy. He died in Stockholm in 1650, where he had reluctantly traveled to tutor Queen Christina of Sweden. His philosophical project shaped everything that followed in early modern thought, and his metaphysics structured the rationalist-empiricist division that organized seventeenth-century philosophy.