Descartes

French philosopher, mathematician and scientist (1596–1650), born in La Haye en Touraine, educated by the Jesuits at the Collège de La Flèche in a solid scholastic education that he would later largely reject, and active throughout his adult life as an itinerant thinker across Europe, above all in the Netherlands, where he spent most of his intellectual career seeking the freedom and tranquillity that would allow him to develop his thought away from French academic censorship. Regarded as the founder of modern philosophy and father of continental rationalism, Descartes proposed in his Discourse on the Method (1637) a radically new project: to subject all inherited knowledge to methodical, systematic doubt in order to rebuild it afterward on absolutely certain foundations, following a method inspired by the deductive certainty of mathematics. This project reaches its most celebrated formulation in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641): after successively doubting the senses, dreams, and even the existence of the external world through the thought experiment of the 'evil genius', Descartes arrives at a single indubitable certainty, the existence of his own thinking self, condensed in the formula cogito, ergo sum ('I think, therefore I am'). From this indubitable starting point, he reconstructs the existence of God as guarantor of the reliability of human reason and, finally, the existence of the material world, radically distinguished from the mind through his famous dualism between res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance), a mind-body problem that continues to generate debate in philosophy of mind. In mathematics, Descartes founded analytic geometry by uniting algebra and geometry for the first time through the coordinate system that bears his name, one of the most fruitful mathematical advances in history. His mechanistic conception of the physical universe and of animals as soulless automata, set out in the Treatise on Man, exerted a decisive influence on the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, while his radical method of doubt and rational introspection permanently shaped the subsequent course of all Western philosophy.

9 works

• Discours de la methode (avec La Dioptrique, Les Meteores, La Geometrie)
• Discourse on the Method
• Discourse on the Method (ed. 2)
• Discourse on the Method (fr)
• Le Monde (Traite de la Lumiere), avec Les Passions de l'Ame et La Geometrie
• Les Passions de l'Ame
• Rules for the Direction of the Mind
• Selections from the Principles of Philosophy
• Six metaphysical meditations