René Descartes

René Descartes (French: René Descartes, pronounced: [ʁəne dekaʁt]; March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650), French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. He spent most of his career in the Netherlands, serving in the Dutch Army. One of the most famous intellectuals of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy and analytic geometry. Many elements of Cartesian philosophy have precedents in the late Aristotelian school, the 16th-century revival of Stoicism, or early philosophers such as Augustine. In his natural philosophy, it differed from scholasticism in two main points: first, he refused to break down tangible entities into matter and form; second, in explaining natural phenomena, he rejected any appeal to divine or natural ultimate ends. In his theology, he insisted on the absolute freedom of God's creative act. Descartes refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers, often distinguishing his views from those of those who had preceded him. In the opening paragraph of his early modern treatise on the emotions, Les Passions de l'âme (French: Les Passions de l'âme), Descartes even asserted that he would write on the subject "as if no one had written on these matters before". His most famous philosophical statement is "I think, therefore I am" (Latin: Cogito, ergo sum), found in Discourse on Method and Principia Philosophiae (a similar concept was proposed by Gómez Pereira around 1554). Descartes is often considered an important precursor to modern philosophy, and he is largely credited with stimulating the growing interest in epistemology in the 17th century. He laid the foundations for 17th-century Continental rationalism, later advocated by the likes of Spinoza and Leibniz, but opposed by the empiricist school, composed of the teachings of Hobbes, Locke, George Berkeley and Hume. The rise of early modern rationalism in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic—as a highly systematized philosophical school in its own right for the first time in history—had an enormous and far-reaching impact on modern Western thought as a whole. Two influential rationalist philosophical systems were those of Descartes (who wrote all of his major works during most of his adult life in the United Provinces of the Netherlands) and Spinoza—Cartesianism and Spinozaism.