 First modern thinker to provide a philosophical saying only that he left the study of letters in order to
framework for the natural sciences as these travel in "the great book of the world."
began to develop.
Early Life
Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye, in
the Touraine region, between the cities of Tours and
Poitiers. His father, Joachim, a member of the minor
nobility, served in the Parliament of Brittany. Jeanne
Brochard Descartes, his mother, died in May 1597.
Although his father remarried, Descartes and his older
brother and sister were raised by their maternal
grandmother and by a nurse for whom he retained a
deep affection.
In 1606 Descartes entered La Flèche, a Jesuit college
established by the king for the instruction of the young
nobility. In the Discourse Descartes tells of the 8-year
course of studies at La Flèche, which he considered
"one of the most celebrated schools in Europe."
According to his account, which is one of the best
contemporary descriptions of 17th-century education, his
studies left him feeling embarrassed at the extent of his
own ignorance.
The young Descartes came to feel that languages,
literature, and history relate only fables which incline
man to imaginative exaggerations. Poetry and
eloquence persuade man, but they do not tell the truth.
Mathematics does grasp the truth, but the certainty and
evidence of its reasoning seemed to Descartes to have
only practical applications. Upon examination, the
revelations of religion and morals seem as mysterious to
the learned as to the ignorant. Philosophy had been
studied by the best minds throughout the centuries, and
yet "no single thing is to be found in it which is not
subject to dispute." Descartes says that he came to
suspect that even science, which depends upon
philosophy for its principles, "could have built nothing
solid on foundations so far from firm."
Travel and First Writings
The 18-year-old Descartes left college with a reputation
for extreme brilliance. In the next years he rounded out
the education befitting a young noble. He learned
fencing, horsemanship, and dancing and took a law
degree from Poitiers.
From 1618 to 1628 Descartes traveled extensively
throughout Europe while attached to various military
units. Although a devout Catholic, he served in the army
of the Protestant prince Maurice of Nassau but later
enlisted in the Catholic army of Maximilian I of Bavaria.
Living on income from inherited properties, Descartes
served without pay and seems to have seen little action;
he was present, however, at the Battle of Prague, one of
the major engagements of the Thirty Years War.
Descartes was reticent about this period of his life,
This period of travel was not without intellectual effort.
Descartes sought out eminent mathematicians,
scientists, and philosophers wherever he traveled. The
most significant of these friendships was with Isaac
Beeckman, the Dutch mathematician, at whose
suggestion Descartes began writing scientific treatises
on mathematics and music. He perfected a means of
describing geometrical figures in algebraic formulas, a
process that served as the foundation for his invention of
analytic geometry. He became increasingly impressed
with the extent to which material reality could be
understood mathematically.
During this period Descartes was profoundly influenced
by three dreams which he had on Nov. 10, 1619, in Ulm,
Germany. He interpreted their symbols as a divine sign
that all science is one and that its mastery is universal
wisdom. This notion of the unity of all science was a
revolutionary concept which contradicted the Aristotelian
notion that the sciences were distinguished by their
different objects of study. Descartes did not deny the
multiplicity of objects, but rather he emphasized that only
one mind could know all these diverse things. He felt
that if one could generalize man's correct method of
knowing, then one would be able to know everything.
Descartes devoted the majority of his effort and work to
proving that he had, in fact, discovered this correct
method of reasoning.
From 1626 to 1629 Descartes resided mainly in Paris.
He acquired a wide and notable set of friends but soon
felt that the pressures of social life kept him from his
work. He then moved to Holland, where he lived,
primarily near Amsterdam, for the next 20 years.
Descartes cherished the solitude of his life in Holland,
and he described himself to a friend as awakening
happily after 10 hours of sleep with the memory of
charming dreams. He said his life in Holland was
peaceful because he was "the only man not engaged in
merchandise." There Descartes studied and wrote. He
carried on an enormous correspondence throughout
Europe, and in Holland he acquired a small, but
dedicated, set of friends and disciples. Although he
never married, Descartes fathered a natural daughter
who was baptized Francine. She died in 1640, when she
was 5. First Works
Descartes's research in mathematics and physics led
him to see the need for a new methodology, or way of
thinking. His first major work, Rules for the Direction of
the Mind, was written by 1629. Although circulated
widely in manuscript form, this incomplete treatise was
not published until 1701. The work begins with the
assumption that man's knowledge has been limited by
the erroneous belief that science is determined by the
various objects of experience. The first rule therefore
states that all true judgment depends on reason alone
for its validity. For example, the truths of mathematics
are valid independently of observation and experiment.
Thus the second rule argues that the standard for any
true knowledge should be the certitude demanded of
demonstrations in arithmetic and geometry. The third
rule begins to specify what this standard of true
knowledge entails. The mind should be directed not by
tradition, authority, or the history of the problem, but only
by what can clearly be observed and deduced.
There are only two mental operations that are
permissible in the pure use of reason. The first is
intuition, which Descartes defines as "the undoubting
conception of an unclouded and attentive mind"; the
second is deduction, which consists of "all necessary
inference from other facts that are known with certainty.
"The basic assumption underlying these definitions is
that all first principles are known by way of self-evident
intuitions and that the conclusions of this "seeing into"
are derived by deduction. The clarity and distinctness of
ideas are for Descartes the conceptual counterpart of
human vision. (For example, man can know the
geometry of a square just as distinctly as he can see a
square table in front of him.)
Many philosophers recognized the ideal character of
mathematical reasoning, but no one before Descartes
had abstracted the conditions of such thinking and
applied it generally to all knowledge. If all science is
unified by man's reason and if the proper functioning of
the mind is identified with mathematical thinking, then
the problem of knowledge is reduced to a question of
methodology. The end of knowledge is true judgment,
but true judgment is equivalent to mathematical
demonstrations that are based on intuition and
deduction. Thus the method for finding truth in all
matters is merely to restrict oneself to these two
operations.
According to the fourth rule, "By method I mean certain
and simple rules, such that if a man observe them
accurately, he shall never assume what is false as true
… but will always gradually increase his knowledge and
so arrive at a true understanding of all that does not
surpass his powers." The remaining sixteen rules are
devoted to the elaboration of these principles or to
showing their application to mathematical problems. In
Descartes's later works he refines these methodological
principles, and in the Meditations he attempts a
metaphysical justification of this type of reasoning.
By 1634 Descartes had written his speculative physics in
a work entitled The World. Unfortunately, only fragments
survive because he suppressed the book when he heard
that Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the
Universe had been condemned by the Catholic Church
because of its advocacy of Copernican rather than
Ptolemaic astronomy. Descartes also espoused the
Copernican theory that the earth is not the center of the
universe but revolves about the sun. His fear of censure,
however, led him to withdraw his work. In 1634 he also
wrote the brief Treatise on Man, which attempted to
explain human physiology on mechanistic principles.
Discourse and Meditations
In 1637 Descartes finished Discourse on Method, which
was published together with three minor works on
geometry, dioptrics, and meteors. This work is significant
for several reasons. It is written in French and directed to
men of good sense rather than professional
philosophers. It is autobiographical and begins with a
personal account of his education as an example of the
need for a new method of conducting inquiry.
The work contains Descartes's vision of a unity of
science based on a common methodology, and it shows
that this method can be applied to general philosophic
questions. In brief, the method is a sophistication of the
earlier Rules for the Direction of the Mind. In the
Discourse Descartes presents four general rules for
reducing any problem to its fundamentals by analysis
and then constructing solutions by general synthesis.
Meditations on First Philosophy appeared in 1641-1642
together with six (later seven) sets of objections by
distinguished thinkers including Thomas Hobbes,
Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre Gassendi and the author's
replies. The Meditations is Descartes's major work and is
one of the seminal books in the history of philosophy.
While his former works were concerned with elaborating
a methodology, this work represents the systematic
application of those rules to the principal problems of
philosophy: the refutation of skepticism, the existence of
the human soul, the nature of God, the metaphysical
basis of truth, the extent of man's knowledge of the
external world, and the relation between body and soul.
The first meditation is an exercise in methodological
skepticism. Descartes states that doubt is a positive
means of ascertaining whether there is any certain
foundation for knowledge. All knowledge originates
either from the senses or from the mind. Examples of
color blindness, objects seen in perspective, and so on
testify to the distortions inherent in vague sense
perception. The recognition of these phenomena as
distorted suggests a class of clear perceptions which are
more difficult to doubt. But Descartes then points out that
such images appear as clear to man in dreams as in an
awakened state. Therefore all sensory experience is
doubtful because sense data in itself does not indicate
whether an object is seen or imagined, true or false.
What about the realm of pure ideas? Descartes
simplifies the argument by asking whether it is possible
to doubt the fundamental propositions of arithmetic and
geometry. Man cannot doubt that two plus two equals
four, but he may suspect that this statement has no
reality apart from his mind. The standard of truth is the
self-evidence of clear and distinct ideas, but the question
remains of the correspondence of such ideas to reality.
Descartes imagines the existence of an all-powerful "evil
genius" who deceives man as to the content of his ideas,
so that in reality two plus two equals five.
The second meditation resolves these skeptical issues in
a deceptively simple manner by arguing that even if it is
doubtful whether sense images or ideas have objects, it
is absolutely true that man's mind exists. The famous
formula "I think, therefore, I am" is true even if everything
else is false. Descartes's solution is known as
subjectivism, and it is a radical reversal of previous
theories of knowledge. Whereas nature had been
assumed to be the cause of man's images and ideas,
Descartes states that man is a "thinking thing" whose
subjective images and ideas are the sole evidence for
the existence of a world.
The third meditation demonstrates that God is "no
deceiver," and hence clear and distinct ideas must have
objects that exactly and actually correspond to them.
Descartes argues that the idea of God is an effect. But
an effect gets its reality from its cause, and a cause can
only produce what it possesses. Hence either Descartes
is a perfect being or God exists as the cause of the idea
of God.
The fourth meditation deals with the problem of human
error; insofar as man restricts himself to clear and
distinct ideas, he will never err. With this connection
between ideas and objects Descartes can emerge from
his doubts about knowledge. The external world can be
known with absolute certainty insofar as it is reducible to
clear and distinct ideas. Thus the fifth meditation shows
the application of methodology to material reality in its
quantifiable dimensions, that is, to the extent to which
material reality can be "the object of pure mathematics."
The sixth, and final, meditation attempts to explain the
relation between the human soul and the body. Since
Descartes believed in mechanism, there could be no
absolute connection between a free soul and a bodily
machine. After considerable hesitation he expresses the
relation between mind and matter as a "felt union." The
body is the active faculty that produces the passive
images and imaginings man finds in his mind. Actually
Descartes's explanation is logically impossible in terms
of the "subjective" separation of mind; similarly, the
unresolved dualism of the "felt union" violates the
principle of assenting only to clear and distinct ideas.
The remainder of Descartes's career was spent in
defending his controversial positions. In 1644 he
published the Principles of Philosophy, which breaks
down the arguments of the Meditations into propositional
form and presents extra arguments dealing with their
scientific application. In 1649 Descartes accepted an
invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to become
her teacher. There he wrote The Passions of the Soul,
which is a defense of the mind-body dualism and a
mechanistic explanation of the passions. But Descartes's
health was undermined by the severity of the northern
climate, and after a brief illness he died in Stockholm in
1650.
Descartes's theory of knowledge starts with the quest for
certainty, for an indubitable starting-point or foundation
on the basis alone of which progress is possible (see
method of doubt). This is eventually found in the
celebrated ‘Cogito ergo sum’: I think therefore I am. By
locating the point of certainty in my own awareness of
my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the
theory of knowledge that dominated the following
centuries in spite of various counter-attacks on behalf of
social and public starting-points. The metaphysics
associated with this priority is the famous Cartesian
dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two
different but interacting substances. Descartes rigorously
and rightly sees that it takes divine dispensation to
certify any relationship between the two realms thus
divided, and to prove the reliability of the senses invokes
a ‘clear and distinct perception’ of highly dubious proofs
of the existence of a benevolent deity. This has not met
general acceptance: as Hume drily puts it, ‘to have
recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order
to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a
very unexpected circuit’.
Elements of Cartesian Philosophy
It was with the intention of extending mathematical
method to all fields of human knowledge that Descartes
developed his methodology, the cardinal aspect of his
philosophy. He discards the authoritarian system of the
scholastics and begins with universal doubt. But there is
one thing that cannot be doubted: doubt itself. This is the
kernel expressed in his famous phrase, Cogito, ergo
sum [I think, therefore I am].
From the certainty of the existence of a thinking being,
Descartes passed to the existence of God, for which he
offered one proof based on St. Anselm's ontological
proof and another based on the first cause that must
have produced the idea of God in the thinker. Having
thus arrived at the existence of God, he reaches the
reality of the physical world through God, who would not
deceive the thinking mind by perceptions that are
illusions. Therefore, the external world, which we
perceive, must exist. He thus falls back on the
acceptance of what we perceive clearly and distinctly as
being true, and he studies the material world to perceive
connections. He views the physical world as mechanistic
and entirely divorced from the mind, the only connection
between the two being by intervention of God. This is
almost complete dualism.
The development of Descartes' philosophy is in
Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641); his Principia
philosophiae (1644) is also very important. His influence
on philosophy was immense, and was widely felt in law
and theology also. Frequently he has been called the
father of modern philosophy, but his importance has
been challenged in recent years with the demonstration
of his great debt to the scholastics. He influenced the
rationalists, and Baruch Spinoza also reflects
Descartes's doctrines in some degree. The more direct
followers of Descartes, the Cartesian philosophers,
devoted themselves chiefly to the problem of the relation
of body and soul, of matter and mind. From this came
the doctrine of occasionalism, developed by Nicolas
Malebranche and Arnold Geulincx.
Among the truths I will thereby discover is the real
distinction between mind and matter. One of Descartes's
most important and lasting legacies to philosophy is the
doctrine that has come to be known as "dualism." Mind
and matter (or body), according to Descartes, are two
essentially and radically different kinds of substance.
Mind is unextended, indivisible, simple thinking; its
modes or properties are ideas or thoughts. Matter, on
the other hand, is nothing but extension or dimensional
space, and is therefore divisible; its modes are shape,
size, and mobility. There is nothing materialistic about
the mind, and nothing mental or spiritual about the body.

Major Contributions to Science
In science, Descartes discarded tradition and to an
extent supported the same method as Francis Bacon,
but with emphasis on rationalization and logic rather
than upon experiences. In physical theory his doctrines
were formulated as a compromise between his devotion
to Roman Catholicism and his commitment to the
scientific method, which met opposition in the church
officials of the day. Mathematics was his greatest
interest; building upon the work of others, he originated
the Cartesian coordinates and Cartesian curves; he is
often said to be the founder of analytical geometry. To
algebra he contributed the treatment of negative roots
and the convention of exponent notation. He made
numerous advances in optics, such as his study of the
reflection and refraction of light. He wrote a text on
physiology, and he also worked in psychology; he
contended that emotion was finally physiological at base
and argued that the control of the physical expression of
emotion would control the emotions themselves. His
chief work on psychology is in his Traité des passions
de l'âme (1649).
This doctrine is of great importance not only for
understanding the nature of the human being, who is a
composite—or, to use Descartes's phrase, a "substantial
union"—of these two substances, but also for science.
According to Descartes, the physical world is nothing but
passive matter or extension, divisible ad infinitum into
material parts. The active, spiritlike "forms" of the
Aristotelian world picture have been banished from
nature. All natural phenomena, no matter how complex,
and regardless of whether they are terrestrial or
celestial, are henceforth to be explained solely in terms
of matter and the motion, rest and impact of its parts.
Descartes's separation of mind and matter was a crucial
step in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century and laid the metaphysical foundations for the
mechanical philosophy that dominated the period until
Isaac Newton (1642–1727).

In the Meditations, Descartes begins by taking the

reader on a journey of intellectual self-discovery. His
goal is to determine what exactly can be known for
certain, not just about the world around us but especially
about ourselves. Even under the most adverse skeptical
assumptions about the reliability of our senses and our
rational faculties, we can always be absolutely certain of
our own existence. As he so famously expresses it in the
Discourse on Method, the reasoning represented by the
proposition "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito ergo sum)
can never be doubted. This single epistemological
nugget can serve as the foundation for a host of other
certainties. For once I know my own existence and my
nature as a thinking being—endowed with certain
thoughts or clear and distinct ideas—I can establish not
only that God, an absolutely perfect being, exists and
cannot be a deceiver, but also that this benevolent God
created me with my rational faculties. Thus, to the extent
that I use those faculties properly and give my assent
only to what I clearly and distinctly perceive, I cannot go
wrong and will obtain true beliefs about myself and about
the external world.