Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes was born on March 31 1596, at La Haye in the Touraine region of France. He was educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche where he admired his teachers but later he said that he found little of the substance in the course of instruction and that only mathematics had given him any certain knowledge. After receiving a law degree in 1616 at the University of Poitiers, he became a volunteer in the D

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In 1649 he was invited to teach philosophy to the Queen of Sweden. He influenced not only the rationalist thinkers who were his immediate followers, but also the course of modern philosophical enquiry, and the Cartesian quest for certainty gave Epistemology the central place in philosophy. His Cartesian philosophy served as a guide for determining what statements can be considered fact. This statement cannot be doubted and therefore all knowledge should be built on this principal. His achievements have changed philosophy forever. But he thought the pressures of social life kept him from his work, so he then moved to Holland in search of seclusion. Descartes is Famous for saying, “Je pense, donc je suis”, which means “I think, therefore I exist”.

Between 1637 to 1644, Descartes produced his three most important philosophical works, the Discourse on Method which was a preface to his Optics, Meteors, Geometry, and the Principals of Philosophy. He was unsatisfied with the haphazard methods of science and then in use, he began to doubt all but mathematical knowledge. He was not well adapted to the climate and he died of pneumonia after only a few months.

From 1626 to 1629 Descartes lived mostly in Paris. utch and then the Bavarian army and traveled throughout Europe.

Descartes adopted the strategy of withholding his belief from anything that was not entirely certain.

During Rene Descartes life (1596-1650) he wrote many works that influenced others. He developed his first major work, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, at his new, more private home in Holland.

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