René Descartes

René Descartes (pronounced day-cart) is generally considered the most significant French philosopher of the 1600s and the father of modern philosophy, above all because of the method he develops in Meditations. He was born to a prominent Catholic family in the Touraine Province of Western France and received a comprehensive Jesuit education, finished a degree in law, and briefly joined the Dutch army. One night in November 1619, during his military service, he fell asleep by a stove, had a series of vivid dreams, and decided to dedicate the rest of his life to science. This episode also directly inspired his Meditations. From 1620 to 1628, Descartes traveled around Europe, studied philosophy and geometry, and befriended a number of prominent intellectuals in Paris. In 1628, he abruptly moved to the Netherlands, a Protestant region where the Catholic Church’s Inquisition could not prosecute him for challenging religious doctrine. He studied in a number of Dutch cities, including Franeker, Leiden, Amsterdam, and Deventer, and he moved nearly every year for the rest of his life. Descartes had a relationship with a servant that resulted in a daughter, but she died at a young age, which devastated him. He composed all of his major works in the last 20 years of his life, writing in Latin (for fellow scholars) as well as, unusually, in French (for the general public). Today, he is best remembered for the first two chapters of Meditations, which influenced virtually all the philosophers that followed him in their insistence that rational inquiry should be the foundation for science. He also revolutionized the study of mathematics—and especially geometry—by inventing the Cartesian coordinates system. And he made significant contributions to theology based on his optimistic (and controversial) worldview that Catholics and Protestants alike could achieve salvation and go to heaven. Due to the controversial nature of his work during his lifetime, he was occasionally run out of various cities. In 1648, Descartes finally returned to France to publish some of his work, and in 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to her court to teach her philosophy. However, he caught pneumonia in the frigid Swedish winter and died early the next year—although scholars recently suspected that he may have actually been poisoned.