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"This August, the OUP Philosophy team honors René Descartes (1596–1650) as their Philosopher of the Month. Called “The Father of Modern Philosophy” by Hegel, Descartes led the seventeenth-century European intellectual revolution which laid down the philosophical foundations for the modern scientific age" inform John Priest, Marketing Assistant at Oxford University Press.
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| Frans Hals - Portret van René Descartes.jpg |
Born in La Haye, France, Descartes was educated at the Jesuit College of La Flèche and at the University of Poitiers. Much of Descartes’s early work as a “philosopher’ was what we now call scientific. The World, composed in the early 1630s, explored physics and cosmology, but Descartes cautiously withdrew it from publication in 1633 after the condemnation of Galileo by the Roman
Inquisition for his heliocentric hypothesis (which Descartes too supported).In the Discourse on Method, a popular introduction to his philosophy, Descartes developed his celebrated method of doubt. By doubting all his ideas, he reached one unquestionable proposition: “I am thinking”, and from this that he existed: cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”).
Developing the theory later known as Cartesian dualism, Descartes maintains that there are two different kinds of substance: physical, or that which has length, breadth, and depth and can therefore be measured and divided—and thinking substance, which is indivisible. Mental phenomena, for Descartes, have no place in the quantifiable world of physics, but have an autonomous, separate status. Fascinated by the problems of ascertaining natural knowledge, Descartes’s metaphysics can be seen as an attempt to make a mathematical physics possible while paying tribute to traditional metaphysical and theological concerns like the existence of God and the immateriality of the soul.
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Source: OUPblog (blog)
