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Ren Descartes. Ren Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, did more than any other thinker to give modern philosophy its distinctive style and characteristic set of problemsFor his life, I recommend, in addition to the brief biography by Bernard Williams quoted in the Study Guide, Descartes'
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1. René Descartes Mathematics, Physics, and Metaphysics
At the Beginning of the Modern Era
2. René Descartes René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, did more than any other thinker to give modern philosophy its distinctive style and characteristic set of problems
For his life, I recommend, in addition to the brief biography by Bernard Williams quoted in the Study Guide, Descartes’s own account in the Discourse on Method, printed along with the Meditations in our text
3. Descartes’s Main Writings Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628 or 1629—unpublished)
The World (1634—Two parts, Treatise on Light and Treatise on Man, published posthumously)
The Geometry, the Dioptric, and the Meteors, prefaced by the Discourse on Method (1637)
Meditations on First Philosophy, with Objections and Replies (1641)
Principles of Philosophy (1644)
The Passions of the Soul (1649)
4. Descartes’s Work in Mathematics Descartes is best known in mathematics for his invention of co-ordinate geometry or analytic geometry—the method of representing points by means of co-ordinates (ordered pairs or triples of real numbers) and of lines and surfaces by means of algebraic equations
Descartes’s development of analytic geometry both revolutionized mathematics and laid the basis for the invention, fifty or so years later, of the differential and integral calculus by Isaac Newton and G.W.F. Leibniz, the branch of mathematics that finally proved equal to the task of accurately representing acceleration and deceleration (and therefore such forces as gravity)
5. Descartes’s Work in Physics Descartes’s most important contribution to physics was his commitment to thoroughly mechanistic explanation and his rejection of both the notion of substantial form (along with the associated notion of non-observable “powers” in nature) and the notion of final causality (i.e., the notion that there are ends or purposes in nature)
Among the “oddities” or “gaps” in his physics as seen from a later—i.e., Newtonian—point of view:
His identification of body with space itself
His conception of motion as invariably involving vortices
His lack of any concept of mass
Still, Cartesian physics continued to have its serious adherents well into the 18th century
6. Descartes’s Work in Philosophy In philosophy, Descartes is especially known for three things:
His “new way of ideas”—i.e., the modern understanding of consciousness as consciousness of ideas (i.e., of our mental representations or “pictures” of things) rather than as direct consciousness of things “outside the mind”
His associated conviction that philosophy must be grounded in the method of doubt coupled with a reliance upon principles “evident by the light of nature” and an insistence upon clarity and distinctness in our ideas
His insistence on the importance of recognizing a real distinction between thinking substance and extended substance—or more colloquially,between mind and body
These effectively define Cartesianism in philosophy
