René Descartes by 2019Ashton Bard

Life work

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Descartes worked on his system in the Netherlands and published his ideas in 1634 in a scientific work entitled Le Monde.

Inspiration

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In 1618, when he was 21, Descartes went to the Netherlands to serve in the army of Maurice of Nassau. Eventually ending up in Ulm, Germany, he had an experience that would forever change his life. On November 10, 1619, after a day of intense reflection, he went to bed and had three significant dreams. He felt the dreams were divine signs that his destiny was to find a fully unified science of nature based on mathematics and human reason.

Training

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Descartes spent 10 years traveling and studying what he called "the great book of the world." Eventually deciding that he needed to distance himself from all the assumptions and prejudices he had acquired over the years from books and formal studies, he set about discovering his own clear and rational foundation for human knowledge.

Publications

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in 1637, Descartes anonymously published a book of three treatises dealing with mathematics and the physical sciences—the Geometry, the Dioptric, and the Meteors. The book was prefaced by his famous work Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method).

Who was he?

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René Descartes sought to discover an unassailable foundation for absolute human knowledge. Applying his philosophical and mathematical formulations to the natural world and humanity's conception of itself, Descartes ushered in the modern philosophical era by separating the working of the human mind not only from the mechanical actions of the human body, but from all of the natural world.

Descartes was born in La Haye, a small town in the French province of Touraine, on March 31, 1596, into one of the most respected families among the French nobility. His father, Joachim, held the post of counselor to the Parlement of Bordeaux. Only a few days after his birth, Descartes's mother died of tuberculosis. As a result, the young Descartes was a frail child of chronically poor health

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Video

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