René Descartes (1596–1650), soldier, mathematician and the founder of modern philosophy, who invented coordinate geometry and set out to rebuild the whole of knowledge from what cannot be doubted. He dedicated the Meditations to the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne and argued in them, from reason alone and for the sake of unbelievers, that God exists and that the soul is distinct from the body. He died at Stockholm, of a chill caught tutoring Queen Christina at five in the morning.
Works (2)
- A Discourse of a Method — The Discours de la méthode of 1637, in the English of 1649: the story of how Descartes came to doubt everything he had been taught and what he found he could not doubt. The fourth part is the first form of the argument of the Meditations — I think, therefore I am, and from the idea of a perfect being to the existence of God — and the fifth draws the line between the soul of man and the machinery of the beasts. (8 notes)
- Six Metaphysical Meditations — The Meditationes de Prima Philosophia of 1641, dedicated to the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne and offered to it as a proof, by natural reason alone, that there is a God and that the mind is distinct from the body. This is the first English version, made in 1680 by William Molyneux of Dublin, with Hobbes’s objections and Descartes’s answers printed after it as they were in the original. (9 notes)