Descartes
Modern philosophyDescartes was a seventeenth-century French philosopher (1596–1650), as well as a mathematician and physicist. Born in La Haye (renamed Descartes in 1961), he studied in Poitiers before moving to Paris. He travelled to Holland and Germany and joined the army of the Duke of Bavaria. His reflections, together with three dreams he had in Neuburg, led him to leave military life and devote himself to philosophy; he went on to write, among other works, the Discourse on the Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he pursued the search for certain truth.
The Works of Descartes Summarised on This Site
Meditations on First Philosophy
Descartes here seeks a certain truth. This leads him to propose a radical doubt, justified by the hypothesis of evil genius. Can anything resist this doubt?
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Descartes here presents the rules that should be followed by a mind wishing to arrive at certain truth and to build a universal science
Passions of the Soul
What are the passions, and how do the mechanics of our bodies work? Descartes proposes here a new conception of the relationship between the mind and the body.
Bibliography
Here are the essential books if you wish to better understand the thought of this author:
Blom, John J., Descartes. His moral philosophy and psychology. New York University Press. 1978
Gaukroger, Stephen (1995). Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press
Grayling, A. C. (2005). Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and Its Place in His Times, The Free Press, London.
Grosholz, Emily (1991). Cartesian method and the problem of reduction. Oxford University Press
J. Cottingham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Descartes Cambridge University Press, 1992
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Biography: Life of Descartes
Childhood
René Descartes was born in 1596 in La Haye, a town in Indre-et-Loire, in the Centre region of France. The town was later renamed Descartes in his honour. His father was a councillor in the Parliament of Brittany.
His mother died less than a year after his birth, as a result of childbirth. Raised by his father, grandmother, and nurse, Descartes showed a keen intellectual curiosity from an early age. Never ceasing to ask questions, he was nicknamed by his father "my little philosopher".
At eleven, he was admitted to the Collège royal Henri-le-Grand in La Flèche, in the Sarthe region. At this Jesuit-run school, one of the largest in Europe, he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy.
He passed his baccalauréat and then went to Poitiers, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Law. Once he had obtained his licence in civil and canon law, at twenty, he moved to Paris. For two years he led a withdrawn life, shunning society in order to devote himself to his studies.
The Army and Travel
He enlisted in the army of the Prince of Orange in Holland. During this period, he met the physicist Beeckman, with whom he kept up a correspondence.
In his spare time, he turned his thoughts to mathematics and philosophy.
In 1619, he travelled to Denmark and Germany and joined a new army, that of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, as the Thirty Years' War broke out.
It was during this same eventful year that he experienced a kind of revelation: he had a dream — or rather three successive dreams — in which he conceived the foundations of a new science.
He shut himself away in a well-heated room (which he called his "stove"). According to legend, he hit upon his system of Cartesian coordinates — by which geometric figures can be described by reducing their positions to arithmetic numbers — while lying in bed, observing the cracks in the ceiling above him.
He gave up military life but continued his travels, through Germany, Holland, and then Italy, living off his mother's inheritance.
He returned to France for an extended stay of six years, from 1622 to 1628 — a formative period during which he forged invaluable contacts in intellectual circles. Among others, he met Father Marin Mersenne, who was in correspondence with the whole of learned Europe.
This gave him the means to make his mathematical theories more widely known, and they began to spread.
One encounter during this period proved particularly significant: Cardinal de Bérulle impressed upon him the duty to pursue the study of philosophy in depth and to write his own works. Descartes took this to heart, withdrawing to Brittany in 1627.
It was at the end of this period of retreat that his first major philosophical work was published: the Rules for the Direction of the Mind.
Writing in the Netherlands
He returned to Amsterdam, again seeking solitude, moving frequently and keeping his whereabouts to himself to avoid being disturbed. Living near a slaughterhouse, he was able to carry out dissections. He also enrolled at the University of Franeker.
This period of sustained reflection proved highly productive: he developed the principles of analytical geometry, turned his attention to optics, and wrote The Dioptrique.
When Galileo was condemned by the Church, Descartes abandoned plans to publish the work he had just completed, The World, also known as the Treatise on Light — a work that rested on the very principle for which Galileo had been condemned: heliocentrism.
Having read Galileo's work in 1634, he resolved to take his research in a different direction. Over the following years he wrote his two landmark works: the Discourse on the Method (1637), followed by the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
In 1635, he had a daughter with the maid of an Amsterdam bookseller.
But five years later, in 1640, he lost both his daughter and her grandfather within a month of each other — a blow that plunged him into what he described as "the greatest regret he had ever felt in his life".
The Meditations on First Philosophy began to make their mark in intellectual circles, and he found himself obliged to respond both to Hobbes's objections and to the accusations levelled against him during the Utrecht Quarrel.
In 1643, he met Elisabeth of Bohemia, then in exile in Holland; the two entered into a correspondence devoted largely to ethics. In a sense, he became her director of conscience.
This stimulating encounter ushered in a new period of intellectual creativity. He dedicated his next work, Principles of Philosophy, which appeared in 1644, to her. A few years later, in 1649, he completed his last major work, the Passions of the Soul.
In the meantime, he met Pascal during one of his rare visits to France. He later claimed to have inspired Pascal's famous experiment on the vacuum, carried out at the Puy de Dôme.
Death in Sweden
In 1649, he became the tutor of Queen Christina of Sweden, travelling to Stockholm for the purpose.
After keeping him waiting for a month, she asked him to write verses for a ballet staged as part of her birthday celebrations.
Then came a final request, no less unusual: she wanted daily philosophy lessons — but at five in the morning, the hour when the mind is "the quietest and freest of the day".
This punishing schedule, combined with the Scandinavian cold, left Descartes longing to return south the following spring, but his health gave way before he could.
He died of pneumonia on 11 February 1650.
His remains were repatriated to France, and his skull was bequeathed many years later — in 1931 — to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, though doubts remain as to its authenticity. His coffin is still kept in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Plans to transfer his remains to the Panthéon have been raised but never brought to fruition.
Main Works
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Discourse on the Method
Meditations on First Philosophy
Principles of Philosophy
Passions of the Soul