Biography of rene descartes books he wrote

The meeting took place in The Hague. Perhaps the copy was made during the visit and brought back to Cambridge. In any event, this is a new and interesting development in Descartes scholarship. In Descartes moved to Amsterdam. There he worked on drafts of the Dioptrique the Optics and the Meteors the Meteorology , which were very likely intended to be a part of a larger work, Le Monde The World.

In he moved again, this time to Deventer, to apparently teach Henry Reneri — his physics. In a letter to Mersenne, dated November , Descartes expresses his fear that were he to publish The World , the same fate that befell Galileo would befall him. The World appears to have been constituted of several smaller, but related, works: a treatise on physics, a treatise on mechanics machines , a treatise on animals, and a treatise on man.

Although much of The World has been lost, some of it seems to have survived in the form of essays attached to the Discourse which, as was mentioned earlier, would be published four years later, in And, some of it was published posthumously. Also during this year, a domestic servant by the name of Helene gave birth to a baby girl, Francine. However, Gaukroger claims that the baptismal date was 7 August Gaukroger, p.

In Reneri acquired an official chair in Philosophy at the University of Utrecht, and continued to build a following of students interested in Cartesian science. Around March of , at the age of forty, Descartes moved to Leiden to work out the publishing of the Discourse. And, in it is published. With the Discourse out and a following of students building in Utrecht, Descartes seems to have turned his attention from career to family.

Gaukroger suggests that despite this apparent denial of paternity, Descartes not only corresponds with Francine, but in brings her and Helene to his new home at Santpoort or Egmond-Binnen Gaukroger, pp. The Discourse is important for many reasons. For instance, it tells us what Descartes himself seems to have thought of his early education, and in particular, his early exposure to mathematics.

Roger Ariew suggests that these reflections are not so much those of the historical Descartes, as much as they are those of a persona Descartes adopts in telling the story of the Discourse Ariew, pp. Uncontested, however, is the view that the Discourse sketches out the metaphysical underpinnings of the Cartesian system.

Biography of rene descartes books he wrote

And, as a bonus, it has three works that are attached to it that are apparently added so as to exemplify the method of inquiry it develops though admittedly it is unclear how the method is applied in these essays. As was suggested earlier, the Optics and Meteorology were very likely versions of works originally intended for The World.

It should be stressed that the three attached essays are important independent of the Discourse , for they contain much worth studying. It is in this work that Descartes shows how certain geometrical problems can be solved by way of algebraic equations. The significance of the sort of connection that Descartes made between geometry and algebra was great indeed, for without it the mathematization of the physics and the development of the calculus might not have happened when they did—a generation later via Sir Isaac Newton — and Gottfried Leibniz — And so, the claim that Descartes is the originator of analytic geometry, at least as we understand it today, overstates the case.

As Boyer rightly points out, however, this does not diminish the importance of the work in the history of mathematics. In Descartes began writing the Meditations. And, in he returned to Leiden to help work out its publication. There is evidence suggesting that he was called away from Leiden around the time of her death, returning soon after.

Some have speculated that he left Leiden to be at her side. Rather, it seems to have been in a letter from Mersenne that Descartes first learns of it. In a follow up letter to Mersenne, dated 3 December , Descartes expresses regret in not having been able to see his father before his death. Mersenne sent the Meditations to philosophers and theologians for criticism.

The list of critics includes: Caterus, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi, and Mersenne himself, with several other unnamed readers who raised their objections through Mersenne. A later edition would include an objection from Bordin. The Meditations opens by developing skeptical questions concerning the possibility of knowledge. Through a series of several carefully thought out meditations, the reader establishes along with the author the groundwork for the possibility of knowledge scientia.

There were two styles of presentation: analytic and synthetic. It is important not to confuse these terms with those, say, used by Kant. For Descartes the analytic style of presentation and inquiry proceeds by beginning with what is commonly taken to be known and discovering what is necessary for such knowledge. Thus, the inquiry moves from what is commonly known to first principles.

By contrast, the synthetic style of presentation begins by asserting first principles and then to determining what follows. Prompted by Mersenne, Descartes sketches out in the Second Replies a synthetic rendering of the Meditations. In establishing the ground for science, Descartes was at the same time overthrowing a system of natural philosophy that had been established for centuries—a qualitative, Aristotelian physics.

But, Descartes was restless in practising law, he travelled frequently seeking to gain a variety of experiences. In , he joined the Dutch States Army in Breda, where he concentrated on the study of military engineering, which included more study of mathematics. In November , while Descartes was stationed in Neuburg an der Donau, he stated that he received heavenly visions, while he was shut in his room.

He felt a divine spirit had infused his mind with the vision of a new philosophy and also the idea of combining mathematics and philosophy. Descartes had always sought to be independently minded — never relying on books he read; this vision increased his independence of thought and is a characteristic aspect of his philosophy and mathematical work.

In , Descartes left the army and visited several countries before returning to France. He was now motivated to write his own philosophical treatises. His first work was Regulae ad directionem ingenii Rules for the Direction of the Mind. It set out some of Descartes principles for philosophy and the sciences. In particular, it expressed the importance of relying on reason and the use of mental faculties to methodically work out the truth.

Descartes frequently moved in his early years, but he came to settle in the Netherlands, and it was here that he did most of his writings. As well as philosophy, Descartes continued his mathematical studies. He enrolled in Leiden University and studied mathematics and astronomy. He had planned to have the little girl educated in France, having arranged for her to live with relatives, but she died of a fever at age 5.

Descartes lived in the Netherlands for more than 20 years but died in Stockholm, Sweden, on February 11, He had moved there less than a year before, at the request of Queen Christina, to be her philosophy tutor. The fragile health indicated in his early life persisted. He was Sweden was a Protestant country, so Descartes, a Catholic, was buried in a graveyard primarily for unbaptized babies.

It also led him to define the idea of dualism: matter meeting non-matter. Because his previous philosophical system had given man the tools to define knowledge of what is true, this concept led to controversy. Fortunately, Descartes himself had also invented methodological skepticism, or Cartesian doubt, thus making philosophers of us all.

The intellectual abstraction consists in my turning my thought away from one part of the contents of this richer idea the better to apply it to the other part with greater attention. Thus, when I consider a shape without thinking of the substance or the extension whose shape it is, I make a mental abstraction. According to Descartes, two substances are really distinct when each of them can exist apart from the other.

Thus, Descartes reasoned that God is distinct from humans, and the body and mind of a human are also distinct from one another. According to Descartes's indivisibility argument, the mind is utterly indivisible: because "when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any part within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete.

Moreover, in The Meditations , Descartes discusses a piece of wax and exposes the single most characteristic doctrine of Cartesian dualism: that the universe contained two radically different kinds of substances—the mind or soul defined as thinking , and the body defined as matter and unthinking. Everything that happened, be it the motion of the stars or the growth of a tree , was supposedly explainable by a certain purpose, goal or end that worked its way out within nature.

Aristotle called this the "final cause", and these final causes were indispensable for explaining the ways nature operated. Descartes's theory of dualism supports the distinction between traditional Aristotelian science and the new science of Kepler and Galileo, which denied the role of a divine power and "final causes" in its attempts to explain nature.

Descartes's dualism provided the philosophical rationale for the latter by expelling the final cause from the physical universe or res extensa in favor of the mind or res cogitans. Therefore, while Cartesian dualism paved the way for modern physics , it also held the door open for religious beliefs about the immortality of the soul.

Descartes's dualism of mind and matter implied a concept of human beings. A human was, according to Descartes, a composite entity of mind and body. Descartes gave priority to the mind and argued that the mind could exist without the body, but the body could not exist without the mind. In The Meditations , Descartes even argues that while the mind is a substance, the body is composed only of "accidents".

Nature also teaches me, by the sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a pilot in his ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking thing, would not feel pain when the body was hurt, but would perceive the damage purely by the intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken.

Descartes's discussion on embodiment raised one of the most perplexing problems of his dualism philosophy: What exactly is the relationship of union between the mind and the body of a person? It was this theory of innate knowledge that was later combated by philosopher John Locke — , an empiricist. In The Passions of the Soul , published in , [ ] Descartes discussed the common contemporary belief that the human body contained animal spirits.

These animal spirits were believed to be light and roaming fluids circulating rapidly around the nervous system between the brain and the muscles. These animal spirits were believed to affect the human soul, or passions of the soul. Descartes distinguished six basic passions: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness. All of these passions, he argued, represented different combinations of the original spirit, and influenced the soul to will or want certain actions.

He argued, for example, that fear is a passion that moves the soul to generate a response in the body. In line with his dualist teachings on the separation between the soul and the body, he hypothesized that some part of the brain served as a connector between the soul and the body and singled out the pineal gland as connector. Thus different motions in the gland cause various animal spirits.

He argued that these motions in the pineal gland are based on God's will and that humans are supposed to want and like things that are useful to them. But he also argued that the animal spirits that moved around the body could distort the commands from the pineal gland, thus humans had to learn how to control their passions. Descartes advanced a theory on automatic bodily reactions to external events, which influenced 19th-century reflex theory.

He argued that external motions, such as touch and sound, reach the endings of the nerves and affect the animal spirits. For example, heat from fire affects a spot on the skin and sets in motion a chain of reactions, with the animal spirits reaching the brain through the central nervous system, and in turn, animal spirits are sent back to the muscles to move the hand away from the fire.

Above all, he was among the first scientists who believed that the soul should be subject to scientific investigation. He challenged the views of his contemporaries that the soul was divine , thus religious authorities regarded his books as dangerous. Descartes believed the brain resembled a working machine and that mathematics, and mechanics could explain complicated processes in it.

His theories on reflexes also served as the foundation for advanced physiological theories , more than years after his death. The physiologist Ivan Pavlov was a great admirer of Descartes. Descartes denied that animals had reason or intelligence. If animals showed signs of distress then this was to protect the body from damage, but the innate state needed for them to suffer was absent.

The view that animals were quite separate from humanity and merely machines allowed for the maltreatment of animals , and was sanctioned in law and societal norms until the middle of the 19th century. For Descartes, ethics was a science, the highest and most perfect of them. Like the rest of the sciences, ethics had its roots in metaphysics. However, as he was a convinced rationalist, Descartes clearly states that reason is sufficient in the search for the goods that individuals should seek, and virtue consists in the correct reasoning that should guide their actions.

Nevertheless, the quality of this reasoning depends on knowledge and mental condition. For this reason, he said that a complete moral philosophy should include the study of the body. Descartes and Zeno both identified sovereign goods with virtue. For Epicurus , the sovereign good was pleasure, and Descartes says that, in fact, this is not in contradiction with Zeno's teaching, because virtue produces a spiritual pleasure that is better than bodily pleasure.

Regarding Aristotle 's opinion that happiness eudaimonia depends on both moral virtue and also on the goods of fortune such as a moderate degree of wealth, Descartes does not deny that fortunes contributes to happiness, but remarks that they are in great proportion outside one's own control, whereas one's mind is under one's complete control.

Those maxims are known as his "Provisional Morals". In the third and fifth Meditation , Descartes offers proofs of a benevolent God the trademark argument and the ontological argument respectively. Descartes has faith in the account of reality his senses provide him, since he believed that God provided him with a working mind and sensory system and does not desire to deceive him.

From this supposition, however, Descartes finally establishes the possibility of acquiring knowledge about the world based on deduction and perception. Regarding epistemology , therefore, Descartes can be said to have contributed such ideas as a conception of foundationalism and the possibility that reason is the only reliable method of attaining knowledge.

Descartes, however, was very much aware that experimentation was necessary to verify and validate theories. Descartes invokes his causal adequacy principle [ ] to support his trademark argument for the existence of God, quoting Lucretius in defence: "Ex nihilo nihil fit" , meaning " Nothing comes from nothing " Lucretius. Descartes considered himself to be a devout Catholic, [ 83 ] [ 84 ] [ 85 ] and one of the purposes of the Meditations was to defend the Catholic faith.

His attempt to ground theological beliefs on reason encountered intense opposition in his time. Pascal regarded Descartes's views as a rationalist and mechanist, and accused him of deism : "I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God," while a powerful contemporary, Martin Schoock , accused him of atheist beliefs, though Descartes had provided an explicit critique of atheism in his Meditations.

The Catholic Church prohibited his books in Descartes also wrote a response to external world skepticism. Through this method of skepticism, he does not doubt for the sake of doubting but to achieve concrete and reliable information. In other words, certainty. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him.

They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to argue that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the "propensity" to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.

Descartes also believes a substance is something that does not need any assistance to function or exist. Descartes further explains how only God can be a true "substance". But minds are substances, meaning they need only God for it to function. The mind is a thinking substance. The means for a thinking substance stem from ideas. Descartes steered clear of theological questions, restricting his attention to showing that there is no incompatibility between his metaphysics and theological orthodoxy.

He avoided trying to demonstrate theological dogmas metaphysically. When challenged that he had not established the immortality of the soul merely in showing that the soul and the body are distinct substances, he replied, "I do not take it upon myself to try to use the power of human reason to settle any of those matters which depend on the free will of God.

Descartes "invented the convention of representing unknowns in equations by x , y , and z , and knowns by a , b , and c ". He also "pioneered the standard notation" that uses superscripts to show the powers or exponents; for example, the 2 used in x 2 to indicate x squared. One of Descartes's most enduring legacies was his development of Cartesian or analytic geometry , which uses algebra to describe geometry; the Cartesian coordinate system is named after him.

He was first to assign a fundamental place for algebra in the system of knowledge, using it as a method to automate or mechanize reasoning, particularly about abstract, unknown quantities. Algebraic rules were given geometric proofs by mathematicians such as Pacioli , Cardano , Tartaglia and Ferrari. Equations of degree higher than the third were regarded as unreal, because a three-dimensional form, such as a cube, occupied the largest dimension of reality.

Descartes professed that the abstract quantity a 2 could represent length as well as an area. Although Descartes did not pursue the subject, he preceded Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in envisioning a more general science of algebra or "universal mathematics", as a precursor to symbolic logic , that could encompass logical principles and methods symbolically, and mechanize general reasoning.

Current popular opinion holds that Descartes had the most influence of anyone on the young Isaac Newton , and this is arguably one of his most important contributions. The most important concept was his very modern treatment of single variables. Descartes's work provided the basis for the calculus developed by Leibniz and Newton , who applied the infinitesimal calculus to the tangent line problem , thus permitting the evolution of that branch of modern mathematics.

Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences. Thus, all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principals, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Ethics.

By the science of Morals, I understand the highest and most perfect which, presupposing an entire knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom. The beginning of Descartes's interest in physics is accredited to the amateur scientist and mathematician Isaac Beeckman , whom he met in , and who was at the forefront of a new school of thought known as mechanical philosophy.

With this foundation of reasoning, Descartes formulated many of his theories on mechanical and geometric physics. Descartes asked Beeckman to translate the problem from Dutch to French. Both believed that it was necessary to create a method that thoroughly linked mathematics and physics. Although the concept of work in physics was not formally used until , similar concepts existed before then.

In Principles of Philosophy Principia Philosophiae from Descartes outlined his views on the universe. In it he describes his three laws of motion. If x is twice the size of y, and is moving half as fast, then there's the same amount of motion in each. Descartes had discovered an early form of the law of conservation of momentum. Descartes's vortex theory of planetary motion was later rejected by Newton in favor of his law of universal gravitation , and most of the second book of Newton's Principia is devoted to his counterargument.

Descartes also made contributions to the field of optics. He showed by using geometric construction and the law of refraction also known as Descartes's law in France, or more commonly Snell's law elsewhere that the angular radius of a rainbow is 42 degrees i. He first proposed the idea that the elements were made up of small particles that join together imperfectly, thus leaving small spaces in between.

These spaces were then filled with smaller much quicker "subtile matter". The size of the particle also matters; if the particle was smaller, not only was it faster and constantly moving, it was more easily agitated by the larger particles, which were slow but had more force. The different qualities, such as combinations and shapes, gave rise to different secondary qualities of materials, such as temperature.

While rejecting most of Aristotle 's theories on meteorology, he still kept some of the terminology that Aristotle used such as vapors and exhalations. These "vapors" would be drawn into the sky by the sun from "terrestrial substances" and would generate wind. Falling clouds could also generate thunder. He theorized that when a cloud rests above another cloud and the air around the top cloud is hot, it condenses the vapor around the top cloud, and causes the particles to fall.

When the particles falling from the top cloud collided with the bottom cloud's particles it would create thunder. Descartes believed that the booming sound that avalanches created, was due to snow that was heated, and therefore heavier, falling onto the snow that was below it. Another theory that Descartes had was on the production of lightning.

Descartes believed that lightning was caused by exhalations trapped between the two colliding clouds. He believed that in order to make these exhalations viable to produce lightning, they had to be made "fine and inflammable" by hot and dry weather. Descartes also believed that clouds were made up of drops of water and ice, and believed that rain would fall whenever the air could no longer support them.

It would fall as snow if the air was not warm enough to melt the raindrops. And hail was when the cloud drops would melt, and then freeze again because cold air would refreeze them. Descartes did not use mathematics or instruments as there were not any at the time to back up his theories on Meteorology and instead used qualitative reasoning in order to deduce his hypothesis.

Descartes has often been dubbed the father of modern Western philosophy , the thinker whose approaches has profoundly changed the course of Western philosophy and set the basis for modernity. In an anthropocentric revolution, the human being is now raised to the level of a subject, an agent, an emancipated being equipped with autonomous reason.

This was a revolutionary step that established the basis of modernity, the repercussions of which are still being felt: the emancipation of humanity from Christian revelational truth and Church doctrine ; humanity making its own law and taking its own stand. This change in perspective was characteristic of the shift from the Christian medieval period to the modern period, a shift that had been anticipated in other fields, and which was now being formulated in the field of philosophy by Descartes.

This anthropocentric perspective of Descartes's work, establishing human reason as autonomous, provided the basis for the Enlightenment 's emancipation from God and the Church. According to Martin Heidegger , the perspective of Descartes's work also provided the basis for all subsequent anthropology. In commercial terms, The Discourse appeared during Descartes's lifetime in a single edition of copies, of which were set aside for the author.

Sharing a similar fate was the only French edition of The Meditations , which had not managed to sell out by the time of Descartes's death. A concomitant Latin edition of the latter was, however, eagerly sought out by Europe's scholarly community and proved a commercial success for Descartes. Although Descartes was well known in academic circles towards the end of his life, the teaching of his works in schools was controversial.

According to philosophy professor John Cottingham , Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy is considered to be "one of the key texts of Western philosophy". Cottingham said that the Meditations is the "most widely studied of all Descartes' writings". According to Anthony Gottlieb , a former senior editor of The Economist , and the author of The Dream of Reason and The Dream of Enlightenment , one of the reasons Descartes and Thomas Hobbes continue to be debated in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is that they still have something to say to us that remains relevant on questions such as, "What does the advance of science entail for our understanding of ourselves and our ideas of God?

In her interview with Tyler Cowen, Agnes Callard described Descartes's thought experiment in the Meditations , where he encouraged a complete, systematic doubting of everything that you believe, to "see what you come to". She said, "What Descartes comes to is a kind of real truth that he can build upon inside of his own mind. She clarified that in Descartes's reasoning, you do "end up back in the mind of God"—in a "universe God has created" that is the "real world" The whole question is about being connected to reality as opposed to being a figment.

If you're living in the world God created, God can create real things. So you're living in a real world. The membership of Descartes to the Rosicrucians is debated. The initials of his name have been linked to the R. Descartes dedicated the work titled The Mathematical Treasure Trove of Polybius, Citizen of the World to "learned men throughout the world and especially to the distinguished B.

Brothers of the Rosy Cross in Germany". The work was not completed and its publication is uncertain. In January , a previously unknown letter from Descartes, dated 27 May , was found by the Dutch philosopher Erik-Jan Bos when browsing through Google. Bos found the letter mentioned in a summary of autographs kept by Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

The college was unaware that the letter had never been published. This was the third letter by Descartes found in the last 25 years. The Descartes most familiar to twentieth-century philosophers is the Descartes of the first two Meditations , someone preoccupied with hyperbolic doubt of the material world and the certainty of knowledge of the self that emerges from the famous cogito argument.

For up to Descartes The superiority of a sub-iectum Why and how does this claim acquire its decisive authority? The claim originates in that emancipation of man in which he frees himself from obligation to Christian revelational truth and Church doctrine to a legislating for himself that takes its stand upon itself. With the interpretation of man as subiectum , Descartes creates the metaphysical presupposition for future anthropology of every kind and tendency.

When, with the beginning of modern times, religious belief was becoming more and more externalized as a lifeless convention, men of intellect were lifted by a new belief: their great belief in an autonomous philosophy and science. Descartes work has been used, in fact to inaugurates an entirely new kind of philosophy. Contents move to sidebar hide.