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RENÉ DESCARTES

René Descartes. He rejected empiricism but was to
be considered the "father of modern philosophy."

René Descartes was a student of mathematics and astronomy in the 1620s. This was after Galileo had been peering into the heavens with his telescope. It was also after Galileo had written his successful book criticizing Aristotle and after Galileo had promoted experimentation and the mathematical formulation of scientific ideas.

Descartes had a passion for understanding and worked this into his invention of analytic geometry: a coordinate system allowing geometric shapes to be expressed in algebraic equations.

His mathematics did not get him into trouble -- math being hard to argue with. But his ideas beyond mathematics did. He put together a system of ideas -- a philosophy -- that used doubt as a tool. Descartes valued doubt, doubt being necessary in advancing ideas from what they were to what they should be. He would be regarded as having invented a philosophical framework for the natural sciences, and he would be described as the "Father of Modern Philosophy," a philosophical revolutionary -- like many accolades, a bit overblown.

Descartes was offering the world a philosophy that he thought compatible with the new world of science and also the tradition of Christian faith. But his philosophy offended the Church. In 1633 the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo, and thirty years later, the Church put Descartes' work on its Index of Prohibited Books.

Descartes began his philosophy by rejecting any ideas that could not be doubted. There is no mental mechanism for doubting the existence of the angel Gabriel, and a belief in Gabriel was not to be a assumed as part of his foundation of thought -- as it would for Muslims. Descartes advocated disciplined philosophical argumentation integrated with physical science. He began with the only thing he could claim that was beyond doubt, and that was the observation of his own existence: I think therefore I am. In Latin: Gogito ergo sum. In French: Je pense donc je suis.

Descartes' declaration of his existence was not very edifying and he was obliged to reason his way to further conclusions if he were to establish anything worth consideration. He had established the importance of doubt, but he went on to positions that others would consider dubious -- with arguments that students of philosophy in centuries to come would be obliged to wade through.

In keeping with his love of mathematics, in philosophy Descartes adhered to the rationalist school: he emphasized reason at arriving at truth and not empiricism. Tying conclusions to sense experience was more of a British point of view, Francis Bacon, John Locke, et cetera -- nevermind that the empiricists also believed in reason. Against empiricism, Descartes used the Wax Argument: senses tell one that a piece of wax has certain characteristics, but if the wax is melted the senses are demonstrated to have been wrong -- a silly argument. He is using his own sense experience in trying to refute sense experience in general.

As a "rationalist" he believed in reaching conclusions through "deduction," as had Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. And like Anselm he offered an ontological proof of the existence of God.

Descartes proposed that the human mind and body were completely separate -- what philosophers described as dualism. It was a point of view that would not have an impact on how people reacted to the material world, but it would impact arguments in the field of philosophy. Descartes viewed the human body as working like a machine and following the laws of physics. But he injected into his equation the soul as mind. His mind-body dualism would be rejected by people who saw human behavior -- a product of mind -- as very much a product of body chemistry and genetics. But these were matters that were not understood in Descartes time.

Descartes associated mental activity with consciousness. He gave no recognition to the unconscious mental states that scientists are aware of today. In his dualism, Descartes was associating consciousness with existence and soul -- an association that was mere assumption.

Descartes died of pneumonia in 1650 in Sweden, at the age of 54, while tutoring the robust queen, Christina. A Catholic in Protestant Sweden. he was interred in a graveyard mainly used for unbaptized infants. Later, his remains were taken to France and buried in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris.

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