Rene Descartes French philosopher
The philosopher René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596 in La Haye in Touraine, a small town in mainland France, which has since been renamed in his honor after his most prominent son. He was probably the youngest of 3 children, and his mother, Jeanne Brochard, died within the first year of his life. His father, Joachim, a councilor in the provincial parliament, sent the children to live with their maternal grandmother, where they also stayed after he remarried several years later. Although he was genuinely concerned with a good education and handed Rene over, at age eight, to a boarding school at the Jesuit college of Henri IV at La Flèche, several miles to the north, for several seasons.
He received a thorough education, initially at a Jesuit university at age eight, then graduated with a law degree at twenty-two, but was put into a program by an influential instructor to use logic and mathematics to understand the natural world. This particular strategy integrated the contemplation of the dynamics of existence and of information itself, hence his most prominent observation, “I think, so I exist.”
Descartes is believed by many to be the father of contemporary philosophy, as his ideas generally departed from the understanding existing in the original 17th century, which was more based on sentiment. While the components of his philosophy were not entirely new, his approach to them was. Descartes essentially believed in removing everything from the dining room table, both preconceived notions and inherited ones, as well as starting anew, putting back one by one the elements that were positive, which for him began with the statement “I exist.” . “This is where the most popular quote from him arose:” I think, that’s how I am.
Since Descartes thought that all truths were eventually connected, he wanted to discover the importance of the natural world with a logical strategy, through mathematics and science; for various reasons, an extension of the strategy that Sir Francis Bacon had asserted in England a couple of years earlier. . In addition to the Discourse on Method, Descartes even published Meditations on the Philosophy that is First, as well as Principles of Philosophy, among a few other treatises.
Descartes never married, although he did have a daughter, Francine, created in the Netherlands in 1635. He had moved to that nation in 1628 because life in France was too hectic for him to concentrate on his work, as well as his work. . Francine’s mother was a maid at the house where he stayed. He had planned to take the little girl to study in France, and had placed her to care for her relatives, though she died of a fever at the age of five.
Descartes lived in the Netherlands for more than twenty years but died in Stockholm, Sweden, on February 11, 1650. He had settled there a year earlier, at the request of Queen Christina, to be her opinion tutor. The fragile health suggested in his early life persisted. She habitually spent her mornings in bed, where she continued to honor her dream life, integrating it into her methods of waking up in mindfulness meditation, although the queen’s insistence on her 5:00 a.m. instructions led to a bout of pneumonia that she could not avoid. . recover he was fifty-three.