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|Summary='''Rene Descartes''' (1596-1650) was French mathematician and philosopher. Descartes He is widely regarded as the founder of modern philosophy because he because rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic world view embraced for most of the previous two thousand years, and laid down new foundations for knowledge. [[CiteRef::Russell (1945)|p.524]][[CiteRef::Newman (2016)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1993)]] He put forward this new approach to knowledge in his ''Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences'' (''Discourse on Method''), first published in 1637[[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]]. Descartes posited a normative scientific methodology whereby a proposition is acceptable only if it can be clearly and distinctly perceived by the intellect beyond all reasonable doubt or follows deductively from such propositions. Rejecting the Aristotelian world of forms, substances, and teleology, he posited a mechanical world in which matter possessed only spatial extent extension and interacted only by contact. This allowed him to advance a mathematical a priorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiry.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]]
|Historical Context=Descartes’ work developed as a response to the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition that had come to form the centerpiece of the contemporary mosaic in the early seventeenth-century. Descartes had been well educated in this tradition over the course of his education at La Fleche where he studied a traditional Scholastic curriculum of logic, grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and theology under Jesuit instruction. The mosaic of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was based primarily on the works of Aristotle and some later Hellenistic natural philosophers, reconciled in various ways with Christian theology by scholars in the high middle ages. It included elements such as Christian theology, humoral physiology, astrology, Ptolemean astronomy, and Christian (Catholic, in many but not all communities contemporaneous with Descartes) theology.[[CiteRef::Haldane (1905)]]
