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Descartes concluded that if his goal was to attain certain knowledge about the world, Descartes concluded that the then presently accepted method must be rejected and that a new one would be required to satisfy his aims. Method held a central place in his epistemology; in fact, one of Descartes’ criticisms of Galileo was that he failed to produce a fully developed method to justify his discoveries.[[CiteRef::Ariew (1986)]] To that end he embraced his skeptical doubts and devised a method based on '''methodological skepticism'''; a method whereby he rejects all knowledge that he cannot be certain of, accepts only those propositions which he can accept as certain, and proceed deductively from those axioms according to reason. By this method Descartes hoped to produce a kind of systematized knowledge that, he believed, could be universally acceptable. In his 'Meditations on First Philosophy', [[CiteRef::Descartes (2004)]] Descartes identified the sole indubitable proposition upon which he would build the entire rest of his philosophical system as his famous '''‘Cogito, Ergo Sum’''' (also styled ‘Dubito, Ergo Cogito, Ergo Sum’ or simply as ‘the Cogito’); “I think, therefore I am.” From this foundation Descartes deduced his being a created thing, his requiring a creator, that creator being God, the nature of God, and the reliability of his God-given senses and reason, all of which formed the broader foundation of his systematized scientific worldview.[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]]
Although Descartes maintained some methodological aspects of the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic – namely the axiomatic-deductive, epistemic-foundationalist structure of investigation – one critical difference in Descartes’ methodology was the shift in the method of theory choice. According to Barseghyan, the accepted method of the Scholastic-Aristotelian method was that a theory is acceptable “if it grasps the nature of a thing through intuition schooled by experience, or if it is deduced from general intuitive principles”.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 144]] Descartes’ methodology It jettisons the Aristotelian expectation that a theory must be experientially based and intuitively obvious for it to be acceptable, and although his system , as it ended up , allowed for knowledge that was both experiential and intuited,[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]] the ultimate justification for knowledge claims was human reason. In this way Descartes is both a '''rationalist''' and an a priorist, in that his epistemology and metaphysics allows for the existence of synthetic a priori propositions.
===The Cartesian Revolution in Natural Philosophy===
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Descartes played a pivotal role in the transition away from the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic' mechanical corpuscular natural philosophy included physical, and his physicalbiological, physiological, and psychological, and biological theories are too numerous to be adequately treated here.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]] That said, a number of his theories are worth exploring in brief, in particular those that were fundamental departures from the accepted mosaic of the early sixteenth century. The first and most dramatic of these is Descartes’ rejection of hylomorphism and the form-matter distinction which would be the foundation for Descartes’ rejection of most of the prior physics. In place of the hylomorphic theory of substance Descartes proposed that there are in fact two kinds of substances that are entirely different from each other in composition and kind: mental substance and physical substance. Descartes equated the former with the rational soul of God and humans and the latter with all physical matter, the fundamental feature of which he considered to be extension. Descartes deduced his scientific theories about the natural world from this basically metaphysical foundation (all of which he deduces by application of his method). For example the central concept in Cartesian mechanics is that all material interactions are interactions between matter, which fills the universe (plenism also followed from Descartes’ position of matter as extension because if all matter is extended then there can be no space without extended matter, i.e. a vacuum). Descartes also considered the universe to be essentially mechanical in character except for mental substance – animals according to Descartes, as being constituted solely of material substance and without mental substance, are mere automata and cannot be said to think, feel, or love in the way that human beings or God can.[[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]]
The details of the Cartesian school of natural philosophy are not as important however as the impact that the school would have on subsequent scientific inquiry. The overthrow of the Aristotelian tradition, even in places where Cartesianism was rejected and the community maintained Aristotelianism, forced the academic community in Europe to reconsider and defend the Aristotelian mosaic in ways that had never before been encountered. Though the dialectical approach to scholarship throughout the medieval period saw scholars constantly questioning various aspects of the Aristotelian worldview Descartes’ wholesale rejection of huge swaths of the mosaic and its central concepts were unprecedented. Theories like hylomorphism, which had been a given in the mosaic of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and had endured through multitudes of adjustments, reconciliations and dialectic criticism had never before faced complete overhaul as Descartes threatened. Although Descartes would eventually be supplanted by Newton he made the critical first steps to replacing the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]]
