Difference between revisions of "René Descartes"

From Encyclopedia of Scientonomy
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Line 13: Line 13:
 
|DOD Approximate=No
 
|DOD Approximate=No
 
|Summary='''Rene Descartes''' (1596-1650) was French mathematician and philosopher. Descartes rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic world view accepted for most of the previous two thousand years, and laid down new foundations for knowledge.[[CiteRef::Russell (1945)|p. 524]][[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1993)]] In mathematics he developed techniques that made possible analytic geometry. In natural philosophy, he was co-framer of the sine law of light refraction, developed a theory of the rainbow, and formulated a precursor of the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2014)]] Rejecting the Aristotelian world of forms, substances, and teleology, he posited a mechanical world in which matter possessed only spatial extension and interacted only by contact. 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 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.[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]] This allowed him to advance a mathematical a priorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiry.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]]
 
|Summary='''Rene Descartes''' (1596-1650) was French mathematician and philosopher. Descartes rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic world view accepted for most of the previous two thousand years, and laid down new foundations for knowledge.[[CiteRef::Russell (1945)|p. 524]][[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1993)]] In mathematics he developed techniques that made possible analytic geometry. In natural philosophy, he was co-framer of the sine law of light refraction, developed a theory of the rainbow, and formulated a precursor of the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2014)]] Rejecting the Aristotelian world of forms, substances, and teleology, he posited a mechanical world in which matter possessed only spatial extension and interacted only by contact. 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 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.[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]] This allowed him to advance a mathematical a priorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiry.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]]
|Historical Context=The [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific 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. This '''Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic'''  included Christian theology, humoral physiology, astrology, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Christian (Catholic, in many but not all communities contemporaneous with Descartes) theology.[[CiteRef::Haldane (1905)]] Descartes was well educated in this tradition through his attendance at the prestigious Jesuit La Fleche College between the ages of ten and eighteen. He studied a traditional scholastic curriculum of logic, grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Natural philosophy was taught from the works of Aristotle as interpreted by Christian scholars. He is known to have excelled at math.[[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|pp. 38-61]][[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]]
+
|Historical Context=The [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific 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. This '''Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic'''  included Christian theology, humoral physiology, astrology, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Christian (Catholic, in many but not all communities contemporaneous with Descartes) theology.[[CiteRef::Haldane (1905)]] Descartes was well educated in this tradition through his attendance at the prestigious Jesuit La Fleche College between the ages of ten and eighteen. He studied a traditional scholastic curriculum of logic, grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Natural philosophy was taught from the works of Aristotle as interpreted by Christian scholars. Descartes also received an education in mathematics that was unusual for the Aristotelian tradition, and excelled at math. [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|pp. 38-61]][[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]][[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]]
  
 
Descartes’ major writings came in a time of social and intellectual upheaval in Europe. He was a participant in the Thirty Years War before writing his major works and traveled extensively around Europe at a time when the continent was embroiled in both reformation and counter-reformation, both of which were a wellspring of new thought in theology and philosophy. The community of the time was engaged with major challenges to the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. These came from a variety of sources, including various varieties of Platonism, Hermeticism, the Chemical Philosophy of Paracelsus, among other movements.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]] There were new developments in optics, astronomy, and physiology.[[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] Aristotle's earth-centered cosmology had been challenged by the work of Nicolaus Copernicus(1473-1543), Johannes Kepler(1571-1630), and Galileo Galilei(1564-1642), which Descartes was familiar with.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]][[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]][[CiteRef::Ariew (1986)]]  
 
Descartes’ major writings came in a time of social and intellectual upheaval in Europe. He was a participant in the Thirty Years War before writing his major works and traveled extensively around Europe at a time when the continent was embroiled in both reformation and counter-reformation, both of which were a wellspring of new thought in theology and philosophy. The community of the time was engaged with major challenges to the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. These came from a variety of sources, including various varieties of Platonism, Hermeticism, the Chemical Philosophy of Paracelsus, among other movements.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]] There were new developments in optics, astronomy, and physiology.[[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] Aristotle's earth-centered cosmology had been challenged by the work of Nicolaus Copernicus(1473-1543), Johannes Kepler(1571-1630), and Galileo Galilei(1564-1642), which Descartes was familiar with.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]][[CiteRef::Rodis-Lewis (1992)]][[CiteRef::Ariew (1986)]]  
  
The '''mechanical natural philosophy''' was a pursued radical alternative to Aristotelian cosmology, embraced by some supporters of Copernican heliocentrism.[[CiteRef::Luthy, Murdoch, and Newman (2001b)]][[CiteRef::Chalmers (2014)]][[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 69-73]] It rejected the Aristotelian fundamentals of form, substance, and teleology, and the idea that matter is continuous.  Instead it maintained that the world consisted of invisibly tiny particles of matter and that all the observable properties of the natural world were a consequence of these particles and their interactions with one another. The particles interacted mechanically, by contact, and it was often supposed that they rendered natural phenomena potentially explainable in geometrical and mathematical terms. Unlike Aristotle's physics, it was compatible with a moving planetary Earth. It can be traced to the Ancient Greek '''atomism''' of Democritus (circa 460-370 BCE) and later Epicurean philosophers. Atomism was reintroduced into European thought in the fifteenth century with the rediscovery of the Roman poet Lucretius's ''De rerum natura''. In the early seventeenth century, it was championed by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Nicolas Hill (1570-1610?), Sebastian Basso (1573-1625?), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and Galileo Galilei.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Klein (2012)]][[CiteRef::Gatti (2001)]][[CiteRef::Luthy, Murdoch, and Newman (2001b)]]
+
The '''mechanical natural philosophy''' was a pursued radical alternative to Aristotelian cosmology, embraced by some supporters of Copernican heliocentrism.[[CiteRef::Luthy, Murdoch, and Newman (2001b)]][[CiteRef::Chalmers (2014)]][[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 69-73]] It rejected the Aristotelian fundamentals of form, substance, and teleology, and the idea that matter is continuous.  Instead of explaining the properties of visible bodies in terms of form, it instead maintained that the world consisted of invisibly tiny particles of matter and that all the observable properties of the visible bodies were a consequence of these particles and their interactions with one another. The particles interacted mechanically, by contact, and it was often supposed that they rendered natural phenomena potentially explainable in geometrical and mathematical terms. Unlike Aristotle's physics, it was compatible with a moving planetary Earth. It can be traced to the Ancient Greek '''atomism''' of Democritus (circa 460-370 BCE) and later Epicurean philosophers. Atomism was reintroduced into European thought in the fifteenth century with the rediscovery of the Roman poet Lucretius's ''De rerum natura''. In the early seventeenth century, it was championed by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Nicolas Hill (1570-1610?), Sebastian Basso (1573-1625?), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and Galileo Galilei.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Klein (2012)]][[CiteRef::Gatti (2001)]][[CiteRef::Luthy, Murdoch, and Newman (2001b)]]
  
After leaving La Fleche, Descartes became involved in a collaboration with the Dutch Calvinist natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman (1588-1687), who valued him for his mathematical skills. They worked together on several mathematical problems in natural philosophy. Beeckman was a corpuscularist.  A derivative of atomism, '''corpuscularism''' rejected indivisible atoms and void spaces but nonetheless accounted for the properties of objects in terms of invisibly tiny particles [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 68]] He is almost certainly the first person in Europe to attempt to explain macro-geometrical regularities in terms of micro-mechanical models. [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 70]] Descartes adopted Beeckman's mathematical corpuscularism and became part of a community of corpuscularist thinkers which besides Beeckman and Descartes included Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), and Walter Charleston (1620-1707). They all knew each other and reacted to each other's work.[[CiteRef::Osler (2001)]]
+
After leaving La Fleche, in 1618,Descartes became involved in a collaboration with the Dutch Calvinist natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman (1588-1687), who valued him for his mathematical skills. They worked together on several mathematical problems in natural philosophy. Beeckman was a corpuscularist.  A derivative of atomism, '''corpuscularism''' rejected indivisible atoms and void spaces but nonetheless accounted for the properties of objects in terms of invisibly tiny particles [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 68]] He is almost certainly the first person in Europe to attempt to explain macro-geometrical regularities in terms of micro-mechanical models. [[CiteRef::Gaukroger (1995)|p. 70]] For the most part, applying mathematics to physical problems was not part of the Aristotelian tradition. Descartes adopted Beeckman's mathematical corpuscularism and became part of a community of corpuscularist thinkers which besides Beeckman and Descartes included Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), and Walter Charleston (1620-1707). They all knew each other and reacted to each other's work.[[CiteRef::Osler (2001)]] The decade after Descartes met Beeckman was the most philosophically productive of his life. [[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]]
  
In terms of his methodology Descartes was largely responding to what he perceived as the dogmatism and marked lack of progress he in the Scholastic tradition, and his excitement with the new mechanical natural philosophy. His weariness with the largely dialectical scholastic method is what led him to develop the highly systematized epistemology and metaphysics for which he would come to be known.
+
In terms of his methodology Descartes was largely responding to what he perceived as the dogmatism and marked lack of progress he saw in the Scholastic tradition, and his excitement with the new mechanical natural philosophy. His weariness with the largely dialectical scholastic method is what led him to develop the highly systematized epistemology and metaphysics for which he would come to be known.
 
|Major Contributions=Descartes new methodology and mechanical natural philosophy were of revolutionary importance. They became accepted at Cambridge University in England by 1680,[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 211]] and in France by about 1700, displacing the Aristotelian-medieval system of theories from the [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific mosaic]]. These theories were ultimately fully displaced throughout Europe by Descartes theories and by the later theories of Issac Newton (1642-1726).[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 167]]
 
|Major Contributions=Descartes new methodology and mechanical natural philosophy were of revolutionary importance. They became accepted at Cambridge University in England by 1680,[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 211]] and in France by about 1700, displacing the Aristotelian-medieval system of theories from the [[Scientific Mosaic|scientific mosaic]]. These theories were ultimately fully displaced throughout Europe by Descartes theories and by the later theories of Issac Newton (1642-1726).[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 167]]
  
Line 45: Line 45:
 
included physical, biological, physiological, and psychological theories.[[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.  
 
included physical, biological, physiological, and psychological theories.[[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 Aristotelian natural philosophy all objects were a compound of form and matter, a concept called hylomorphism. Form gives material bodies their distinctive properties, and makes them different from one another.  It explains why fire rises and stones fall. Matter is what they all share in common. All things have teleological goals or purposes [[CiteRef::Shields (2016)]]. It was also In Descartes' mechanical corpuscular natural philosophy, by contrast, there are just two kinds of substance 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. The form/matter distinction is rejected, as are Aristotle's four elements. [[CiteRef::Ariew (1992)]]  
+
In Aristotelian natural philosophy all objects were a compound of form and matter, a concept called hylomorphism. Form gives material bodies their distinctive properties, and makes them different from one another.  It explains why fire rises and stones fall. Matter is what they all share in common. All things have teleological goals or purposes [[CiteRef::Shields (2016)]]. In Descartes' mechanical corpuscular natural philosophy, by contrast, there are just two kinds of substance 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. The form/matter distinction is rejected, as are Aristotle's four elements. [[CiteRef::Ariew (1992)]]  
 +
 
 +
Descartes deduced his scientific theories about the natural world from this basically metaphysical foundation (all of which he deduces by application of his method). He wrote that "the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principle ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals".[[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)|p. 271]] In Cartesian mechanics, matter fills the universe as a plenum. If all matter is extended, there can be no space without extended matter. Unlike atomism, matter is infinitely divisible, though visible things are composed of tiny corpuscles that interact with one another by physical contact. Their size and shape are hypothetical, and are too small to be determined directly by observation, though observation can allow us to infer the plausibility of our guesswork. The universe is essentially mechanical in character, except for the mental substance of human beings. Animals, according to Descartes, are complex automata composed of physical substance only and cannot be said to think, feel, or love in the way that human beings or God can.[[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]][[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]] Descartes maintained that our senses do not inform us of the mechanical world as it is, but provide us with sensations which may be different from their objective cause. Only extended matter and motion exist apart from our minds. Secondary qualities, such as colors, are created in our minds in response to mechanical stimuli. [[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]]. Descartes completed a manuscript that was to be a comprehensive expression of his mechanical natural philosophy, called ''The World''. He withdrew his plans to publish it upon learning of the condemnation of Galileo in Rome in 1633. The work never appeared during his lifetime, but two major fragments, the ''Treatise on Light'', and the ''Treatise on Man'' where published posthumously. The first dealt with physics, and the second put forward a theory of physiology, nervous system, function, and the mind/brain relationship. [[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Descartes (2003)]]
 +
 
  
Descartes deduced his scientific theories about the natural world from this basically metaphysical foundation (all of which he deduces by application of his method). He wrote that "the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principle ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals".[[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)|p. 271]] In Cartesian mechanics, matter fills the universe as a plenum. If all matter is extended, there can be no space without extended matter. Unlike atomism, matter is infinitely divisible, though visible things are composed of tiny corpuscles that interact with one another by physical contact. Their size and shape are hypothetical, and are too small to be determined directly by observation, though observation can allow us to infer the plausibility of our guesswork. The universe is essentially mechanical in character, except for the mental substance of human beings. Animals, according to Descartes, are complex automata composed of physical substance only and cannot be said to think, feel, or love in the way that human beings or God can.[[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]][[CiteRef::Descartes (2007)]] Our senses do not inform us of the mechanical world as it is, but provide us with sensations which may be different from their objective cause. Secondary qualities, such as colors, exist only in our minds. Only extended matter and motion exist apart from our minds. [[CiteRef::Clarke (1992)]]
 
  
 
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 theories would eventually be supplanted by those of Newton, he made the critical first steps to replacing the Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]]
 
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 theories would eventually be supplanted by those of Newton, he made the critical first steps to replacing the Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic.[[CiteRef::Hatfield (2016)]]

Revision as of 16:58, 30 January 2017

René Descartes (31 March 1596 – 10 February 1650) was a French natural philosopher; who is today considered one of the most influential figures in modern philosophy. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was French mathematician and philosopher. Descartes rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic world view accepted for most of the previous two thousand years, and laid down new foundations for knowledge.1p. 52423 In mathematics he developed techniques that made possible analytic geometry. In natural philosophy, he was co-framer of the sine law of light refraction, developed a theory of the rainbow, and formulated a precursor of the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.4 Rejecting the Aristotelian world of forms, substances, and teleology, he posited a mechanical world in which matter possessed only spatial extension and interacted only by contact. 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 1637.5 Descartes posited a 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.2 This allowed him to advance a mathematical a priorist approach to scientific knowledge and inquiry.67

Historical Context

The scientific mosaicof 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. This Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic included Christian theology, humoral physiology, astrology, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Christian (Catholic, in many but not all communities contemporaneous with Descartes) theology.8 Descartes was well educated in this tradition through his attendance at the prestigious Jesuit La Fleche College between the ages of ten and eighteen. He studied a traditional scholastic curriculum of logic, grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Natural philosophy was taught from the works of Aristotle as interpreted by Christian scholars. Descartes also received an education in mathematics that was unusual for the Aristotelian tradition, and excelled at math. 9pp. 38-61106

Descartes’ major writings came in a time of social and intellectual upheaval in Europe. He was a participant in the Thirty Years War before writing his major works and traveled extensively around Europe at a time when the continent was embroiled in both reformation and counter-reformation, both of which were a wellspring of new thought in theology and philosophy. The community of the time was engaged with major challenges to the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. These came from a variety of sources, including various varieties of Platonism, Hermeticism, the Chemical Philosophy of Paracelsus, among other movements.6 There were new developments in optics, astronomy, and physiology.11 Aristotle's earth-centered cosmology had been challenged by the work of Nicolaus Copernicus(1473-1543), Johannes Kepler(1571-1630), and Galileo Galilei(1564-1642), which Descartes was familiar with.121013

The mechanical natural philosophy was a pursued radical alternative to Aristotelian cosmology, embraced by some supporters of Copernican heliocentrism.14159p. 69-73 It rejected the Aristotelian fundamentals of form, substance, and teleology, and the idea that matter is continuous. Instead of explaining the properties of visible bodies in terms of form, it instead maintained that the world consisted of invisibly tiny particles of matter and that all the observable properties of the visible bodies were a consequence of these particles and their interactions with one another. The particles interacted mechanically, by contact, and it was often supposed that they rendered natural phenomena potentially explainable in geometrical and mathematical terms. Unlike Aristotle's physics, it was compatible with a moving planetary Earth. It can be traced to the Ancient Greek atomism of Democritus (circa 460-370 BCE) and later Epicurean philosophers. Atomism was reintroduced into European thought in the fifteenth century with the rediscovery of the Roman poet Lucretius's De rerum natura. In the early seventeenth century, it was championed by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Nicolas Hill (1570-1610?), Sebastian Basso (1573-1625?), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and Galileo Galilei.6161714

After leaving La Fleche, in 1618,Descartes became involved in a collaboration with the Dutch Calvinist natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman (1588-1687), who valued him for his mathematical skills. They worked together on several mathematical problems in natural philosophy. Beeckman was a corpuscularist. A derivative of atomism, corpuscularism rejected indivisible atoms and void spaces but nonetheless accounted for the properties of objects in terms of invisibly tiny particles 9p. 68 He is almost certainly the first person in Europe to attempt to explain macro-geometrical regularities in terms of micro-mechanical models. 9p. 70 For the most part, applying mathematics to physical problems was not part of the Aristotelian tradition. Descartes adopted Beeckman's mathematical corpuscularism and became part of a community of corpuscularist thinkers which besides Beeckman and Descartes included Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), and Walter Charleston (1620-1707). They all knew each other and reacted to each other's work.18 The decade after Descartes met Beeckman was the most philosophically productive of his life. 6

In terms of his methodology Descartes was largely responding to what he perceived as the dogmatism and marked lack of progress he saw in the Scholastic tradition, and his excitement with the new mechanical natural philosophy. His weariness with the largely dialectical scholastic method is what led him to develop the highly systematized epistemology and metaphysics for which he would come to be known.

Major Contributions

Hakob Barseghyan's lecture on Cartesian Worldview

Descartes new methodology and mechanical natural philosophy were of revolutionary importance. They became accepted at Cambridge University in England by 1680,19p. 211 and in France by about 1700, displacing the Aristotelian-medieval system of theories from the scientific mosaic. These theories were ultimately fully displaced throughout Europe by Descartes theories and by the later theories of Issac Newton (1642-1726).19p. 167

Cartesian Method

Under the Aristotelian scholastic method 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”.19p. 144 Descartes became frustrated with this tradition and its dialectical approach to knowledge-seeking, which he charged with plunging him into skeptical doubts whereby he could never be sure what was true and what was not. He writes in Discourse on the Method:5

“But no sooner had I completed the whole course of study that normally takes one straight into the ranks of the ‘learned’ than I completely changed my mind about what this education could do for me. For I found myself tangled in so many doubts and errors that I came to think that my attempts to become educated had done me no good except to give me a steadily widening view of my ignorance!”

Descartes concluded that if his goal was to attain certain knowledge about the world,the accepted method must be rejected and a new one would be required. 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.13 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', 20 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 that he was a created thing, his requiring a creator, that creator being God, the benevolent nature of God, and the consequent reliability of his God-given senses and reason, all of which formed the broader foundation of his systematized scientific worldview.2

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. 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,2 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

Hakob Barseghyan's lecture on Cartesian Worldview

included physical, biological, physiological, and psychological theories.126 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 Aristotelian natural philosophy all objects were a compound of form and matter, a concept called hylomorphism. Form gives material bodies their distinctive properties, and makes them different from one another. It explains why fire rises and stones fall. Matter is what they all share in common. All things have teleological goals or purposes 21. In Descartes' mechanical corpuscular natural philosophy, by contrast, there are just two kinds of substance 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. The form/matter distinction is rejected, as are Aristotle's four elements. 22

Descartes deduced his scientific theories about the natural world from this basically metaphysical foundation (all of which he deduces by application of his method). He wrote that "the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principle ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals".7p. 271 In Cartesian mechanics, matter fills the universe as a plenum. If all matter is extended, there can be no space without extended matter. Unlike atomism, matter is infinitely divisible, though visible things are composed of tiny corpuscles that interact with one another by physical contact. Their size and shape are hypothetical, and are too small to be determined directly by observation, though observation can allow us to infer the plausibility of our guesswork. The universe is essentially mechanical in character, except for the mental substance of human beings. Animals, according to Descartes, are complex automata composed of physical substance only and cannot be said to think, feel, or love in the way that human beings or God can.75 Descartes maintained that our senses do not inform us of the mechanical world as it is, but provide us with sensations which may be different from their objective cause. Only extended matter and motion exist apart from our minds. Secondary qualities, such as colors, are created in our minds in response to mechanical stimuli. 7. Descartes completed a manuscript that was to be a comprehensive expression of his mechanical natural philosophy, called The World. He withdrew his plans to publish it upon learning of the condemnation of Galileo in Rome in 1633. The work never appeared during his lifetime, but two major fragments, the Treatise on Light, and the Treatise on Man where published posthumously. The first dealt with physics, and the second put forward a theory of physiology, nervous system, function, and the mind/brain relationship. 623


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 theories would eventually be supplanted by those of Newton, he made the critical first steps to replacing the Aristotelian-scholastic mosaic.12

Criticism

Descartes’ ideas saw widespread criticism in his time and shortly after from all manner of sources, including Scholastic vanguards, religious authorities, and other philosophers. By 2016 almost all of Descartes’ ideas have been consigned to the graveyard of ideas, but it is worth noting some criticisms Descartes faced in his lifetime or shortly thereafter that are of historical interest.

The most notable objection Descartes would end up facing would be the more mathematically precise and more explanatorily powerful physical theory given by Newton half a century later, but there existed objection to Descartes even earlier. One particularly notable objection came from Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who questioned Descartes’ theory of substance in a letter dated the tenth of May, 1643. In it, she asks “Given that the soul of a human being is only a thinking substance, how can it affect the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary actions?”24 Descartes would never gives a satisfactory answer over the course of the correspondence, and the single example highlights how troubling the issues left open by Descartes’ system are for the integrity of that system. Elizabeth’s objection raises reasonable (significant, even) doubts about whether or not the theory of substance around which Descartes bases a significant portion of his scientific theories can hold water.

One of the most powerful objections to arise after Descartes’ death in 1650 came a generation later with the emergence of the philosophy of John Locke and the British Empiricists. Locke, despite being an admirer of Descartes, was highly critical of his methodology and in particular was critical of his methodological scepticism, which Locke regarded as a non-starter.25

Other objections were political, theological, and personal objections brought by various interest groups who had some stake in the academic status quo. In many places Descartes’ work was banned, in more even discussion of Descartes’ work was banned. Official condemnations came down from Universities and Church authorities, none of which were effective at stopping the spread of Cartesian ideas.26

Publications

Here are the works of Descartes included in the bibliographic records of this encyclopedia:

To add a bibliographic record by this author, enter the citation key below:

 

Citation keys normally include author names followed by the publication year in brackets. E.g. Aristotle (1984), Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (1935), Musgrave and Pigden (2016), Kuhn (1970a), Lakatos and Musgrave (Eds.) (1970). If a record with that citation key already exists, you will be sent to a form to edit that page.

Related Topics

Method
Methodology


References

  1. ^  Russell, Bertrand. (1945) A History of Western Philosophy. Routledge.
  2. a b c d  Newman, Lex. (2014) Descartes' Epistemology. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/.
  3. ^  Garber, Daniel. (1993) Descartes and Experiment in the Discourse and Essays. In Voss (Ed.) (1993), 288-310.
  4. ^ Hatfield (2014) 
  5. a b c  Descartes, René. (2007) Discourse on the Method. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf.
  6. a b c d e f g  Garber, Daniel. (1992) Descartes' Physics. In Cottingham (Ed.) (1992), 286-334.
  7. a b c d  Clarke, Desmond. (1992) Descartes' Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Revolution. In Cottingham (Ed.) (1992), 258-285.
  8. ^  Haldane, Elizabeth S. (1905) Descartes, His Life and Times. J. Murray.
  9. a b c d  Gaukroger, Stephen. (1995) Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
  10. a b  Rodis-Lewis, Genevieve. (1992) Descartes' Life and the Development of His Philosophy. In Cottingham (Ed.) (1992), 21-57.
  11. ^  Cottingham, John. (1992) Introduction. In Cottingham (Ed.) (1992), 1-20.
  12. a b c  Hatfield, Gary. (2016) Rene Descartes. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/descartes/.
  13. a b  Ariew, Roger. (1986) Descartes as a Critic of Galileo's Scientific Methodology. Synthese 67 (1), 77-90.
  14. a b  Luthy, Chirstopher; Murdoch, John E. and Newman, William R. (2001) Introduction: Corpuscles, Atoms, Particles, and Minima. In Luthy, Murdoch, and Newman (Eds.) (2001), 1-38.
  15. ^  Chalmers, Alan. (2014) Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/atomism-modern/.
  16. ^  Klein, Jurgen. (2012) Francis Bacon. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/francis-bacon/.
  17. ^  Gatti, Hilary. (2001) Giordano Bruno's Soul-Powered Atoms: From Ancient Sources Towards Modern Science. In Luthy, Murdoch, and Newman (Eds.) (2001), 133-162.
  18. ^  Osler, Margaret. (2001) How Mechanical was the Mechanical Philosophy? Non-Epicurean Aspects of Gassendi's Philosophy of Nature. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016), 423-440.
  19. a b c  Barseghyan, Hakob. (2015) The Laws of Scientific Change. Springer.
  20. ^  Descartes, René. (2004) Meditations on First Philosophy. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1641.pdf.
  21. ^  Shields, Christopher. (2016) Aristotle. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle/.
  22. ^  Ariew, Roger. (1992) Descartes and scholasticism: The intellectual background to Decartes' thought. In Cottingham (Ed.) (1992), 58-90.
  23. ^  Descartes, René. (2003) Treatise on Man. Prometheus Books.
  24. ^  Descartes, René. (2009) Correspondence with Princess Elizabeth. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1643.pdf.
  25. ^  Uzgalis, William. (2016) John Locke. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/.
  26. ^  Jolley, Nicholas. (1992) The Reception of Descartes' Philosophy. In Cottingham (Ed.) (1992), 393-423.