René Descartes: biography of this French philosopher.

Summary of the life and intellectual legacy of Descartes, author of the phrase "I think, therefore I am".

René Descartes was one of the greatest thinkers in history.. His influence on Western thought and philosophy is undeniable, especially if we take into account his famous work "The Discourse of the Method".

He was way ahead of his time, a time when Galileo Galilei, a contemporary of his, was being censored by the religious elites, making it difficult for Cartesian philosophy to even be published at first.

In the following we will look at the life and work of this philosopher through a biography of René Descartesand to understand in more detail his philosophical thought.

Biography of René Descartes

Mathematician, physicist and, better known as a philosopher, René Descartes has been a multifaceted character. We will now take a look at his biography.

Early life

René Descartes was born in La Haye, France, on March 31, 1596.. His mother died when he was barely 13 months old, and his father, being busy with his work in the parliament of Brittany, hardly had time for the young Descartes, so his education fell into the hands of his maternal grandmother.

Little René was educated at a Jesuit school in La Flèche, between 1604 and 1616.between 1604 and 1612, which at the time was one of the most famous Jesuit institutions in Europe. That center was of paramount importance for his intellectual development.

There he learned several things, although it was centered on the teaching of traditional liberal education, theology and how to be a good gentleman. Years later, Descartes would be critical of the education he received in such a center. At La Flèche, Descartes obtained his bachelor's degree and later traveled to Potiers to graduate in law.

In 1616, at the age of 22, he left for the Netherlands to serve in the ranks of the Mauritian army of Nasser, he left for the Netherlands to serve in the ranks of the army of Maurice of Nassau, a Protestant prince in the war of thethe Protestant prince in the Thirty Years' War. Later, he would enlist in the ranks of Maximilian I of Bavaria, who was a Catholic. This may seem paradoxical, given that Catholics and Protestants were at odds in such a conflict. Descartes would recognize that he had enlisted in different armies to get to know new countries and understand the reality of each side.

During the winter of 1619 Descartes was stuck in a small village in the Upper Danube, near Ulm. He remained isolated from any social relations, next to a stove and with no other company than his own thoughts. It was there that the foundations of his philosophical system were revealed to him: the mathematical method and the more than famous Cartesian principle, "I think, therefore I am"..

During the night of November 10-11, 1619, victim of a feverish excitement, Descartes would have three dreams where the form of his method would be revealed to him, and his vocation to devote his life to philosophy and science.

End of military life

Renouncing the military life, Descartes took the opportunity to travel through German and Dutch lands, returning to France in 1622. He would spend some time in Italy, between 1623 and 1625, and then return to France, settling in Paris and taking a course in psychology in 1625.He would spend some time in Italy, between 1623 and 1625, and then return to France, settling in Paris and making contact with the most outstanding scientists of the time.

In 1628 he would return to Holland, a country where science was advancing by leaps and bounds thanks to the relative freedom of thought and the scientific enjoyed good popularity, residing in the Netherlands for 21 years. During the first five years he would devote himself to elaborating his own system of the world, what he understood the human being to be and how our soul was encapsulated in our body.

By 1633 he was well advanced in writing the Treatise on Lighta comprehensive text in which he discussed metaphysics and physics. However, he decided not to publish it, given the terrible condemnation of Galileo Galilei. Descartes defended in that work the Copernican heliocentrism of Galileo Galilei.. In the end the work would be published posthumously.

In 1637 his famous "Discourse on Method" appeared, presented as a prologue to three scientific essays. The book would gain wide popularity and many educated readers would dare to send letters to its author to discuss what they thought or possible errors in the Cartesian method.

In the discourse, Descartes proposed a methodical doubt, with which all the knowledge of the time was to be questioned.. It was not a skeptical doubt, since it was oriented towards the search for principles on which to base knowledge, and not a simple criticism of all knowledge of the time.

He proposed the Cartesian method for all sciences and disciplines, and it consists of breaking down the most complex problems into simpler parts, until detecting their most basic elements, simple ideas that can be presented as evident reasons. Then would come to relate these same ideas to understand the more complex postulates they were constituting.

In his mechanistic physics he explained that extension was the main property of material bodies, a postulate expounded in his Metaphysical Meditations of 1641. In this work he tried to demonstrate the existence of God and his perfection, in addition to the immortality of the soul, already pointed out in the fourth part of the Discourse on Method. As his popularity grew, criticism and threats of religious persecution became dark shadows hanging over René Descartes.

Flight to Sweden and the end of his life

Tired of struggles, criticisms and threats from both French and Dutch ecclesiastical authorities and academics, Descartes, in 1649, accepted the invitation of Queen Christendom to Sweden, accepted the invitation of Queen Christina of Sweden, who invited him to reside in Stockholm as her preceptor of philosophy..

This was no coincidence. Descartes and the monarch had maintained an intense correspondence. But although René Descartes enjoyed the company of Christina of Sweden, a cultured queen, the country he ruled was not so pleasant to him. He came to describe it as a land of bears, where men's thoughts freeze, along with the water.

In the Scandinavian country Descartes had to get up at four o'clock in the morning. had to get up at four o'clock in the morning, in the dark and with the winter cold gnawing at his bones, to give philosophy lessons to the queen, because the monarch only had that one thing to teach her.because the monarch only had that hour free due to her royal obligations. This would surely be what ended his life, since he died on February 11, 1650 from pneumonia, having been in Sweden for only five months.

Descartes' philosophy

René Descartes is considered as the promoter of the modern rationalist philosophy, one of the first philosophical currents in the world.one of the first philosophical currents after the end of the Middle Ages. Its approach aims to solve philosophical and scientific problems by means of a knowledge that guarantees the certainty of the postulates themselves.

In his Discourse on Method of 1637, he stated that he intended to elaborate a doctrine based entirely on new principles, breaking with the philosophical teachings he had received as a student at La Flèche. He was convinced that reality responded, completely, to a rational order.. He intended to create a method that would make it possible to reach the whole field of knowledge with the same certainty provided by the exact sciences, such as geometry and arithmetic.

His method is composed of four procedures:

• Not to accept as true anything of which one is not absolutely certain.
• To break down each problem into smaller parts.
• Go from the simplest to the most complex to understand.
• Review the entire process to ensure that no steps have been skipped.

To accomplish the first step, the first step is to methodical doubt, i.e. to question all acquired or inherited knowledge.. All knowledge has a part that can be criticized, but at the same time there is a part that is impossible to question, and this is the very action of doubting.

That is to say, we doubt reality, we doubt knowledge, but what we cannot doubt is that we are doubting. In this way we arrive at an absolute and evident certainty: we doubt. Doubt is a thought, with which we are doing the action of thinking.. It is not possible to think without existing, with which, the fact of thinking, doubting and performing other cognitive actions implies the indisputable existence of the thinking self. It is here where his famous phrase "cogito, ergo sum" arises, that is the maxim "I think, therefore I am".

It is on the basis of this simple sentence, albeit with absolute certainty, that Descartes posits his entire philosophy. We cannot trust in the existence of things, because, even if we see them or touch them, how can we be sure that they are not deceiving us?For, even if we see them or touch them, how can we be sure that they are not deceiving us? How can we be sure that our senses give us true information?

On the other hand, thought is not a material thing, but contains ideas of things, representations of reality. What arises from here is whether our thought contains any ideas or representations that can be perceived with the same clarity and distinction, which he considers two criteria of certainty, with which we perceive reality.

Types of ideas

Descartes reviews all the knowledge that he had previously discarded at the beginning of his philosophical quest. at the beginning of his philosophical quest. In reconsidering them he sees that the mental representations of our way of seeing reality can be encompassed in three categories:

• Innate ideas.
• Adventitious ideas.
• Fictitious ideas.

Innate ideas are, as their name indicates, already in us at the moment of our birth. They are ideas such as beauty or justice. They are not something found in the external world, they are abstract aspects.

Adventitious ideas would be those that would come from external things, such as the representation of what we have in us at birth.They are the result of our experience, obtained from our own experience, obtained from our own experience, obtained from our own experience. They are the result of our experience, obtaining them by means of the senses. The problem is that, since our senses can fail, we cannot be certain that the adventitious ideas we possess are true; perhaps reality is nothing more than a mere illusion.

Finally, there are fictitious ideas, which, as the name suggests, are those representations of things that do not exist, such as monsters in mythology, unicorns or any other.such as monsters in mythology, unicorns or any other. They are invented ideas, creativity. These fictitious ideas are the result of the sum or combination of other ideas that would be adventitious.

Our existence and that of God

When examining innate ideas, which are not given to us through the senses since they have no external representation, we find a rather paradoxical fact. Human beings are not perfect, since we die and have our weaknesses, but we can conceive of ideas of perfection, such as that of God, a being of existence and God's existence.We can, however, conceive ideas of perfection, such as that of God, an infinite, eternal and immutable being.

The idea of God, something perfect, cannot arise from a finite and imperfect individual, it has to come from before, by the action of another being, from God himself. The fact that we believe in the existence of God as a perfect being while we are imperfect is the demonstration that God exists, because if it has not been him who has put his idea of perfection in our imperfect mind, who has it been?

On substance

Descartes defines the concept of substance, understood as that which exists in such a way that it only needs itself in order to exist.. Substances manifest themselves through modes and attributes. Attributes are essential properties that reveal the determination of the substance, that is, those qualities without which a substance would cease to be that substance. Modes are not properties, but merely accidental, temporary situations or aspects.

The attribute of bodies is extension, since without it they cease to be bodies. All other properties, such as form, color, location and motion, are only modes, i.e., relatively temporary phenomena.

The attribute of spirit is thought, since spirit has this property always. Therefore, there is a thinking substance, called "res cogitans," but this is not a body, since it lacks extension, and its attribute is thought. Then there is a substance that is composed of physical bodies, called "res extensa", whose attribute would be extension, understood as three-dimensionality. Both substances are irreducible to each other and totally separate, and this conception of these two substances is what is called Cartesian dualism.

The human being is composed of body, i.e., res extensa, and soul, res cogitans.. But this clashes with the idea that these two substances are totally separate. In the case of the human being, the soul resides in the pineal gland, directing the body. This is how our res cogitans and our res extensa establish contact, with the soul influencing the body.