Rene Descartes (1596-1650 CE) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic.
The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it. If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. Here are few quotes of his worth remembering before we test Descartes fully in my survival of the fittest philosophers. It was the basis for modernity in the philosophical sense, and for this we should be grateful.
#Cogito ergo blogo free
This was an anthropocentric revolution, raising the human being to the level of a free agent acting with autonomous reason. Because of his insistence though, the philosophical debate of his age was shifted from "what is true" to "of what can I be certain?" Possibly without realising it, Descartes changed the medieval search for an authoritative guarantor of truth from God to humanity, since the traditional concept of "truth" implies an external authority while "certainty" relies instead on the judgment of the individual. By demanding one certainty, Descartes committed himself to proffering several fundamental errors. As I said in tenet #2 of my evolutionary philosophy, all knowledge is probabilistic. Or perhaps we are all in a computer simulation. Brain tumors can lead to crimes as heinous as pedophilia. The mind, like the senses, can be fallible. Even Descartes' doubt and existence could be doubted. The original Skeptics knew, of course, that this line of reasoning was circular and could not be trusted. He wrestled deeply with all his doubts until he concluded in the end that if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. Initially, Descartes arrived at only a single principle: thought exists. Descartes did not give up the search for truth believing that nothing could ever be known-he instead tried to reject any ideas that could be doubted in the hopes of finding one solid rock upon which knowledge could be built.
Though it may sound familiar, this was actually a more nuanced doubt than the radical nihilism of the Skeptics of Ancient Greece.
( Know thyself is surely #1, though these rankings are just personal speculations and therefore likely wrong.)ĭescartes' is known as the "father of modern philosophy" due to the first two of his Meditations on First Philosophy in which he laid out his famous methodic doubt-the systematic process he used of being skeptical about the truth of one's beliefs. Rodin's Thinker, begun in 1880 was originally part of a larger commission celebrating Dante's Divine Comedy, but it just as easily could have been dedicated to René Descartes-he of the second most famous line in all of philosophy: cogito ergo sum or I think, therefore I am. Recognize that profile? (Check my logo more carefully if you don't.)
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