Rene Descartes - Inventor of Analytical Geometry

Rene Descartes was born on 31 March 1596 and was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who invented analytical geometry and algebra. Rene Descartes did spend a large portion of his life while working in the Dutch Republic and he also initially served the Dutch states army of Maurice of Nassau, Stadtholder of the United Provinces, and the Prince of Orange. Rene Descartes is considered to be one of the most notable and intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age and is also regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. 

Many aspects of Descartes' philosophy may be found in late Aristotelianism, the resurgent Stoicism of the 16th century, or older philosophers like Augustine. He diverged from the schools in two important ways in his natural philosophy: first, he denied the division of corporeal essence into matter and form; second, he rejected any reference to ultimate purposes, divine or natural, in understanding natural events. Descartes regularly distinguished his ideas from those of the philosophers who came before him. Descartes goes so far as to claim in the first part of the Passions of the Soul, an early modern book on emotions, that he will write on this topic "as though no one has written on these things before." "Cogito, ergo sum" is his most famous philosophical remark which means ‘I think, therefore I am and it is found in Discourse on the Method.

Descartes is generally regarded as the "Father of Modern Philosophy," and he is often credited for increasing attention paid to epistemology in the 17th century. He established the groundwork for 17th-century continental rationalism, which was subsequently championed by Spinoza and Leibniz, and was later challenged by Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume's empiricist school of thinking.

Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy which was released in 1641 is still required reading in most university philosophy departments. Descartes' impact may also be seen in mathematics, where the Cartesian coordinate system was named after him. He is regarded as the founder of analytical geometry, the link between algebra and geometry that was important in the development of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also a pivotal player throughout the Scientific Revolution.

In this article, we are going to discuss Descartes’s biography, his early life, Rene Descartes’s mathematician contribution, later life death, legacy, and also a few of the most important and frequently asked questions related to Rene Descartes will be discussed. 

Rene Descartes Facts

• Name: René Descartes

• Birthdate: March 31, 1596

• Death Date: February 11, 1650

• Place of Birth: La Haye, Touraine, France

• Place of Death: Stockholm, Sweden

• Education: Jesuit College of Henri IV, University of Poitiers

• Fathers Name: Joachim

• Mother’s Name: Jeanne Brochard

Who was Rene Descartes?

• Rene Descartes was born in an upper-class family which was also very well educated on March 31, 1596, in the French village of La Haye en Touraine. The village is now known as Descartes, Indre-et-Loire in the honor of the man himself, Rene Descartes.

• Rene Descartes was well educated, beginning at a Jesuit institution at the age of eight and finishing with a law degree at the age of 22, but an important instructor put him on a path to apply mathematics and logic to understanding the natural world. This method included a study on the essence of life and knowledge itself, leading to his most famous remark, "I think; therefore I am."

Rene Descartes Early Life

• On March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, a small town in Central France, Rene Descartes, Rene Descartes was born and after he passed away, the town in which he was born had now been renamed to his name. Rene Descartes was the youngest of all three children. His father’s name is Joachim, a council member in the provincial parliament, and his mother Jeanne Brochard was only alive a year after Descartes’s birth. After his mother died, Descarte's father, Joachim sent all his children to live with their maternal grandmother where Descarte grew up. 

• René's father worked six months a year at the Court of Justice in Rennes, which was roughly 200 miles away from their house. René was brought up by his grandmother and great-uncle. René's father remarried when he was four years old and moved to Rennes permanently. Despite this, René and his father had a close relationship. René's health was bad from birth, and he had a persistent cough. Local physicians predicted that he would die in infancy. René's care was taken care of by a nurse hired by his father. As an adult, he thought his nurse had saved his life, so he gave her a lifetime pension.

• Rene Descartes' father was very much concerned and always wanted to provide good education to Rene Descartes and that was the reason that he sent him to the boarding school at the age of 08. The boarding school was the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche, which was many miles to the north in which he lived and studied there for more than 7 years. 

• Descartes was an excellent student, however, it is claimed that he was ill because he was not required to adhere to the school's hard schedule and was instead permitted to rest in bed until midmorning. His studies in rhetoric and logic, as well as the mathematical arts, which encompassed music and astronomy, as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics, prepared him well for a career as a philosopher. So did spending the following four years at the University of Poitiers getting a bachelor in law. Some historians believe he suffered a nervous breakdown during this time.

• Rene Descartes after studying mathematics later added theology and medicine to his studies. He did it because he was curious about learning new things and ideologies. After gaining the knowledge he wanted from great books, he traveled and joined the army for a brief amount of time. During his time in the army, he saw few battles and as his resume was very good he was then introduced to the Dutch scientist and philosopher Isaac Beeckman who in the coming years turned out to be a teaching figure to  Rene Descartes. Descartes credited a sequence of three very intense dreams or visions with defining the path of his studies for the rest of his life a year after graduating from Poitiers.

Rene Descartes- Father of Modern Philosophy

• Many regard Descartes to be the father of modern philosophy since his views diverged significantly from prevailing knowledge in the early 17th century, which was more emotion-based. While certain aspects of his thought were not entirely novel, his approach to them was. Descartes believed in removing everything from the table, all preconceived and inherited conceptions, and beginning again, gradually reintroducing the certain things, which for him began with the declaration "I exist." This gave rise to his most famous quote: "I think; therefore I am."

• Rene Descartes from the beginning has believed that all the truths were at the end linked to each other. He attempted to discover the meaning of the natural universe using a logical method based on science and mathematics, which was an extension of the approach advocated by Sir Francis Bacon in England a few decades before. Descartes also produced Meditations on First Philosophy and Principles of Philosophy, among other treatises, in addition to Discourse on the Method.

• Although the twentieth century largely placed Descartes in philosophy as time passed, each century has focused on different elements of his works such as his explorations in theoretical physics, which prompted many scholars to consider him first and foremost a mathematician. He introduced Cartesian geometry, which incorporates algebra. he is responsible for developing an empirical understanding of rainbows through his laws of refraction; and he proposed a naturalistic account of the formation of the solar system, though he felt compelled to suppress much of that due to Galileo's fate at the hands of the Inquisition. His fear was not unfounded: Descartes' writings were eventually put to the Index of Prohibited Books by Pope Alexander VII.

Rene Descartes Biography Summary and his Legacy 

• Throughout his life, Rene Descartes did not marry but he did have a daughter whose name was Francine and was born in the Netherlands in 1635. Rene Descartes had relocated there in 1628 because life in France was too hectic for him to focus on his profession, and Francine's mother was a maid in the mansion where he was living. He had intended to educate the little girl in France, having arranged for her to live with relatives, but she died of a fever at the age of five.

• Descartes resided in the Netherlands for more than 20 years before dying on February 11, 1650, in Stockholm, Sweden. He had arrived there less than a year previously, at Queen Christina's request, to be her philosophy instructor. His frail health from his childhood continued. He spent much of his mornings in bed, honoring his dream life and merging it into his waking routine in conscious meditation, but the queen's insistence on 5 a.m. classes led to a bout of illness from which he never recovered. He was 53 years old.

• As Sweden was a Protestant country and Descartes was a catholic and after his death, he was buried in a graveyard which is primarily used for the unbaptized babies, and later after few days, his remains were then taken to the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés which is the oldest church in Paris. 

• When confronted with theological questions, Rene Descartes approach of combining mathematics and logic with a philosophy to explain the physical world became metaphysical and it led him to a contemplation of the nature of existence and the mind-body duality, identifying the pineal gland as the point of contact for the body with the soul. It also inspired him to characterize dualism as matter colliding with non-matter. This notion sparked debate since his prior philosophical system had provided man with the means to define knowledge of what is true. Fortunately, Descartes created methodological skepticism or Cartesian doubt, and so all of us became philosophers.