The life of the father of modern philosophy René Descartes
Introduction
René Descartes was a philosopher, scientist and mathematician of French origin. He was born in Turana, today called Descartes in his honor, on March 31, 1596, third descendant of a French family that fled Rennes due to the bubonic plague. Descartes is considered the father of modern philosophy, as well as analytical geometry and mechanism in physics.
Descartes received an early education at Collège Henry IV in the town of La Flèche, until sixteen years of age. There was highly valued by educators, although in a special regime due to health fragilities. He also formed with the Jesuits where Aristotle and the great Christian thinkers read: St. Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Developing
He entered the University of Poitiers where he studied medicine and law, and after a brief incursion into military life, he dedicated himself fully to his scientific research in Holland in 1629, where he would lead a quiet and modest life, with occasional residence changes to hideHis whereabouts. It was in Holland where his main works announced: the speech of the method, written at 41 years of age;And, metaphysical meditations, written four years later. Descartes died of pneumonia in Stockholm Sweden, on February 11, 1650, where he had gone, called by the queen, in 1649.
The first work that is conserved of Descartes was its rules for the direction of the Spirit, written in 1628, but posthumously published. The main works of Descartes are: the speech of the method and metaphysical meditations. Among Descartes’s works, I would highlight the speech of the method. The knowledge of the time is advancing a lot:
Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes realizes that something essential is missing: that it is to base that knowledge;demonstrate why it is a knowledge in which we can trust, because what seemed true before, in reality it was not. So, if we thought it was true before, it ended up not being true now, why what we thought would now be true? How can I know with certainty?.
conclusion
In conclusion, the work speech is explained in the context in which Descartes lived. Science was beginning to appear as we know it now, but I needed to find a method that could, on the one hand, guide thought;And, on the other, order knowledge. Descartes was convinced that philosophy could become a universal knowledge.
But he saw that the current philosophy of his time was very far from that ideal: there was an infinity of different and contradictory theories that all they did was lead us to skepticism and refuse us the possibility of reaching a safe, reliable knowledge. The cause of all this, according to Descartes, is the lack of an adequate method of knowledge. For this reason, the present work intends to find a method to never make mistakes, a method that guarantees that we are thinking well and that the ideas we reach are correct and indisputable. He wanted to give validity to human knowledge.
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