Rene Descartes: a Great Thinker of the Western World Essay

I cerebrate thitherfore I am be the words that come to mind as we encounter the subject of Descartes. We travel to man full of loveledge and ideas ready to expand and break free. His avocation in knowledge and the acquisition of truth itself brought him to doubt entirely more(prenominal) or less him, including God and his very profess population. He is tear down considered to be the have of Modern philosophy because he guided the commemorateers of his time to deviate from the Scholastic-Aristotelian manner. This is delinquent to his feel that the scholastic method was prone to doubt since it relied on mother wit as the source for either knowledge, meaning that t to each oneings adhered to traditional methods posed by the church. However we stand non simply look at Descartes without knowing any occasion about his reason and inspirations.Rene Descartes is credited with being the father of modern philosophy. Not only is he accredited to being a man of extraordinary g enius, but his ideas changed the modality western European thinkers viewed theology. Having his mother die after he was born(p) caused young Rene to live with his grandmother in La Haye. He was displace to a Jesuit college c altogethered La Fleche, where he studied grammar, rhetoric, and a philosophic curriculum of verbal arts and logic. He was disappointed in the signifiers he had to take, except for mathematics, consequently explaining his infatuation with the subject along with physics. Either room he left La Fleche with a very broad unsubtle arts education in 16141. He received his degree and manifest in civil and flush toileton law at the University of Poiters. From in that respect, Descartes became a unpaid worker for the army of Maurice of Nassau in the Netherlands during the summer of 1618. It is said that before he went to Netherlands, Descartes had lost all interest in science and mathematics and go through a period of depression or mental breakdown.However b it at Nassau, he met the most(prenominal) important influence of his early adulthood Isaac Beekman3. It was Beekman who re-ignited Descartes interest in science and opened his eyes to the possibility of applying numeric techniques to other fields outdoor(a) of the pre-determined mindset. A push was all that Descartes indispensable to make him set his eyes on a new method of scientific findings. For a while, he was on and off theories, starting and neer finishing them, including his Rules for the Direction of the Mind. He moved to the Netherlands yet again in 1628 in order to find a place full of calmness and quiet where he could think. He tried to run away from capital of France and its city full of distractions. It is here that Descartes began to work on a small(a) treatise, which took him approximately three years to sail through, entitled The World3.The World constituted in showing the mechanisms fanny non using the Scholastic principles of substantial forms and ratt ling qualities3 and in giving an account for the origin of the universe, nature and the gracious frame. He also stated here that he agree with the heliocentric hypothesis proposed by Galileo, that the sun is the center of the universe rather than the earth. He chose non to publish his work after learning of Galileos condemnation hence his work was non matchn until his death. He did decide, however, to publish his Geometry, Dioptrics, and Meteors which he prefaced with a apprise Discourse on Method. He saw this method as something that could be applied to almost anything but mostly to philosophy.Before Descartes, there was Aristotle and old other thinkers who guessd in syllogisms or basically deductive reasoning that can be used as an extremely subtle, sophisticated, or deceptive argument. For physical exertion syllogisms usually follow something along the lines of All A is C all B is A and then all B is C3. Descartes did not believe in syllogisms because their conclusion s merely brought forth a probable contestation which could not be easily strainn. Since a statement is probable because it is a statement this just caused confusion. In order to avoid these confusions, Descartes sought geometry and absolute genuinety.For interpreter, in geometry a theorem is deduced from a set of clear, simple, essential truths3 that argon universally agreed with, therefrom we can deduce that these undeniable truths are supported by deduction and reasoning. As Descartes laid this basis down, he found them promising due to the idea that geometry is clear, distinct and therefore it is easily understood. The idea behind geometry is not just simple speculation instead it is something that is agreed upon, distant the confused ideas of sensation. Even though he was able to mount his theories in geometry, he was unable to give the same way of thought to human thinking, because of the peoples skepticism.To solve this he came up with Meditations on for the first time philosophy. In this work, he laid out arguments doubting his previous beliefs3, since they did not apply to human thought. He observed that the senses can be deceiving. For example your vision can deceive you by letting you believe that there is water on the road, even though it is just a verbalism of radiated heat. Moreover, although this may apply to sensations derived under certain circumstances, doesnt it seem certain that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a spend dressing gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands, and so on? (AT VII 18 CSM II 13)1. His point was that even though senses do deceive, you reading this paper right now may not be ground on true sensations, instead it may be based on those inside a dream.Since we cannot prove that we are dreaming at this moment, Descartes concluded that any belief based on sensation had to be doubtful because it could all very swell up be a dream, thus disproving the syllogism view. This in turn does not pertain to mathematical beliefs. We all know that 2+3=5, whether we are asleep or awake, this is proven to be true and thus accepted. However, Descartes saw it as a predetermined belief that 2+3=5 was not substantially reasoning or sensing on his own but that God was conspiring against him to make him handle about everything including math. And since God is the one conspiring against him, then God ceases to go, meaning that there is a mean demon waiting for him to fail.After such statements, Descartes finds himself even doubting these beliefs, thus leaving him in a whirlpool of spurious beliefs3 by the end of his starting time Meditation. He does however recognize that these are all just exaggerated conceptions, which give him the opportunity to rid himself of all preconception beliefs, thus being open to accept future undeniable truths. It seems that Descartes was trying to clear his mind of what he had learned from the past, putting it all into one thought (or First Meditation) this wr iting seems to have helped him open his mind, and decease more accepting to new theories and consider their possibility instead of discarding them.In his second meditation Descartes tries to find absolute certainty in his most famous reasoning Cogito ergo sum I think therefore I exist. These words marked the end of Descartes doubt and open a passage where he can seek to discover the nature of his own essence, to demonstrate the existence of God, and to provide the criterion to guide the mind in search of truth2. Here not only does he experience the I exist shock, but he realizes what he has left behind from the previous theory. All belief in sense has been left behind from the First Meditation, and now the belief of if I exist comes to mind because he can now see that in order for the demon to deceive him he must be real. The thought of I exist, and I am real are now embedded in the mind2. This new embodiment allowed Descartes to see the mere fact of his thoughts being engaged in a ctivity, thus comprehend a thinking I being combined with I exists becomes an absolute certain truth.The therefore is something that is embodied by Descartes, meaning the consideration of himself and his existence as something immediate. Lastly, we review the I exist meaning that since I think and reason, it must mean that I must be present to think therefore I exist. Descartes, in the end, at around his Sixth Meditation3 determines what he is in terms of the phrase A thinking thing. A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, refuses, that imagines and also feels2. Thus, Descartes sees his thoughts as operations all occurring within the will, the intellect and the imagination, all which are occurring inside the thoughts of the mind.At the end of his theory, Descartes sees that he does have a mind and indeed also has a body, and that he is nothing more than a thinking thing. However, he does not believe that his mind and body are connected, in fact his belief is that they ar e separated from each other and that he can clearly conceive each of them apiece and thus whatever he thinks god can set asunder2. Descartes does not solve this conflict of mind and body, what he does is condensing it. By construction that a human is the compound of mind and body, he was able to novelty his philosophy into the biology of the body itself. He says that mind and body move at the pineal gland which controls the perception and motion of the body.The nest blackguard in Descartes theoretical strategy was to prove Gods existence. He decided to do this by providing proofs, such as those used in geometry. The first base is that there is an idea of a supreme perfect tense being, the second is based on the cause of ones very existence as an imperfect being and the third is the idea that a supreme perfect being must have in itself the extremity to exists2. Because something cannot come from nothing, his existence has to come from someone or something that created him, (a bigger power,) thus if he exists and he has to have been created by another existing power then that means that such a force has to also exist1&3.For example, if you are boiling a pot of water, that pot is being boiled by the heat source coming from underneath the pot, meaning that something (in this case the kitchen) has to provide an specific amount of heat, or at least be angry enough to provide heat to the cool un-heated pot. Same way if the kitchen did not have heat, then the water would not boil, because something cannot give what it does not have3, this is called the free-and-easy Adequacy principle. In the end, god has to be real since he created a real being, in this case Descartes. God exists because I exist, and I exist because the existing perfect being of god created me, thus I was given existence by someone already possessing it.At last, Descartes was able to prove that eliminating predetermined beliefs helps those in philosophy think and accept rationality outside of societys box. As a philosopher, he was able to prove his existence and reality and Gods existence as well by following steps in order to reach complete satisfaction with his theories. As a mathematician, he was able to introduce ideas of geometric coordinates and use them as an application in his more profound thoughts. Of course Descartes extensive philosophies exceeded the ones discussed in this paper, even though his most influential ones were covered.