René Descartes

About this figure

René Descartes (1596-1650) was born in La Haye-en-Touraine, France, and educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche before taking a law degree at Poitiers in 1616. Rather than practice law, he spent his twenties traveling through Europe, for a time attached to the army of Maurice of Nassau in the Dutch Republic and later to Bavarian forces during the early Thirty Years' War, less as a committed soldier than as a young man of means observing the world before settling on a direction. By his own later account, a cluster of vivid dreams he had one night in Germany in November 1619 crystallized his sense that all the sciences might be unified under a single method of reasoning, an ambition that shaped the rest of his working life.

That method is the subject of his best-known book, Discourse on the Method (1637), published anonymously and, notably for a serious philosophical work of the time, written in French rather than the Latin of scholars, so that it could be read by anyone able to read at all. In it Descartes proposed clearing away everything he could possibly doubt and rebuilding knowledge from whatever survived that doubt, arriving at the conclusion, later phrased as "cogito, ergo sum," that the very act of doubting proved his own existence as a thinking thing. He extended and formalized this argument in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), circulated in draft to other scholars and theologians, including Thomas Hobbes, whose objections and Descartes's replies were published alongside the Meditations; an English edition later gathered these exchanges as the Six Metaphysical Meditations. In 1644 he published Principles of Philosophy, dedicated to Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate, with whom he corresponded for years on questions of mind, body, and the passions, attempting there a fuller physical account of the universe built on matter and motion rather than the Aristotelian categories still taught in most European universities.

Descartes lived most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic, moving frequently between towns, in part for the intellectual freedom it offered and in part, by his own admission, for the quiet. In 1649 Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to tutor her in philosophy. The Swedish winter and an unfamiliar schedule of early-morning lessons wore on him; he fell ill within months of arriving and died in Stockholm on 11 February 1650. Most historians attribute his death to pneumonia, though the exact circumstances were disputed even at the time, and a minority of later writers have raised the possibility of poisoning without ever establishing it. His remains were eventually returned to France.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.