Rene Descartes and Cartesianism

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer. He has been called the 'Father of Modern Philosophy'. It has been said that both modern philosophy and modern mathematics began with the work of Rene Descartes. His analytic method of thinking focused attention on the problem of how we know, which has occupied philosophers ever since.

After consideration of all the previous methods of inquiry, Descartes decided that there must be a better way to find out the true knowledge. The first principle that he finally felt was self-evident was summarized in the statement, "I think, therefore I am". The method developed by Descartes was based on the following rules:

• The first rule was never to accept anything as true unless I recognized it to be evidently such. That is, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudgment.
• The second was to divide each of the difficulties which I encountered into as many parts as possible, and as might be required for an easier solution.
• The third was to think in an orderly fashion, beginning with the things which were simplest and easiest to understand, and gradually and by degrees reaching toward more complex knowledge, even treating as though ordered materials that were not necessarily so.
• The last was always to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I would be certain that nothing was omitted.

In short, his method required; 

(1) accepting as "truth" only clear, distinct ideas that could not be doubted, 

(2) breaking a problem down into parts, 

(3) deducing one conclusion from another, and 

(4) conducting a systematic synthesis of all things.

Descartes based his entire philosophical approach to science on this deductive method of reasoning. Descartes was highly optimistic about his plan to reconstruct a new and fully reliable body of knowledge.

Cartesianism

Cartesianism is the name was given to the philosophical doctrine (or school) of René Descartes. Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences. For him, philosophy was a thinking system that embodied all knowledge and expressed it in this way.

Cartesians view the mind as being wholly separate from the body. The mind can perhaps interact with a physical body, but it does not exist in the body. In general, Cartesian thought divides the world into three areas of existence:

• that inhabited by the physical body (matter),
• that inhabited by the mind, and
• that inhabited by God.