René Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, France, in 1596 and educated by the Jesuits at La Flèche. After military service across Europe he settled in the Dutch Republic, where the climate of intellectual tolerance allowed him to write freely. The Discourse on the Method (1637) and the on First Philosophy (1641) propose a programme of radical doubt — dismiss any belief that could possibly be in error — that nevertheless cannot doubt the existence of the doubter: cogito ergo sum. From that single certainty he reconstructed God, the external world, and the foundations of natural philosophy. In mathematics he united algebra and geometry through Cartesian coordinates, the basis of analytic geometry. Summoned to Stockholm by Queen Christina to give lessons at five in the morning in a cold palace, he caught pneumonia and died there in February 1650.
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Philosopher · Mathematician · Father of Modern Philosophy
René Descartes
1,596 CE – 1,650 CE
The French philosopher who proposed to doubt everything that could be doubted — and rebuilt knowledge, including himself, from the foundation: I think, therefore I am.
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