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 * For other things named Descartes, see Descartes (disambiguation).

René Descartes (IPA:, March 31 1596 – February 11 1650) is generally acknowledged to be among the canonical figures of Western philosophy. By way of the Discourse on method (1637) and the Meditations (1641), he became one of the founders of modern philosophy; by way of the Essays published with the Discourse, and the Principles of philosophy (1644), he helped to establish a new, mechanistic physics—the first step on the path to modern science. His work in geometry and algebra was fundamental to what became analytic and algebraic geometry, and provided the basis for the representation of curves by equations which is essential to their treatment in the calculus of Leibniz and Newton. In a more general way, he is often credited with putting subjectivity and the problem of the mind’s relation to the external world at the center of philosophical concern, thus opening the way to Hume’s skepticism and to Kant’s critical philosophy.

Descartes’ modern reputation rests on three points of his philosophy: the cogito, radical doubt and its resolution, and the mind-body distinction. In the last thirty years, philosophers and historians have taken a renewed interest in Descartes’ natural philosophy and in his last work, the Passions of the soul (1649).

The cogito—in brief, the argument that even in doubting everything I can be certain that I exist and that I am a thinking thing—makes the thinking subject the foundation of all our knowledge. When combined with the view that our access to everything else is by way of ideas or representations in the mind, the primacy of the thinking subject raises the possibillity that in the absence of any independent means of checking the truth of my ideas, those ideas might fail to represent the world as it is or might even fail to correspond to any really existing thing other than themselves. Thus is raised the spectre of radical doubt.

Radical doubt is in the Meditations presented through the hypothesis of a evil genius who, though not God himself, has all the powers he needs to deceive the meditator in every way possible. The result is that the meditator might be having all those experiences for which we think having external senses and a brain are requisite, even though neither those senses nor the brain, nor any body, actually exists. Descartes’ solution is to appeal to the veracity of God, whose existence and attributes can be proved, according to him, even in the situation of radical doubt. That solution was generally not accepted; the chief objection, already raised by Arnauld in the fourth Objections to the Meditations, is that it is circular. On the one hand, Descartes relies on the veracity of God to establish the truth of clear and distinct ideas; on the other hand, he seems to base his knowledge of the divine attributes on the clarity and distinctness of his idea of God. The skeptical problem thus remains.

In Meditations 6 and again in the Principles Descartes argues that there is a “real distinction” between mind and body—in other words, that it is possible for each to exist without the other. His position is a version of dualism. Even before 1700 Spinoza and Locke, noting that Descartes had not shown that thought and extension are contradictory attributes, held that for all we know mind and body could be identical. The mental and the physical might be attributes of a single underlying thing. A further objection, first raised by Gassendi, is that if mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of substance, then it is difficult to understand how they could interact, especially if the model of causal interaction is the impact of one body upon another. Yet Descartes not only grants but insists that they do. Recent philosophy of mind for the most rejects substance dualism. But it has tended, in keeping with the cogito, to take self-awareness or consciousness as the mark of the mental. Descartes’ mind-body problem then becomes the problem of explaining how consciousness, as the paradigmatic mental property, could be realized in a physical system like the brain.

His natural philosophy is no longer treated as a mere precursor to Newton’s, a failed “philosophical romance” (as Christiaan Huygens called it). Descartes’ natural philosophy, despite its errors, has come to be seen as the first systematic attempt to base the explanation of natural phenomena on a few fundamental laws from which those phenomena are to be demonstrated. Together with the Epicurean atomism of Gassendi, Cartesian physics was the vehicle by which what Boyle was to call the “mechanical philosophy” became the dominant model for all the sciences in the seventeenth century.

The Passions of the soul, which began in an exchange of letters between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth, offers what would now be called an ethics of virtue. It classifies the passions or emotions and describes their typical causes and effects, including their physiological correlates in the body. On that basis Descartes shows how we can master our passions so as to free the will from their influence, allowing it to be guided instead by reason and the good as discerned by reason. The highest virtue is générosité (the closest equivalent in English is ‘magnanimity’), which is the esteem we have for ourselves in recognizing that we have free will and that we have done our best to bring about the good. In keeping with his Stoic sources, Descartes holds that the only events truly under our control are our thoughts, and that achieving autonomy in our volitions or acts of will is the only good of which we can be certain.

Life
Summary article: Descartes’ Life

Articles in this series:
 * Descartes’ Life from 1596 to 1639
 * [Descartes’ Life from 1639 to 1650

Summary paragraph to be inserted here. ªªª

Collected editions
(This is the standard edition, usually cited as ‘AT’.)

Biographies
(The earliest biography regarded as having documentary value.)

(Includes a detailed treatment of Descartes’ natural philosophy.)

(Eng. trans. Jane Marie Todd, (A sympathetic summation by the doyenne of Descartes studies in France.)

(Firmly sets Descartes in his place and time.)