Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through René Descartes
Drew From(2)
who shaped René Descartes
- The doubt Descartes weaponizes was already in the air — much of it Montaigne's
- Scholars trace the Meditations' hyperbolic doubt back to the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Montaigne's Essays (especially the Apology for Raymond Sebond) and Charron
- Reading Montaigne first shows you doubt used as a way of living; Descartes takes the same tool and tries to end it once and for all in the cogito
via Confessions
- "I am thinking, therefore I exist" has a forebear in Augustine — Descartes himself went to the library to check, and confirmed Augustine used the same move to ground the certainty of existence
- The Meditations' inward retreat from the senses toward a self-certain mind reworks the introspective ascent Augustine performs in the Confessions
- Read Augustine first and Descartes's radical-seeming method reveals its lineage: the soul turning on itself to find the one thing it can't doubt
Inspired(3)
who René Descartes shaped
- The doubt Hume sets out to dismantle has a name here: Cartesian doubt
- Descartes' method of suspending everything to find one certainty becomes Hume's chief target in Section XII of the Enquiry
- Hume's charge: this universal skepticism is self-undermining, since it has to lean on the very faculties it claims to suspect
via Ethics
- Spinoza cut his teeth on Descartes — his first published book laid out Principles of Cartesian Philosophy in geometric form
- He kept Descartes' machinery, the more-geometrico method of definitions, axioms, and proofs, and turned it on Descartes himself
- The Ethics is built to demolish the one thing Descartes was surest of: the split between mind and body, two substances where Spinoza will allow only one
via Pensées
- Descartes built a God reason could prove — and Pascal could not forgive him for it: "he has no further need of God"
- The Pensées keep the thinking self and the mind-body split, then turn on the rest as "useless and uncertain"
- This is the work Pascal is answering when he insists the heart, not the intellect, is the only road to faith
Portraits
Dated 1647 contemporary oil (Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Bader Collection) — a less-reproduced but firmly-dated life portrait, useful as an alternate to the Hals/Weenix pair.
Pieter Nason, 1647
Half-length portrait of Descartes in a dark cloak and wide white collar, head turned slightly, eyes calm and watchful against a plain dark ground.
Frans Hals, 1649
Famous Quotes
“this proposition (pronunciatum) I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.”
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
“I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me.”
“Doubtless, then, I exist, since I am deceived; and, let him deceive me as he may, he can never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I shall be conscious that I am something.”
About René Descartes
French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, often called the father of modern philosophy. His Meditations on First Philosophy built all knowledge from the foundation of 'I think, therefore I am.' He also invented analytic geometry and made foundational contributions to optics. He died in Stockholm, having caught pneumonia while tutoring Queen Christina of Sweden.