Jennifer Vazquez

PHI2010
Professor Alllen Mcphee

Rene Descartes Biography

Rene Descartes, also known by Renatus Cartesius  was a French philosopher that in my

opinion was not that known like many of the other philosophers that are known by thousands. He

was born on March 31, 1596 in La Haye, France. He passed away on February 11, 1650 in

Stockholm Sweden. Descartes at the age of 8 was educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche in

Anjou. During his stay there, he studied classics, logic and traditional Aristotelian philosophy. A

big part of his mathematics education came from the books of Clavius that he studied there. 

He was named after his godfather René Brochard des Fontaines. His father Joachim

Descartes, whose house was at nearby Châtellerault, was the son of a doctor, and was Counsellor

at the Parliament of Brittany at Rennes. He was not a nobleman, but the rank of chevalerie was

eventually granted to the family in 1668. His mother Jeanne Descartes was the daughter of the

lieutenant-general of the garrison of Poitiers.  René believed that his mother had died having

him, but in fact she died giving birth to another son (who also died) the following year. He spent

most of his childhood at La Haye, with his brother Pierre and sister Jeanne. His father remarried

and René had a half-brother, Joachim, and a half-sister, Anne.

He was the person behind the mechanistic conception of the human body. Born the son of

very wealthy judge was the main reason why he was able to study at the places he was allowed

to attend. Around 1618 he decided to join the Dutch military academy at Breda. While in the

academy he studied more mathematics and mechanics thanks to Isaac Beeckman which was

described to be his mentor. Unfortunetly his health never let him fight, but his knowledge with

mathematics and skills in engineering he contributed with the war. 

 He was able to write is many different languages, he wrote in French, sometimes

in Latin, and sometimes translating those languages into others. Some of the works that he

published were "Discourse on the method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth

in the Sciences, Dioptics, Meterology, and Geometry. He also wrote Meditations on First

Philosophy with 6 Sets of Objections and Replies. Another published book dated back to 1644

and was called Principles of Philosophy, and Passions of The Soul being another published piece

of work.  Descartes thought of knowledge as a tree. A very important fact of his

was, "I think, therefore, I am." It was absolutely certain that he existed as a thinking thing.

Descartes advised iatromechanism, which happened to be the belief that physiological and

medical processes were reduced to problems of physics and mechanics. He did not claim all

these processes were essentially chemical, Fransisco de le Boe Sylvius did. In addition to his

studies he accepted that the mechanistic form of blood circulation that was proposed by William

Harvey in 1628. Basically he states that only humans have souls, and that all other animals are

tools that cannot think or feel pain. 

Descartes believed in something he called divine forknowledge, but not in

predetermination. He also discovered analytic geometry, which is the system of solving in

geometry  by graphing algebraic equations called " Cartesian coordinates" on a grid defined by a

horizontal x-axis and a vertical y-axis. 

René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm Sweden, where he had

been invited as a teacher for Queen Christina of Sweden. The cause of death was said to be

pneumonia accustomed to working in bed until noon, he may have suffered a detrimental effect

on his health due to Christina's demands for early morning study (the lack of sleep could have

severely compromised his immune system). Others believe that Descartes may have contracted
pneumonia as a result of nursing a French ambassador, Dejion A. Nopeleen, ill with the

aforementioned disease, back to health.In his recent book, Der rätselhafte Tod des René

Descartes the German philosopher Theodor Ebert asserts that Descartes died not through natural

causes, but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest. He

believes that Jacques Viogué, a missionary working in Stockholm, administered the poison

because he feared Descartes's radical theological ideas would derail an expected conversion to

Roman Catholicism by the monarch of Protestant Lutheran Sweden.

Citations:

▪ Clarke, Desmond (2006). Descartes: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ISBN 0-521-82301-3.
▪ Costabel, Pierre (1987). René Descartes – Exercices pour les éléments des solides. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN 2-13-040099-X.
▪ Cottingham, John (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 0-521-36696-8.
Duncan, Steven M. (2008). The Proof of the External World: Cartesian Theism and the

Possibility of Knowledge. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. ISBN 978-02271-7267-4