Who Was Rene Descartes? (Famous Philosophers)

Welcome back to Carneades.org. Today we're going to be continuing with our series, Four Weeks of Famous Philosophers. In this video, we're going to be looking at Rene Descartes himself, founder of analytic geometry, arch enemy of the skeptic, and father of modern philosophy. Now, Rene Descartes was one of the most influential philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists of all time. He was the impetus for the change in philosophical thought from the period of the scholastics to the modern thinkers. Remember, the scholastics just tried to make the ancient Greek texts make sense with the Bible and find a way to manage both faith and reason, whereas our modern thinkers are going to delve into a lot more areas of philosophy. He made great strides in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, geometry, and algebra, and his writings are studied to this day. Descartes was born in 1596 in France. He moved around a great deal throughout his life, though he spent over 20 years in the Dutch Republic, where he did a great deal of his work. Near the end of his life, he was invited, in fact, to the Swedish court to tutor Queen Christina, where he there died of pneumonia. Now, you may remember using coordinate planes in math class to graph equations. These planes are often called Cartesian planes. Why? In honor of Descartes, who was one of the first to use them to visually represent algebraic equations. It's called a Cartesian plane because Descartes was the first to use them. He was also one of the first to ever use the superscript notation to represent powers, such as two squared. Superscript is that small number above another number that means it's raised to a particular power. However, Descartes is probably best known for his work in philosophy. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, he constructs a powerful skeptical scenario involving an evil deceiver. Arguably, in his work, Descartes gave more power to the skeptics or the skeptical position than even the ancient skeptics did. In doing so, he expanded on the skeptical work of those ancient skeptics, and that idea of an evil deceiver to this day is still a very powerful concept in skepticism. What Descartes wanted to see was if there was anything that could not be doubted. Even if the skeptic was granted everything that they wished, even if we were in a perfect skeptical scenario, is there anything that cannot be doubted? He thought we should build our epistemology up from a single indubitable point. He concluded that the one thing which cannot be doubted is that he exists and is a thinking thing. This is known as the cogito for its translation into Latin. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am. Now, he went on in his meditations to argue for the existence of God and for a form of dualism, that the world is made of both mental and physical substance. And while the argument for the existence of God mirrors Anselm's and was not the most convincing, his objections to skepticism and ideas of metaphysical dualism influenced philosophical thought for centuries to come. And many of his still works, particularly the meditations, are still read and studied extensively by philosophers today. And most of the next philosophers that we'll be looking at will in some way be confirming or responding to Descartes and his meditations. Therefore, I give you Rene Descartes, founder of analytic geometry, arch-enemy of the skeptic, and the father of modern philosophy. Up next, we're going to be looking at John Locke. Watch this video and more here at Carnegies.org, and watch a new video every single day for the whole month of October. Stay skeptical, everybody.