SR+-+Rene+Descartes

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Rene Descartes
By Julie Carr, Sam DaSilva, Kimmy Kelly, Shannon Cassidy, and Lainie Smith



__Rene Descartes Biography__ Rene Descartes was born in 1596 in France, yet lived part of his life in Holland. Despite attending Jesuit and law schools, he did not go into legal affairs with his degree, and took up a profession in the military. He became a German soldier. While in serving, Descartes had “a vision of the great potential for progress, if mathematical method were to be applied to all fields of knowledge.” Through the use of his invention of analytical geometry, Descartes was the champion of deductive reasoning, where specific information could be deduced from general information. He believed that because the world operated according to mathematical laws, it could be understood and processed by the human mind. God was the great enabler of this ability to reason and analyze clear ideas. The material world could also be understood under mathematical principals. Descartes’ deductive methods have been a prevalent influence in the method of scientific induction, which takes generalizations and draws specific data from that.

"I Think, Therefore I Am" Descartes wrote this piece (an excerpt from //Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason//) at the height of the Scientific Revolution. Many of Descartes' ideas presented in this work ignite the spark that discovers deductive reasoning that is used in the modern scientific method. It established the premise for existence; if a person thinks, they obviously exist.

Descartes says that for a state to be governed best, it must follow only a few rules: never accept anything as true when it is not obviously so, divide each difficult task into as many parts as possible in order to find the best solution, conduct thoughts in a specific order - simplest first and mount little by little to complex ones - and to make numbered lists so as not to forget anything. He also states that because he dedicated his life to researching the truth, he found it necessary to do the opposite and reject everything in order to find the indisputable truth. Essentially, he says to argue everything as false and believe nothing as it is known. He wraps it up by saying no one should ever allow himself to be persuaded by anything and should question everything on their own.

__Key Quote__ "But immediately afterwards I observed that while I thus desired everything to be false, I, who thought, must of necessity [exist]; and remarking that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were unable to shake it, I judged that I could unhesitatingly accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking..."

__Significant Dates__
 * **March 31, 1596** - born in La Haye, a small town in the French province of Touraine
 * **November 10, 1619** - Rene Descartes had three significant dreams that he felt were divine signs that his destiny was to find a fully unified science of nature based on mathematics and human reason
 * **1637** - published //Discourse on the Method//, his landmark treatise on the scientific method
 * **1649** - accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to join a distinguished group of intellectuals she was gathering to give her instruction and guide her in philosophy
 * **February 11, 1650** - died in Stockholm, Sweden of pneumonia