The philosopher René Descartes was created on March 31, 1596 in La Haye en Touraine, a small town in mainland France, which has since been renamed after his most prominent son. He was probably the youngest of three siblings, and his mother, Jeanne Brochard, died in the first year of life. Their father, Joachim, a member of the council of the provincial parliament, sent the children to live with their maternal grandmother, exactly where they also remained after he remarried several years later. Although he was genuinely concerned about a good education and delivered René, at the age of eight, to the boarding school of the Jesuit university Henri IV in La Flèche, several kilometers to the north, for several seasons.
He was thoroughly educated, initially at a Jesuit university at age eight, then graduated in law at twenty-two, but an influential instructor put him on a program to use logic and mathematics to learn about the natural world. This particular strategy integrated the contemplation of the dynamics of existence and of the information itself, hence his most prominent observation, “I think; that’s how I am.”
In fact, many think that Descartes is the father of contemporary philosophy, since his suggestions commonly departed from the understanding existing in the original seventeenth century, which had been based much more on feelings. While the components of his philosophy weren’t entirely new, his approach to them was. Descartes believed essentially in clearing everything from the dining room table, almost all preconceived and inherited notions, as well as starting over, putting back one by one the elements that were positive, which for him began with the statement “I exist.” “From there came his most popular quote:” I think; Here I am”.
Since Descartes thought that all truths were eventually connected, he wanted to discover the meaning of the natural world with a logical strategy, through mathematics and science; for various reasons, an extension of the strategy that Sir Francis Bacon had asserted in England a couple of years earlier. . In addition to the Discourse on Method, Descartes even published Meditations on Philosophy which is First, as well as Principles of Philosophy, among a few other treatises.
Descartes never married, although he had a daughter, Francine, created in the Netherlands in 1635. He had moved to that nation in 1628 because life in France was too busy for him to concentrate on his work, as well as on Mother. Francine’s was a servant in the house where he was staying. He had planned to experiment with the little female to study in France, having assigned her to deal with relatives, though she died of a fever at the age of five.
Descartes lived in the Netherlands for more than twenty years, but died in Stockholm, Sweden, on February 11, 1650. He had been placed there a season earlier, at the request of Queen Christina, to be her point-of-view tutor. The fragile health suggested in his first years of life persisted. She routinely spent her mornings in bed, exactly where she continued to honor her dream life, integrating it into her awakening methodologies in mindful meditation, although the queen’s insistence on the five o’clock instructions caused a flare-up of pneumonia. from which he couldn’t recover. He was fifty-three years old.