Discourse on the Method and Metaphysical Meditations

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON RENÉ DESCARTES

...born; he was accused of atheism and his books were nearly burned by the hand of the executioner.

Descartes, weary of all these struggles which took up a great part of his time, having resisted the advances of King Louis XIII and Cardinal de Richelieu, yielded to the urgings of Queen Christina of Sweden and went to settle in Stockholm in 1649; he was welcomed there with marks of the liveliest enthusiasm; the queen wished to take philosophy lessons from him; every day, at five o'clock in the morning, Descartes went to the court and lectured on philosophy before an elite audience. One day he caught a cold, and he died on February 11, 1650, in his fifty-fourth year.

The philosophy of Descartes, or Cartesianism, spread rapidly throughout all of Europe, and it can be said that Descartes has been the father of French philosophy since the 17th century. His honor lies in having substituted a new idealism for the decaying doctrines of scholastic philosophy A medieval school of thought that attempted to reconcile Christian theology with Aristotelian logic; it had become rigid and formulaic by Descartes' time., founded on the certainty that the very thought we have of our existence and of God's must give us. A great number of Descartes' ideas, especially in physics, have had to be abandoned. Since the last century, his philosophy has declined among us; but even the systems furthest removed from his still owe much to his method, and it is, one might say, to Descartes as to Bacon Francis Bacon (1561–1626), an English philosopher who championed the inductive method and the scientific revolution., that all the masters of modern thought are indebted, for various reasons.