René Descartes

René Descartes founded modern philosophy on a single certainty and invented analytic geometry. Born in La Haye in Touraine in 1596 to a family of minor nobility, he was educated by Jesuits at La Flèche, took a law degree at Poitiers, and then abandoned books to travel and to serve as a gentleman volunteer in the armies of Maurice of Nassau and Maximilian of Bavaria. On 10 November 1619, quartered in a stove-heated room in Germany, he had three dreams that convinced him he was to found a universal science. He spent years travelling before settling in the Dutch Republic in 1628, where he stayed twenty years, moving house constantly to avoid interruption. His method was systematic doubt: reject everything that can conceivably be false and see what survives. Sensation can deceive, mathematics might be corrupted by a malicious demon, and dreams are indistinguishable from waking. What cannot be doubted is that something is doing the doubting — cogito ergo sum. From that he reconstructed a world of two substances, thinking mind and extended matter, and the problem of how they interact has occupied philosophy since. In mathematics he joined algebra to geometry, representing curves as equations on perpendicular axes, which are still called Cartesian. He suppressed his physics, Le Monde, on hearing of Galileo's condemnation in 1633, and published the Discourse on Method in 1637 and the Meditations in 1641. Queen Christina summoned him to Stockholm and required lessons at five in the morning. He caught pneumonia and died in February 1650.

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