Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) was born March 31, 1596 in La Haye, France, the son of a wealthy lawyer. Sadly, his mother contracted tuberculosis a few days after his birth and died. The baby nearly died as well, and Rene remained a weak child.

After a good Jesuit education, at 17 he began to wander Europe, including a stint in the Bavarian army. In 1628, he moved to Holland, where he stayed for most of his life. Rene never married, but he did have a mistress and a daughter, who died at the age of five.

His major contribution, for which he will forever be known as the father of modern philosophy, is the method of doubt. In his book Meditations, he decided to start philosophy from scratch by doubting everything he could - things, God, self, the church, Aristotle... - until he found something he could not doubt and from which he could build a new philosophy.

His conclusion was, of course, that there was one thing he could not doubt: The fact that he was there doing the doubting! Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. From there, he went on to conclude that there were a number of things equally certain: God, time and space, the world, mathematics. These things, he said, were innate (in-born) to the mind. You derive them not from experience but from the nature of one’s mind itself.

For a selection from Meditations, click here!

But there’s more to Descartes: He was a mathematician as well as a philosopher, and he made a variety of mathematical discoveries, most especially analytic geometry (applying algebra to geometry - remember Cartesian coordinates?), which he supposedly discovered while in what he called a stove - perhaps a sauna. He was also a scientist, and made a number of innovations in mechanics and optics as well. And he was the first to note the idea of the reflex.

The idea that some of our actions are reflexive leads inevitably to the possibility that all actions are reflexive. Descartes theorized that animals (at least) have no need for a soul: They are automatons. Being a good Catholic, he exempted human beings. We do have a soul, although he acknowledged that he did not know how the soul and the body interacted.

In history, people use what is most interesting around them to theorize about other things, especially themselves. Today, everyone talks about psychological issues using computer analogies and information processing models. In Descartes’ day, it was the mechanics of clockworks and hydraulic systems that were the cutting edge of technology. So he and others basically suggested that life - including at least much of human life - was mechanical, i.e. functioned by the same natural laws as did physical entities.

Descartes went one step further: He made the deist hypothesis. He suggested that (outside of the human soul and free will) all of creation works mechanically, and that God designed and set it all in motion - but certainly would have no need to step in and intervene once things are going. Of course, that says God would have no need of miracles, that Christ was not some great intervention in the course of history, and that prayers don’t really do anything. Uh oh.

The Calvinist theologians of Holland attacked him: Besides this untraditional idea of deism and a mechanical universe, as a good Catholic Descartes also believed in free will, which doesn’t jive well with Calvinist predestination (the idea that God knows exactly who is going to hell or to heaven). His friends, fortunately, intervened on his behalf.

In 1649, Descartes was invited by Queen Christina of Sweden to tutor her majesty. Unfortunately, she wanted him at five in the morning three days a week, through sleet and rain and snow. Descartes caught pneumonia and died in 1650, at the age of 54.