Continental Rationalism, Experience, and Experiment

Rationalism is often criticized for placing too much confidence in the ability

of reason alone to know the world. The extent to which one finds this

criticism justified depends largely on one’s view of reason. For Hume, for

instance, knowledge of the world of “matters of fact” is gained exclusively

through experience; reason is merely a faculty for comparing ideas gained

through experience; it is thus parasitic upon experience, and has no claim

whatsoever to grasp anything about the world itself, let alone any special

claim. For Kant, reason is a mental faculty with an inherent tendency to

transgress the bounds of possible experience in an effort to grasp the

metaphysical foundations of the phenomenal realm. Since knowledge of the

world is limited to objects of possible experience, for Kant, reason, with its

delusions of grasping reality beyond those limits, must be subject to

critique.

Sometimes rationalism is charged with neglecting or undervaluing

experience, and with embarrassingly having no means of accounting for the

tremendous success of the experimental sciences. While the criticism of the

confidence placed in reason may be defensible given a certain conception of

reason (which may or may not itself be ultimately defensible), the latter

charge of neglecting experience is not; more often than not it is the product

of a false caricature of rationalism

Descartes and Leibniz were the leading mathematicians of their day, and

stood at the forefront of science. While Spinoza distinguished himself more

as a political thinker, and as an interpreter of scripture (albeit a notorious

one) than as a mathematician, Spinoza too performed experiments, kept

abreast of the leading science of the day, and was renowned as an expert

craftsman of lenses. Far from neglecting experience, the great rationalists

had, in general, a sophisticated understanding of the role of experience and,

indeed, of experiment, in the acquisition and development of knowledge.

The fact that the rationalists held that experience and experiment cannot

serve as foundations for knowledge, but must be fitted within, and

interpreted in light of, a rational epistemic framework, should not be

confused with a neglect of experience and experiment.

a. DescartesOne of the stated purposes of Descartes’ Meditations, and, in particular, the

hyperbolic doubts with which it commences, is to reveal to the mind of the

reader the limitations of its reliance on the senses, which Descartes regards

as an inadequate foundation for knowledge. By leading the mind away from

the senses, which often deceive, and which yield only confused ideas,

Descartes prepares the reader to discover the clear and distinct perceptions

of the pure intellect, which provide a proper foundation for genuine

knowledge. Nevertheless, empirical observations and experimentation

clearly had an important role to play in Descartes’ natural philosophy, as

evidenced by his own private empirical and experimental research,

especially in optics and anatomy, and by his explicit statements in several

writings on the role and importance of observation and experiment.

In Part 6 of the Discourse on the Method, Descartes makes an open plea for

assistance – both financial and otherwise – in making systematic empirical

observations and conducting experiments. Also in Discourse Part 6,

Descartes lays out his program for developing knowledge of nature. It

begins with the discovery of “certain seeds of truth” implanted naturally in

our souls (CSM I, 144). From them, Descartes seeks to derive the first

principles and causes of everything. Descartes’ Meditations illustrates these

first stages of the program. By “seeds of truth” Descartes has in mind

certain intuitions, including the ideas of thinking, and extension, and, in

particular, of God. On the basis of clearly and distinctly perceiving the

distinction between what belongs properly to extension (figure, position,

motion) and what does not (colors, sounds, smells, and so forth), Descartes

discovers the principles of physics, including the laws of motion. From these

principles, it is possible to deduce many particular ways in which the details

of the world might be, only a small fraction of which represent the way the

world actually is. It is as a result of the distance, as it were, between

physical principles and laws of nature, on one hand, and the particular

details of the world, on the other, that, for Descartes, observations and

experiments become necessary.

Descartes is ambivalent about the relationship between physical principles

and particulars, and about the role that observation and experiment play in

mediating this relationship. On the one hand, Descartes expresses

commitment to the ideal of a science deduced with certainty from intuitively

grasped first principles. Because of the great variety of mutually

incompatible consequences that can be derived from physical principles,

observation and experiment are required even in the ideal deductive

science to discriminate between actual consequences and merely possible

ones. According to the ideal of deductive science, however, observation and

experiment should be used only to facilitate the deduction of effects from

first causes, and not as a basis for an inference to possible explanations of

natural phenomena, as Descartes makes clear at one point his Principles of

Philosophy (CSM I, 249). If the explanations were only possible, or

hypothetical, the science could not lay claim to certainty per the deductive

ideal, but merely to probability.

On the other hand, Descartes states explicitly at another point in

the Principles of Philosophy that the explanations provided of such

phenomena as the motion of celestial bodies and the nature of the earth’s

elements should be regarded merely as hypotheses arrived at on the basis

of a posteriori reasoning (CSM I, 255); while Descartes says that such

hypotheses must agree with observation and facilitate predictions, they

need not in fact reflect the actual causes of phenomena. Descartes appears

to concede, albeit reluctantly, that when it comes to explaining particular

phenomena, hypothetical explanations and moral certainty (that is, mere

probability) are all that can be hoped for.

Scholars have offered a range of explanations for the inconsistency in

Descartes’ writings on the question of the relation between first principles

and particulars. It has been suggested that the inconsistency within

the Principles of Philosophy reflects different stages of its composition (see

Garber 1978). However the inconsistency might be explained, it is clear that

Descartes did not take it for granted that the ideal of a deductive science of

nature could be realized. Moreover, whether or not Descartes ultimately

believed the ideal of deductive science was realizable, he was unambiguous

on the importance of observation and experiment in bridging the distance

between physical principles and particular phenomena. (For further

discussion, see René Descartes: Scientific Method.)

Descartes distinguishes between three kinds of ideas: adventitious

(adventitiae), factitious (factae), and innate (innatae). As an example of an

adventitious idea, Descartes gives the common idea of the sun (yellow,

bright, round) as it is perceived through the senses. As an example of a

factitious idea, Descartes cites the idea of the sun constructed via

astronomical reasoning (vast, gaseous body). According to Descartes, all

ideas which represent “true, immutable, and eternal essences” are innate.

Innate ideas, for Descartes, include the idea of God, the mind, and

mathematical truths, such as the fact that it pertains to the nature of a

triangle that its three angles equal two right angles.

By conceiving some ideas as innate, Descartes does not mean that children

are born with fully actualized conceptions of, for example, triangles and

their properties. This is a common misconception of the rationalist doctrine

of innate ideas. Descartes strives to correct it inComments on a Certain

Broadsheet, where he compares the innateness of ideas in the mind to the

tendency which some babies are born with to contract certain diseases: “it

is not so much that the babies of such families suffer from these diseases in

their mother’s womb, but simply that they are born with a certain ‘faculty’

or tendency to contract them” (CSM I, 304). In other words, innate ideas

exist in the mind potentially, as tendencies; they are then actualized by

means of active thought under certain circumstances, such as seeing a

triangular figure.

At various points, Descartes defends his doctrine of innate ideas against

philosophers (Hobbes, Gassendi, and Regius, inter alia) who hold that all

ideas enter the mind through the senses, and that there are no ideas apart

from images. Descartes is relatively consistent on his reasons for thinking

that some ideas, at least, must be innate. His principal line of argument

proceeds by showing that there are certain ideas, for example, the idea of a

triangle, that cannot be either adventitious or factitious; since ideas are

either adventitious, factitious, or innate, by process of elimination, such

ideas must be innate.

Take Descartes’ favorite example of the idea of a triangle. The argument

that the idea of a triangle cannot be adventitious proceeds roughly as

follows. A triangle is composed of straight lines. However, straight lines

never enter our mind via the senses, since when we examine straight lines

under a magnifying lens, they turn out to be wavy or irregular in some way.

Since we cannot derive the idea of straight lines from the senses, we cannot

derive the idea of a true triangle, which is made up of straight lines,

through the senses. Sometimes Descartes makes the point in slightly

different terms by insisting that there is “no similarity” between the

corporeal motions of the sense organs and the ideas formed in the mind on

the occasion of those motions (CSM I, 304; CSMK III, 187). One such

dissimilarity, which is particularly striking, is the contrast between the

particularity of all corporeal motions and the universality that pure ideas

can attain when conjoined to form necessary truths. Descartes makes this

point in clear terms to Regius:

I would like our author to tell me what the corporeal motion is that is

capable of forming some common notion to the effect that ‘things which are

equal to a third thing are equal to each other,’ or any other he cares to take.

For all such motions are particular, whereas the common notions are

universal and bear no affinity with, or relation to, the motions. (CSM I, 304-

5)

Next, Descartes has to show that the idea of a triangle is not factitious. This

is where the doctrine of “true and immutable natures” comes in. For

Descartes, if, for example, the idea that the three angles of a triangle are

equal to two right angles were his own invention, it would be mutable, like

the idea of a gold mountain, which can be changed at whim into the idea of

a silver mountain. Instead, when Descartes thinks about his idea of a

triangle, he is able to discover eternal properties of it that are not mutable

in this way; hence, they are not invented (CSMK III, 184).

Since, therefore, the triangle can be neither adventitious nor factitious, it

must be innate; that is to say, the mind has an innate tendency or power to

form this idea from its own purely intellectual resources when prompted to

do so.

Descartes’ insistence that there is no similarity between the corporeal

motions of our sense organs and the ideas formed in the mind on the

occasion of those motions raises a difficulty for understanding how any

ideas could be adventitious. Since none of our ideas have any similarity to

the corporeal motions of the sense organs – even the idea of motion itself –

it seems that no ideas can in fact have their origin in a source external to

the mind. The reason that we have an idea of heat in the presence of fire,

for instance, is not, then, because the idea is somehow transmitted by the

fire. Rather, Descartes thinks that God designed us in such a way that we

form the idea of heat on the occasion of certain corporeal motions in our

sense organs (and we form other sensory ideas on the occasion of other

corporeal motions). Thus, there is a sense in which, for Descartes, all ideas

are innate, and his tripartite division between kinds of ideas becomes

difficult to maintain.

Perhaps Descartes’ clearest and most well-known statement of

mathematics’ role as paradigm appears in the Discourse on the Method:

Those long chains of very simple and easy reasonings, which geometers

customarily use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, had given

me occasion to suppose that all the things which can fall under human

knowledge are interconnected in the same way. (CSM I, 120)

However, Descartes’ promotion of mathematics as a model for philosophy

dates back to his early, unfinished work, Rules for the Direction of the Mind.

It is in this work that Descartes first outlines his standards for certainty that

have since come to be so closely associated with him and with the

rationalist enterprise more generally.

In Rule 2, Descartes declares that henceforth only what is certain should be

valued and counted as knowledge. This means the rejection of all merely

probable reasoning, which Descartes associates with the philosophy of the

Schools. Descartes admits that according to this criterion, only arithmetic

and geometry thus far count as knowledge. But Descartes does not

conclude that only in these disciplines is it possible to attain knowledge.

According to Descartes, the reason that certainty has eluded philosophers

has as much to do with the disdain that philosophers have for the simplest

truths as it does with the subject matter. Admittedly, the objects of

arithmetic and geometry are especially pure and simple, or, as Descartes

will later say, “clear and distinct.” Nevertheless, certainty can be attained

in philosophy as well, provided the right method is followed.

Descartes distinguishes between two ways of achieving knowledge:

“through experience and through deduction […] [W]e must note that while

our experiences of things are often deceptive, the deduction or pure

inference of one thing from another can never be performed wrongly by an

intellect which is in the least degree rational […]” (CSM I, 12). This is a

clear statement of Descartes’ methodological rationalism. Building up

knowledge through accumulated experience can only ever lead to the sort

of probable knowledge that Descartes finds lacking. “Pure inference,” by

contrast,” can never go astray, at least when it is conducted by right reason.

Of course, the truth value of a deductive chain is only as good as the first

truths, or axioms, whose truth the deductions preserve. It is for this reason

that Descartes’ method relies on intuition as well as deduction. Intuition

provides the first principles of a deductive system, for Descartes. Intuition

differs from deduction insofar as it is not discursive. Intuition grasps its

object in an immediate way. In its broadest outlines, Descartes’ method is

just the use of intuition and deduction in the orderly attainment and

preservation of certainty.

In subsequent Rules, Descartes goes on to elaborate a more specific

methodological program, which involves reducing complicated matters step

by step to simpler, intuitively graspable truths, and then using those simple

truths as principles from which to deduce knowledge of more complicated

matters. It is generally accepted by scholars that this more specific

methodological program reappears in a more iconic form in the Discourse

on the Method as the four rules for gaining knowledge outlined in Part 2.

There is some doubt as to the extent to which this more specific

methodological program actually plays any role in Descartes’ mature

philosophy as it is expressed in the Meditations and Principles (see Garber

2001, chapter 2). There can be no doubt, however, that the broader

methodological guidelines outlined above were a permanent feature of

Descartes’ thought.

In response to a request to cast his Meditations in the geometrical style

(that is, in the style of Euclid’s Elements), Descartes distinguishes between

two aspects of the geometrical style: order and method, explaining:

The order consists simply in this. The items which are put forward first

must be known entirely without the aid of what comes later; and the

remaining items must be arranged in such a way that their demonstration

depends solely on what has gone before. I did try to follow this order very

carefully in my Meditations […] (CSM II, 110)

Elsewhere, Descartes contrasts this order, which he calls the “order of

reasons,” with another order, which he associates with scholasticism, and

which he calls the “order of subject-matter” (see CSMK III, 163). What

Descartes understands as “geometrical order” or the “order of reasons” is

just the procedure of starting with what is most simple, and proceeding in a

step-wise, deliberate fashion to deduce consequences from there.

Descartes’ order is governed by what can be clearly and distinctly intuited,

and by what can be clearly and distinctly inferred from such self-evident

intuitions (rather than by a concern for organizing the discussion into neat

topical categories per the order of subject-matter)

As for method, Descartes distinguishes between analysis and synthesis. For

Descartes, analysis and synthesis represent different methods of

demonstrating a conclusion or set of conclusions. Analysis exhibits the path

by which the conclusion comes to be grasped. As such, it can be thought of

as theorder of discovery or order of knowledge. Synthesis, by contrast,

wherein conclusions are deduced from a series of definitions, postulates,

and axioms, as in Euclid’s Elements, for instance, follows not the order in

which things are discovered, but rather the order that things bear to one

another in reality. As such, it can be thought of as the order of being. God,

for example, is prior to the human mind in the order of being (since God

created the human mind), and so in the synthetic mode of demonstration

the existence of God is demonstrated before the existence of the human

mind. However, knowledge of one’s own mind precedes knowledge of God,

at least in Descartes’ philosophy, and so in the analytic mode of

demonstration the cogito is demonstrated before the existence of God.

Descartes’ preference is for analysis, because he thinks that it is superior in

helping the reader to discover the things for herself, and so in bringing

about the intellectual conversion which it is the Meditations’ goal to

effectuate in the minds of its readers. According to Descartes, while

synthesis, in laying out demonstrations systematically, is useful in

preempting dissent, it is inferior in engaging the mind of the reader.

Two primary distinctions can be made in summarizing Descartes’

methodology: (1) the distinction between the order of reasons and the order

of subject-matter; and (2) the analysis/synthesis distinction. With respect to

the first distinction, the great Continental rationalists are united. All adhere

to the order of reasons, as we have described it above, rather than the order

of subject-matter. Even though the rationalists disagree about how exactly

to interpret the content of the order of reasons, their common commitment

to following an order of reasons is a hallmark of their rationalism. Although

there are points of convergence with respect to the second,

analysis/synthesis distinction, there are also clear points of divergence, and

this distinction can be useful in highlighting the range of approaches the

rationalists adopt to mathematical methodology.

 Intelligibility and the Cartesian Circle

The most important rational principle in Descartes’ philosophy, the

principle which does a great deal of the work in generating its details, is the

principle according to which whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived to

be true is true. This principle means that if we can form any clear and

distinct ideas, then we will be able to trust that they accurately represent

their objects, and give us certain knowledge of reality. Descartes’ clear and

distinct ideas doctrine is central to his conception of the world’s

intelligibility, and indeed, it is central to the rationalists’ conception of the

world’s intelligibility more broadly. Although Spinoza and Leibniz both work

to refine understanding of what it is to have clear and distinct ideas, they

both subscribe to the view that the mind, when directed properly, is able to

accurately represent certain basic features of reality, such as the nature of

substance.

For Descartes, it cannot be taken for granted from the outset that what we

clearly and distinctly perceive to be true is in fact true. It is possible to

entertain the doubt that an all-powerful deceiving being fashioned the mind

so that it is deceived even in those things it perceives clearly and distinctly.

Nevertheless, it is only possible to entertain this doubt when we are not

having clear and distinct perceptions. When we are perceiving things

clearly and distinctly, their truth is undeniable. Moreover, we can use our

capacity for clear and distinct perceptions to demonstrate that the mind

was not fashioned by an all-powerful deceiving being, but rather by an all-

powerfulbenevolent being who would not fashion us so as to be deceived

even when using our minds properly. Having proved the existence of an all-

powerful benevolent being qua creator of our minds, we can no longer

entertain any doubts regarding our clear and distinct ideas even when we

are not presently engaged in clear and distinct perceptions.

Descartes’ legitimation of clear and distinct perception via his proof of a

benevolent God raises notorious interpretive challenges. Scholars disagree

about how to resolve the problem of the “Cartesian circle.” However, there

is general consensus that Descartes’ procedure is not, in fact, guilty of

vicious, logical circularity. In order for Descartes’ procedure to avoid

circularity, it is generally agreed that in some sense clear and distinct ideas

need already to be legitimate before the proof of God’s existence. It is only

in another sense that God’s existence legitimates their truth. Scholars

disagree on how exactly to understand those different senses, but they

generally agree that there is some sense at least in which clear and distinct

ideas are self-legitimating, or, otherwise, not in need of legitimation.

That some ideas provide a basic standard of truth is a fundamental tenet of

rationalism, and undergirds all the other rationalist principles at work in the

construction of rationalist systems of philosophy. For the rationalists, if it

cannot be taken for granted in at least some sense from the outset that the

mind is capable of discerning the difference between truth and falsehood,

then one never gets beyond skepticism.

. Descartes

Descartes deploys his clear and distinct ideas doctrine in justifying his most

well-known metaphysical position: substance dualism. The first step in

Descartes’ demonstration of mind-body dualism, or, in his terminology, of a

“real” distinction (that is, a distinction between two substances) between

mind and body is to show that while it is possible to doubt that one has a

body, it is not possible to doubt that one is thinking. As Descartes makes

clear in the Principles of Philosophy, one of the chief upshots of his

famous cogito argument is the discovery of the distinction between a

thinking thing and a corporeal thing. The impossibility of doubting one’s

existence is not the impossibility of doubting that one is a human being with

a body with arms and legs and a head. It is the impossibility of doubting,

rather, that one doubts, perceives, dreams, imagines, understands, wills,

denies, and other modalities that Descartes attributes to the thinking thing.

It is possible to think of oneself as a thing that thinks, and to recognize that

it is impossible to doubt that one thinks, while continuing to doubt that one

has a body with arms and legs and a head. So, the cogito drives a

preliminary wedge between mind and body.

At this stage of the argument, however, Descartes has simply established

that it is possible to conceive of himself as a thinking thing without

conceiving of himself as a corporeal thing. It remains possible that, in fact,

the thinking thing is identical with a corporeal thing, in other words, that

thought is somehow something a body can do; Descartes has yet to

establish that the epistemological distinction between his knowledge of his

mind and his knowledge of body that results from the hyperbolic doubt

translates to a metaphysical or ontological distinction between mind and

body. The move from the epistemological distinction to the ontological

distinction proceeds via the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas. Having

established that whatever he clearly and distinctly perceives is true,

Descartes is in a position to affirm the real distinction between mind and

body.

In this life, it is never possible to clearly and distinctly perceive a mind

actually separate from a body, at least in the case of finite, created minds,

because minds and bodies are intimately unified in the composite human

being. So Descartes cannot base his proof for the real distinction of mind

and body on the clear and distinct perception that mind and body are in

fact independently existing things. Rather, Descartes’ argument is based on

the joint claims that (1) it is possible to have a clear and distinct idea of

thought apart from extension and vice versa; and (2) whatever we can

clearly and distinctly understand is capable of being created by God exactly

as we clearly and distinctly understand it. Thus, the fact that we can clearly

and distinctly understand thought apart from extension and vice versa

entails that thinking things and extended things are “really” distinct (in the

sense that they are distinct substances separable by God).

The foregoing argument relies on certain background assumptions which it

is now necessary to explain, in particular, Descartes’ conception of

substance. In the Principles, Descartes defines substance as “a thing which

exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence” (CSM

I, 210). Properly speaking, only God can be understood to depend on no

other thing, and so only God is a substance in the absolute sense.

Nevertheless, Descartes allows that, in a relative sense, created things can

count as substances too. A created thing is a substance if the only thing it

relies upon for its existence is “the ordinary concurrence of God” (ibid.).

Only mind and body qualify as substances in this secondary sense.

Everything else is a modification or property of minds and bodies. A second

point is that, for Descartes, we do not have a direct knowledge of substance;

rather, we come to know substance by virtue of its attributes. Thought and

extension are the attributes or properties in virtue of which we come to

know thinking and corporeal substance, or “mind” and “body.” This point

relies on the application of a key rational principle, to wit, nothingness has

no properties. For Descartes, there cannot simply be the properties of

thinking and extension without these properties having something in which

to inhere. Thinking and extension are not just any properties; Descartes

calls them “principal attributes” because they constitute the nature of their

respective substances. Other, non-essential properties, cannot be

understood without the principal attribute, but the principal attribute can

be understood without any of the non-essential properties. For example,

motion cannot be understood without extension, but extension can be

understood without motion.

Descartes’ conception of mind and body as distinct substances includes

some interesting corollaries which result from a characteristic application

of rational principles and account for some characteristic doctrinal

differences between Descartes and empiricist philosophers. One

consequence of Descartes’ conception of the mind as a substance whose

principal attribute is thought is that the mind must always be thinking.

Since, for Descartes, thinking is something of which the thinker is

necessarily aware, Descartes’ commitment to thought as an essential, and

therefore, inseparable, property of the mind raises some awkward

difficulties. Arnauld, for example, raises one such difficulty in his Objections

to Descartes’ Meditations: presumably there is much going on in the mind

of an infant in its mother’s womb of which the infant is not aware. In

response to this objection, and also in response to another obvious problem,

that is, that of dreamless sleep, Descartes insists on a distinction between

being aware of or conscious of our thoughts at the time we are thinking

them, and remembering them afterwards (CSMK III, 357). The infant is, in

fact, aware of its thinking in the mother’s womb, but it is aware only of very

confused sensory thoughts of pain and pleasure and heat (not, as Descartes

points out, metaphysical matters (CSMK III, 189)) which it does not

remember afterwards. Similarly, the mind is always thinking even in the

most “dreamless sleep,” it is just that the mind often immediately forgets

much of what it had been aware.

Descartes’ commitment to embracing the implications – however counter-

intuitive – of his substance-attribute metaphysics, puts him at odds with, for

instance, Locke, who mocks the Cartesian doctrine of the always-thinking

soul in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Locke, the

question whether the soul is always thinking or not must be decided by

experience and not, as Locke says, merely by “hypothesis” (An Essay

Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter 1). The evidence of

dreamless sleep makes it obvious, for Locke, that the soul is not always

thinking. Because Locke ties personal identity to memory, if the soul were

to think while asleep without knowing it, the sleeping man and the waking

man would be two different persons.

Descartes’ commitment to the always-thinking mind is a consequence of his

commitment to a more basic rational principle. In establishing his

conception of thinking substance, Descartes reasons from the attribute of

thinking to the substance of thinking on the grounds that nothing has no

properties. In this case, he reasons in the other direction, from the

substance of thinking, that is, the mind, to the property of thinking on the

converse grounds that something must have properties, and the properties

it must have are the properties that make it what it is; in the case of the

mind, that property is thought. (Leibniz found a way to maintain the

integrity of the rational principle without contradicting experience: admit

that thinking need not be conscious. This way the mind can still think in a

dreamless sleep, and so avoid being without any properties, without any

problem about the recollection of awareness.)

Another consequence of Descartes’ substance metaphysics concerns

corporeal substance. For Descartes, we do not know corporeal substance

directly, but rather through a grasp of its principal attribute, extension.

Extension qua property requires a substance in which to inhere because of

the rational principle, nothing has no properties. This rational principle

leads to another characteristic Cartesian position regarding the material

world: the denial of a vacuum. Descartes denies that space can be empty or

void. Space has the property of being extended in length, breadth, and

depth, and such properties require a substance in which to inhere. Thus,

nothing, that is, a void or vacuum, is not able to have such properties

because of the rational principle, nothing has no properties. This means that

all space is filled with substance, even if it is imperceptible. Once again,

Descartes answers a debated philosophical question on the basis of a

rational principle.

Matthew HomanEmail: matthew.homan@cnu.eduChristopher Newport UniversityU. S. A.

1. Si René Descartes, ay isang maimpluwensiyang Pranses na pilosopo, matematiko, siyentipiko at manunulat. Siya ang itinuturing na "Ama ng Makabagong Pilosopiya" at "Ama ng Makabagong Matematika".Wikipedia

2.3. Ipinanganak: Marso 31, 1596, Descartes, Indre-et-Loire, Pransiya4. Namatay: Pebrero 11, 1650, Estokolmo, Sweden5. Mga Magulang: Joachim Descartes, Jeanne Brochard6. Mga Kapatid: Jeanne Descartes, Pierre Descartes, Anne Descartes,Joachim Descartes7. Edukasyon: University of Poitiers (1614–1616), Prytanée National Militaire

8. Mga AklatTingnan ang 15 + paMeditations on First Philosophy1641Discourse on the Method2003Principles of Philosophy1644The Passions of the Soul1649Rules for the Direction...1684