AP+2015-16+Descartes

The purpose of Descartes’s works was to create a more ‘logical’ state of thought and being, in an era where most experiences circulated assumptions created by Aristotle. An article concerning Descartes’s lifetime and his contributions states, “ His basic strategy was to consider false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt” (Skirry). In doing so, it created a different kind of thinking at that time; Descartes was determined to believe in subjects such as mathematics and logic, in a method of thinking called Rationalism. He wanted to create methods that did not rely on sensations, which were fleeting and unreliable, and instead build on solid understanding (Watson). His goal in his life was to create a reasonable approach to what he thought was an illogical way of producing conclusions about the world. Rationalism was, essentially, the birth of the scientific method as society knows it today; he procured the introduction of experiments instead of assumptions based on the teachings of Aristotle. Overall, the purpose of Descartes’s works was to create a way of thinking that centralized around logic and experimental thought instead of assumptions about life and its mysteries.
 * Purpose (Kyra): **

Works Cited: Skirry, Justin. “Descartes, Rene.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 November 2015. Watson, Richard A. “Rene Descartes.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 November 2015.


 * Audience (Ariel): **

Descartes is often viewed as one of the major rationalist figures during the Age of Reason of the 17th century. As phrased by Mastin, “Rationalism is any view appealing to intellectual and deductive reason (as opposed to sensory experience or any religious teachings) as the source of knowledge or justification...It relies on the idea that reality has a rational structure in that all aspects of it can be grasped through mathematical and logical principles, and not simply through sensory experience” (Mastin). Usually this term is intended towards other rationalists, as well as other philosophers. Descartes is most often identified with his famous words “Cogito ergo sum”, which often affects the audience into his way of philosophy such that some of the ideas we form on a particular subject are in fact not necessarily formed via experience. The philosophical concepts created by Descartes influence the way the audience can perceive their surroundings; with scientific reason and logical thought above all else. The need to then question everything in this manner becomes abundant among the audience, mainly those who follow these principles. Not only, the view on religion and God can transform into an idea behind God that merely meant a rational, planned universe rather than a God taking part in human affairs. It changes the audience’s ideas of studying the world scientifically, “Studying the world scientifically wasn’t in defiance of religion, it was to better understand what God had created” (Kosmicki).

Works Cited: Markie, Peter “Rationalism vs. Empiricism.”Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, 21 March 2013. Web. Mastin, Luke “Rationalism.”The Basics of Philosophy. N.p., 2008. Web. Kosmicki, Jim. “Rationalism.”Rationalism. N.p., 9 September 2003. Web.


 * Historical (Dennis): **

Born in France near the small village of Le Haye, Rene Descartes grew up to make significant contributions to philosophy and science. Despite writing important works such as Meditations on First Philosophy and Principles of Philosophy, Descartes wrote very few of them and confined his thoughts in only a couple of books due to how they “aroused controversy among the Dutch Protestant clergy” (Vrooman). Within his few books were ideas pertaining to the senses, which Descartes calls “an illusion created by a malicious deceiver” which restricts humanity to the physical realm and not the spiritual: the mind (Trincoll). Thus, Descartes came up with the famous line “cogito ergo sum” in which humans are able to doubt everything, but the “malicious deceiver” can never cause people to doubt their own existence. The “I” that Descartes describes is not the physical human body, but rather the mind that transcends the physical realm. These ideas brought about by Descartes inspired the Enlightenment and became the dominant philosophy until David Hume and Immanuel Kant made their own works. While most of Descartes’s arguments have become invalid, ideas such as Cartesian Dualism, the view that the mind and body are separate entities, remain relevant today and continue to influence modern philosophy.

Works Cited: "René Descartes." - Famous Psychologists, Philosophy, and Mind. Vrooman.Web. 07 Nov. 2015. "Rene Descartes." Philosophers. Trincoll, Web. 07 Nov. 2015.

Born of the height of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, Descartes rationalism shattered centuries of established philosophical thought and reasoning that dominated discourse in Europe since the fall of the Ancient Greek civilization. For almost two millennia, to be European was to subscribe to the ideology of the ancients; Plato, Socrates, but above all else, Aristotle. Aristotle’s approach to the world and its givens was to assume several constants, with reasoning based on faulty and outdated logic that was kept at the pinnacle of Western thought by an enforced party line of the Catholic Church, which had endorsed the thought process of the conservative Aristotle as being properly Christian. But Descartes threw that all to the side in the name of a new movement of thought; rationalism. His philosophy was grounded in the logic of science, and the methodology thereof as well. As shown by the quote, “ Because he was one of the first to abandon scholastic Aristotelianism... and because he promoted the development of a new science grounded in observation and experiment, he has been called the father of modern philosophy” (Watson), Descartes revolutionized thought in the Western World, displacing the ancients and their outdated solutions to timeless problems. His movement was triggered by the establishment of what can be referred to as the ‘marketplace of ideas’ in the wake of the disestablishment of the Catholic Church and the subsiding of the ensuing wars of religions that rocked continental Europe for a near century afterwards. With the idea of a monopoly on truth being suppressed, approaches to worldy problems lended themselves to all those who had ways to solve them, not just appointed figures chosen to repeat what had been decided by committee.
 * Cultural (Alec): **

Works Cited: Watson, Richard. "Rene Descartes | Biography - French Mathematician and Philosopher." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web. 08 Nov. 2015. Hatfield, Gary. "René Descartes." Stanford University. Stanford University, 03 Dec. 2008. Web. 08 Nov. 2015.