Rene Descartes
(1596-1650)
Descartes was a French mathematician and philosopher. It was Descartes who formulated the axiom, Cogito ergo sum, "I think therefore I exist."
Descartes was a product of the church and his philosophy reflected the times in which he lived. Descartes was a dualist, viz. a man was of two natures, a spiritual nature and a temporal nature. Now whether this was a belief held deeply, might be a matter of some question, what is clear is that he would have professed his beliefs, such, that, they were in keeping with the doctrine of the time, as promulgated by the all powerful church.1 As a dualist, Descartes, would have accepted that there exists a priori truths (truths not derived from experience; truths such as the existence of God). And, while Descartes accepted some ideas were developed from experience, he was steadfast in his belief that certain ideas were innate. By pure deduction Descartes evolved for himself entire universes that neither he, nor anyone else, could perceive by the use of their natural senses. All that was necessary, for Descartes, was intense self examination and intense reason, and, through this process, all would be revealed.2
Descartes, it would seem, in his philosophical work, continued along the same lines of the church philosophers: the deductive approach, viz., accepting notions which have no basis in reality, and then to proceed to build on those. No one can trust the result of such a process: a conclusion can never be more trustworthy than the premises on which it is built. For one to profess a belief in such a process -- in such a philosophy -- is to profess one's ignorance of the fundamental universal principles, or natural laws, which have guided man along a very long evolutionary past.
