Research Paper On Rene Descartes

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Rene Descartes was born to Joachim Descartes and Jeanna Brochard on May 31, 1596. He was the oldest of three (surviving) children. Descartes was born into a fairly wealthy family which was full of Doctors and Lawyers. He was raised by his grandmother, Jeanne Sain, in La Haye, France. He began to attend the Jesuit College at La Fleche, France during the year 1607. Descartes obtained a well-rounded liberal arts education before leaving the college in 1614. Between the years of 1615 and 1616 he received a degree in canon and civil law at the university of Pointers. In 1618 he became a volunteer for the army of Maurice of Nassau. Here he would meet Isaac Beekman, who would greatly influence his beginning adulthood. Beekman helped to reconnect Descartes …show more content…
During 1619, Descartes would be inspired to establish a new process of scientific inquiry. Descartes would then start to design a blueprint for such processes but would quickly lose interest. By the year 1628 he would give up on this project and move on to several mores scientifically oriented projects. He would pursue the field of optics in which he may have discovered the Law of refraction, a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction, when referring to light or other waves passing through a boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water, glass, or air, by the year of 1626. In late 1628 he would move to the Netherlands which provided him with a sense of solitude and peace that allowed him to focus on his work. He would then move to Sweden after receiving an invitation from Queen Christina. In the Netherlands, he would begin to work on “A little treatise” also known as The World. This would attempt to explain the excessive number of phenomena in the world without scholarly principles of substantial forms and real data, while also using the heliocentric principle of the solar system. He would finish this work within three years. Galileo’s condemnation by the French Inquisition would lead to Descartes’s suppression of his work for several years. Descartes would finish several scientific essays including an emphasis on geometric work in the years of 1635 and 1636. In 1639 Descartes would begin more philosophical work on Meditations on First Philosophy. His work was reviewed by philosophical greats such as Thomas Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre Gassendi. After a honest critique of his work the first edition was released with six sets of objections and his responses in 1641. The second edition was released with a seventh objection and a clarification of the misunderstood supposed

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