René Descartes

René Descartes

René Descartes was born in Touraine, France on 31 March 1596. Much later, his birthplace, La Haye, was rechristened Descartes in his honour. On the 400th anniversary of his birth, Cartesian was born.

Descartes was educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche in Anjou, where he was given a thorough immersion in traditional Aristotelian philosophy. As a young student, he didn’t enjoy the best of health so was granted permission to stay in bed till 11am each day. The practice evidently proved conducive to the thinking of great thoughts, and he maintained the habit for the rest of his life.

In 1616, armed with a law degree at the University of Poitiers, Descartes set off to travel Europe as a volunteer in the Dutch and later the Bavarian armies. Perhaps finding the Dutch soldiers more receptive to his scientific, mathematical and philosophical ideas than the other army-types he mixed with - or maybe they just had more patience - Descartes settled in Holland in 1628.

Fortunately, news travelled fast in post-Renaissance Europe and Descartes soon got to hear about Galileo’s condemnation by the 1633 Inquisition for defending the Copernican system which held that the earth revolved around the sun. With admirable survival instinct, Descartes immediately suppressed publication of his own work ‘The World’ in which he’d made a similar argument.

Descartes’ most important works, the snappily named ‘Discourse on Method’ - preface to ‘Dioptrics’, ‘Meteors’ and ‘Geometry’ - and the even lighter ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’ and ‘Principles of Philosophy’ were published between 1637 and 1644.

In 1649 at the request of Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes moved to Stockholm. However, it seems that not even royal patronage could protect him from the pre-centrally heated Swedish cold and he lived there only a few months before contracting pneumonia and dying on 11 February 1650.