RENE DESCARTES
Biography
Philosopher
René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, a small town
in central France, which has since been renamed after him to honor its most
famous son. He was the youngest of three children, and his mother, Jeanne
Brochard, died within his first year of life. His father, Joachim, a council
member in the provincial parliament, sent the children to live with their
maternal grandmother, where they remained even after he remarried a few years
later. But he was very concerned with good education and sent René, at age 8,
to boarding school at the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche, several
miles to the north, for seven years.
Descartes was a good student, although it is thought that he might have
been sickly, since he didn’t have to abide by the school’s rigorous schedule
and was instead allowed to rest in bed until midmorning. The subjects he
studied, such as rhetoric and logic and the “mathematical arts,” which included
music and astronomy, as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics,
equipped him well for his future as a philosopher. So did spending the next
four years earning a baccalaureate in law at the University of Poitiers. Some
scholars speculate that he may have had a nervous breakdown during this time.
Descartes later added theology and medicine to his studies. But he
eschewed all this, “resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which
could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world,” he wrote much
later in Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting
the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, published in 1637.
So he traveled, joined the army for a brief time, saw some battles and
was introduced to Dutch scientist and philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who would
become for Descartes a very influential teacher. A year after graduating from
Poitiers, Descartes credited a series of three very powerful dreams or visions
with determining the course of his study for the rest of his life.
