Rene Descartes Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Rene Descartes - Assignment Example France was becoming one of the main players in the European arena, a unitary state with strong monarchical power. Absolutism didn’t only provide favorable conditions for the domestic market, but also broadened the gap between social strata. Whereas Catholicism strengthened its position in French spiritual and cultural life, scientific progress driven by the development of productive capacities was the key factor that sparked Descarte’s worldview formation. In his pursuit of new philosophical methods Descartes was initially motivated by the need to find a way of defining certain knowledge and the way of acquiring it for he thought knowledge acquired with help of sense perception to be inaccurate. Moreover, he was fond of science which wasn’t well organized system in that period, thus he wanted to find a solution that would systematize scientific knowledge. In fact, Descartes laid the basics of science in its modern meaning and inquiry, made an immense contribution to development of algebra, geometry, philosophy, physics and reflexology. Considering philosophy to be the source of all natural sciences’ development, Descartes tried to find a firm set of rules that would help one to acquire certain knowledge. The basic work dealing with the foundations of Cartesian methodology is Discourse on Method focusing on the application of the main Descartes’ method, hyperbolical doubt or methodological skepticism. At the same time, the philosopher preferred to neglect empirical method in constructing knowledge, and thus used a method of deduction and argumentation. Thinking was considered by him to be the source of cognition, not senses. Along with that, Descartes philosophical doctrine was dualistic as he admitted existence of two entities that, mind and body, that are in the relations of mutual dependence and interconnection. To illustrate the unreliability and limitation of