Descartes’ Method: Foundations of Modern Philosophy
Things.
Distinction: A thing is identical with itself when it can be separated from others. The distinction eliminates the confusion of a merger with other things. Only clear and distinct ideas can give us certainty, and that is what we attribute to simplicity.
Order: To move from the simple to the complex, geometry is present; it is passed from one figure to another.
Conclusion
The variety of views made it necessary to seek universal knowledge valid for all branches of knowledge. According to Descartes, that knowledge had not been attained due to the absence of a valid and appropriate method. The method Descartes lays out is the mathematical method, which features induction and deduction, without which no certainty can be acquired.
- Induction: Search for obvious truths, axioms.
- Deduction: It is every necessary conclusion derived from other things known for sure, certain, and necessary.
Impact
- The Cartesian convention of autonomous reason as the only guide for man can determine the reasonableness of any modern philosophy. In this sense, both rationalism and empiricism are rationalist.
- However, the precise way Descartes conceives of reason gives rise to so-called modern rationalism. The representatives of this current are Malabranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and it features an understanding of reason as an almost unlimited human capacity, through which, from their own ideas, one aims to build, via deduction, a whole edifice of knowledge. Faced with this “dogmatic optimism,” Kant and Hume react.
- In planning philosophical problems, the Cartesian method indicates the subject of the knowledge problem. Research on the ability of reason to reach truth and its boundaries will be a constant in modern philosophical thought, as will be seen in Kant and Hume.
- The Cartesian approach to knowledge and the solution given to the effect that the only strong point of all knowledge is the self and its ideas of reason give rise to idealism because the cogito creates the gnoseological world, but no one knows it, and it is subjective because it belongs and is internal to a subject. It is not subjective in itself, not because the reason is the same in all men.
- The shift towards the subject in the theory of knowledge culminated in Kant’s Copernican revolution of knowledge theory.
- It also gives rise to the process of formalization of the sciences.
- It invents a new method, a new science that will introduce a modern new thinking versus scholasticism.
- Analytic geometry: fundamental methodological concerns of Descartes embodied in the criteria of clarity, as well as the conflict between epistemology and metaphysics, are the factors that influence the development of thinking of later rationalist philosophers such as Pascal, Spinoza, and Malebranche, who defended the theory of occasionalism, whereby the body-soul relationship occurs only through divine intervention.
Finally, note that English empiricism is a historical counterpoint to rationalism. Empiricism denies the existence of innate knowledge and, therefore, claims that all our knowledge comes from experience.