“Plato thought that too. He believed that only reason can give us certain
knowledge.”
“Exactly. There is a direct line of descent from Socrates and Plato via St.
Augustine to Descartes. They were all typical rationalists, convinced that reason was
the only path to knowledge. After comprehensive studies, Descartes came to the
conclusion that the body of knowledge handed down from the Middle Ages was not
necessarily reliable. You can compare him to Socrates, who did not trust the general
views he encountered in the central square of Athens. So what does one do, Sophie?
Can you tell me that?”
“You begin to work out your own philosophy.”
“Right! Descartes decided to travel around Europe, the way Socrates spent his
life talking to people in Athens. He relates that from then on he meant to confine
himself to seeking the wisdom that was to be found, either within himself or in the
‘great book of the world.’ So he joined the army and went to war, which enabled him
to spend periods of time in different parts of Central Europe. Later he lived for some
years in Paris, but in 1629 he went to Holland, where he remained for nearly twenty
years working on his mathematical and philosophic writings.
“In 1649 he was invited to Sweden by Queen Christina. But his sojourn in what
he called ‘the land of bears, ice, and rocks’ brought on an attack of pneumonia and he
died in the winter of 1650.”
“So he was only 54 when he died.”
“Yes, but he was to have enormous influence on philosophy, even after his
death. One can say without exaggeration that Descartes was the father of modern
philosophy. Following the heady rediscovery of man and nature in the Renaissance,
the need to assemble contemporary thought into one coherent philosophical system
again presented itself. The first significant system-builder was Descartes, and he was
followed by Spinoza and Leibniz, Locke and Berkeley, Hume and Kant.”
“What do you mean by a philosophical system?”
“I mean a philosophy that is constructed from the ground up and that is
concerned with finding explanations for all the central questions of philosophy. Antiq-
uity had its great system-constructors in Plato and Aristotle. The Middle Ages had St.
Thomas Aquinas, who tried to build a bridge between Aristotle’s philosophy and
Christian theology. Then came the Renaissance, with a welter of old and new beliefs
about nature and science, God and man. Not until the seventeenth century did
philosophers make any attempt to assemble the new ideas into a clarified
philosophical system, and the first to attempt it was Descartes. His work was the
forerunner of what was to be philosophy’s most important project in the coming
generations. His main concern was with what we can know, or in other words, certain
knowledge. The other great question that preoccupied him was the relationship
between body and mind. Both these questions were the substance of philosophical ar-
gument for the next hundred and fifty years.”
“He must have been ahead of his time.”
“Ah, but the question belonged to the age. When it came to acquiring certain
knowledge, many of his contemporaries voiced a total philosophic skepticism. They
thought that man should accept that he knew nothing. But Descartes would not. Had
he done so he would not have been a real philosopher. We can again draw a parallel
with Socrates, who did not accept the skepticism of the Sophists. And it was in
Descartes’s lifetime that the new natural sciences were developing a method by which
to provide certain and exact descriptions of natural processes.
“Descartes was obliged to ask himself if there was a similar certain and exact