René Descartes

Deemed the first modern philosopher and founder of the rationalist school, René Descartes used reason and mathematics to analyse the world. Descartes’s book Meditations on the First Philosophy offered a proof of the existence of God founded on reason, not faith. Descartes deduced truths about the outer world based on his sensual perception of it. This method of reasoning became standard philosophical procedure.

Hulton Deutsch

Appears in these articles

Philosophy, Western; Enlightenment, Age of; Mathematics; Consciousness; Dualism; Rationalism; Descartes, René; Cognition

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