Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes's family was rather well off, and he inherited enough money to be able to afford a life of study and travel. At age of eight, he was sent  away to a Jesuit school where, at the first due to health problems, he was allowed to stay in bed all morning. He maintained this habit all his life and felt that his morning meditative hours were his most productive.

At the age of sixteen, he left school and went to paris, were he studied mathematics. Four years later, he become a professional soldier, enlisting in the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau adn later in the Bavarian army. He found that a soldier's life, though busy and dangerous at times, provided him with sufficient leisure time to continue his studies.


After quitting the army, he spent several years traveling in Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, and Holland. He eventually settled in Holland for 20 years, where he studied science, philosophy, and mathematics and spent four years writing a book on the working of the physical world. Holland allowed much more freedom of thought than did most of Europe at that time. Even so, when he heard of Galileo's condemnation by Church and his imprisonment for writing that the earth revolves around the sun, he prudently abandoned his work and instead wrote on his philosophy of science. The result work, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, was followed by two more book - Meditationes, in which he further explains his philosophical views, and Principia philosophiae (Philosophical prinsiples), in which he details a theory on the workings of the universe that became the accepted scientific view for about 100 years.

Holland's liberal attitude toward new views was not without exception. At one time, it was forbidden to print or sell any of Descartes's works. Another time, he was brought before judge on charges of atheism.

Although he made numerous advances in optics and wrote on physics, physiology, and psychology, Descartes is most famous for his philosophical and mathematical works. He has been called the father of modern philosophy, because he attempted to build a completely new system of thought.

When Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to become her tutor, he accepted. Stockholm was cold and miserable, and the queen forced Descartes to break his habit of staying in bed by requiring him to instruct her daily at 5.00 a.m. After four months in Sweden, Descartes came down with pneumonia and died at the age of fifty four.