René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was paramount to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, and later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.
Portrait after Frans Hals
The house where Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine
Graduation registry for Descartes at the University of Poitiers, 1616
In Amsterdam, Descartes lived at Westermarkt 6 (Maison Descartes, left).
French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.
Abelard with Héloïse
Montaigne became the father of the anti-conformist French spirit.
René Descartes is considered as the founder of modern philosophy.
Voltaire came to embody the Enlightenment.
