Rene Descartes: Trouble Kid

If we go back to school days and think about the “trouble kid”, the pal who make us get into troubles, the one who complicates everything, we could think about Rene Descartes in that way! Until his works, the world of philosophy was driven for a natural thought: we can think about things that we see and trust in our thoughts. The philosophy went from object that appeared to subject that thought it. After Descartes, there is a big turn, because after him, we cannot trust naturally in our mind, we have to put everything parenthesis, doubt about everything and we are the constructors of the reality, philosophy goes from subject who think to object thought, and this is a big problem! But, that discussing about that trouble goes too far from our porpoise in this brief biography. He is the hinge who closes the door of the medieval world and opens the modern one!

Born in in La Haye in the Touraine (now this little town is named Descartes), Indre-et-Loire, France in March 31st, 1596 from a noble family: Joachim, a lawyer, and Jeanne, who died when he was thirteen months old. He spent his first years with his grandmother and his older brother and sister, Pierre and Jeanne. The little Descartes grew up in a careful environment given his sickly character. At the age of 8 years, he moved to the city La Fléche to attend the prestigious Jesuit school until 1614, where he would studied grammar, latin and greek, classical literature in depth, physics and mathematics, and also would be impregnated by the philosophy of Aristotle, but already filtered by the scholastic view. By that time the city and the intellectual world which surrounds him was moved by the discovery of the moons of Jupiter by Galileo Galilee, in 1610. Like his father and some ot...

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...ce, matemathics, physics, biology, and geometry dismember from the trunk of philosophy and begin their path as separate science. But, more in deep, he is the founder of the Idealism, the system which begins a new era in philosophy, because in the ancient and in the medieval philosophy they believe in the existence of things, res, by them self, independent of me; but with Descartes, we start to believe in the existence of things only if they are related to me, if they exist I my mind, thus giving birth to a new way to see the life, a new way to approach the world, which will be materialized later in the French Revolution, where the personal believes trump over the believes given by god.

In conclusion, Descartes is one of the biggest thinkers of all times, changing the way we see the world, the way we understand religion, funding new ways to understand objects, etc.