René Descartes’ Posts Would Be So Philosophically Annoying
“Descartes: ‘I update my status, therefore I am.’ French philosopher René Descartes (March 1596 – February 1650) has been heralded as the first modern philosopher. He is famous for having made an important connection between geometry and algebra, which allowed for the solving of geometrical problems by way of algebraic equations. Descartes was the philosopher that famously said “cogito, ergo sum” Latin for “I think, therefore I am.” He coined this in his Discourse on Method (1637) as a first step in demonstrating the attainability of certain knowledge. It is the only statement to survive the test of his methodic doubt. Descartes was the first of the modern rationalists. He thought that only knowledge of eternal truths (including the truths of mathematics and the foundations of the sciences) could be attained by reason alone, while the knowledge of physics required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method.
Scholars agree that Descartes recognizes at least three innate ideas: the idea of God, the idea of (finite) mind, and the idea of (indefinite) body. In the Meditations and related texts from the early 1640s, Descartes argues that the self can be correctly considered as either a mind or a human being and that the self’s properties vary accordingly. For example, the self is simply considered as a mind, whereas the self is composite considered as a human being. But as mentioned before, he was not only heralded as a philosopher but also made a major contribution to the world of mathematics. Descartes had devised a kind of dictionary between algebra and geometry, which in addition to associating pairs of numbers to points, allowed him to describe lines drawn on the plane by equations with two variables—x and y—and vice versa.