Descartes: Discourse on Method

• Proclaimed the mind’s autonomy and importance
• Mind’s ability and right to comprehend truth
• Offers a method whereby one could achieve certainty, and therefore produce an understanding of nature and human culture
• Descartes believed that books would give him a clear and useful knowledge of everything needed in life
• After finishing his schooling he was disappointed in the results and felt like he had gained nothing in trying to educate himself
• Quits his studies once he is of the allowed age
• Spends a few years traveling seeing courts and armies, and acquiring varied experience and testing himself in the episodes that life sent him
• Believed that one would find more truth in the cognations which each man made on things that mattered to him
• Eventually, Descartes reaches the idea to study himself
• Rejects the opinions of the old foundation of learning and resumes them later on, or replaces them with better ones in their place
• Descartes undertook these measures in order to try and reform his ideas, and rebuild them on his own foundations
• States that the opinions of others aren’t barbaric or savage, but often at least as reasonable as one’s own
• States people are much more greatly influenced by custom and example than by any certain knowledge
• Four rules of logic:
• Never accept anything as true unless it is recognized it to be evidently such: that is to carefully avoid precipitation and prejudgment
• Divide each of the difficulties which one encounters into as many parts as possible, to acquire an easier solution
• Think in an orderly fashion beginning with the most simple things to understand and gradually by degrees reaching more complex knowledge
• Make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that one would be certain that nothing was omitted
• Descartes accepts “I think, therefore, I am” as the first principle of the philosophy he was seeking