Read a biography of Descartes and re-read his Discourse[I] (I’d already read his Methods and excerpts from his scientific slog – optics and harmonics, ergh).
So how do I feel about this famous Frenchman, the so-called father of modern philosophy? Philosophy-wise, not that much. His real contribution was to abandon the scholastic philosophy that had been the sole academic curriculum for the last millennia or so, and due to which it was forbidden to contradict Aristotle (aka “The Philosopher” at the time). Which, mind you, was no small feat.
But look at Descartes’ contemporaries, they were all already doing the same things in different ways: Bruno was burned for suggesting not only that not only was Copernicus right, but the sun was just one star of many, each of which contained their own worlds; then we have people like Hobbes (political writings primarily) and Bacon (who shared the same ideal as Descartes – form a system for determining truth). If anything, it is Bacon, who derived a primitive empirical system for science who deserves more credit, as compared to Descartes’ “first principle” rationalizing based system.
For those curious, Bacon’s system basically involved collecting lists of facts and seeing which ones occur simultaneously consistently. Not quite the same as the modern hypothesis-based system, but still a mighty improvement on all his predecessors. I would add here that it is ironic that Aristotle, who while being famous through the middle ages for his logic and rigour, was nonetheless a greater scientist, with interests in geology, astronomy, mathematics, and biology. In fact, some of his biological works were still considered dogma until a few centuries ago. The most infamous example of which relates to the structure of the human heart. Aristotle based his conclusions on non-human primate dissections, which differ in some significant manner from humans. And yet even this sort of direct evidence would take decades to convince the general medical community.
That short anecdote (regarding Aristotlean dogma) calls to mind another anecdote and one which again reminds us that Descartes was not the vanguard of the anti-Aristotlean pro-progress movement. During Descartes’ life, a small scientific collaboration announced that they would perform public experiments that clearly and without a doubt disprove a number of Aristotle’s tenants. Their experiments never went ahead, and they were all expelled from Paris.
So again: why is Descartes’ so famous. He was one of many to disregard Aristotle in building his philosophy, he was one of many in trying to create a system of epistemology (I’d include here not only Bacon whom I mentioned above, but also the mystical Rosicrucianism). The answer, like most historical answers, is I suspect mundane and disappointing: coincidence and concurrent events beyond his control. These combined to make Descartes the first widely known and respected modern philosopher. This is probably mostly due to Mersenne who acted as a 17th-century science RSS feed by writing letters to everyone who mattered, and who was a big fan of Descartes).
