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Rene Descartes biography
Correctly define the words, and you will free the world from half of the misunderstandings
Rene Descartes — (Latinized Cartesius; Cartesius) (1596-1650)
—
French philosopher, mathematician, physicist and physiologist, the founder of New European rationalism and one of the most influential metaphysicians of Modern times.
Descartes laid the foundations of analytical geometry, gave the concepts of a variable and a function, and introduced many algebraic notations.
He expressed the law of conservation of the amount of motion, gave the concept of the momentum of force.
The author of the theory explaining the formation and movement of celestial bodies by the vortex motion of matter particles (Descartes vortices).
R. Descartes introduced the idea of the reflex (Descartes arc).
Based on
Descartes 'philosophy is the dualism of soul and body, "thinking" and "extended" substance.
He identified matter with extension (or space), reduced movement to the movement of bodies.
The common cause of motion, according to Rene Descartes — is God, who created matter, motion and rest.
Man is the connection of a lifeless bodily mechanism with a soul that has thinking and will.
The absolute foundation of all knowledge, according to Descartes, is the immediate certainty of consciousness ("I think, therefore, I exist").
He considered the existence of God as a source of the objective significance of human thinking.
In the doctrine of cognition, Rene Descartes is the ancestor of rationalism and a supporter of the doctrine of innate ideas.
The main works: "Geometry" (1637), "Reasoning about the method..." (1637)
, "The Beginnings of Philosophy" (1644).
Rene Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, Lae, Touraine, France.
He died on February 11, 1650, in Stockholm. )
, a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist and physiologist, the founder of New European rationalism and one of the most influential metaphysicians of Modern times.
Life and writings
Born into a noble family, Rene received a good education.
In 1606, his father sent him to the Jesuit college of La Fleche.
Given Descartes ' not very good health, he was given some indulgences in the strict regime of this educational institution, for example, he was allowed to get up later than others.
Having acquired a lot of knowledge in the college, Rene Descartes at the same time became imbued with an antipathy to scholastic philosophy, which he retained for the rest of his life.
After graduating from the college, Descartes continued his education.
In 1616, at the University of Poitiers, he received a Bachelor of Law degree.
In 1617, Descartes joined the army and traveled a lot in Europe.
The year 1619 turned out to be a key one for Descartes from a scientific point of view.
It was at this time, as Rene himself wrote in his diary, that the foundations of a new "most amazing science"were revealed to him.
Most likely, Descartes had in mind the discovery of a universal scientific method, which he later fruitfully applied in a variety of disciplines.
In the 1620s, Descartes met the mathematician M. Mersenne, through whom he "kept in touch" with the entire European scientific community for many years.
In 1628, Rene Descartes settled in the Netherlands for more than 15 years, but did not settle in any one place, but changed his place of residence about two dozen times.
In 1633, after learning about the condemnation of Galileo by the church, Descartes refused to publish the natural philosophical work "The World", which set out the ideas of the natural origin of the universe according to the mechanical laws of matter.
In 1637, the work of Rene Descartes "Reasoning about the Method" was published in French, with which, as many believe, the new European philosophy began.
In 1641 Descartes ' main philosophical work "Reflections on the First Philosophy" (in Latin) appeared, and in 1644 "The Origin of Philosophy", a work conceived by Descartes as a compendium summarizing the most important metaphysical and natural philosophical theories of the author.
Rene Descartes 'last philosophical work" The Passions of the Soul", published in 1649, also had a great influence on European thought.
In the same year, at the invitation of Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes went to Sweden.
The harsh climate and unusual regime (the queen forced Descartes to get up at 5 in the morning to give her lessons and perform other tasks) undermined Descartes ' health, and, catching a cold, he died of pneumonia.
Method
Descartes ' philosophy vividly illustrates the desire of European culture to free itself from old dogmas and build a new science and life itself "from scratch".
The criterion of truth, Descartes believes, can only be the "natural light" of our mind.
R. Descartes does not deny the cognitive value of experience, but he sees its function solely in the fact that it comes to the aid of reason where the latter's own forces are insufficient for cognition.
Reflecting on the conditions for achieving reliable knowledge, Descartes formulates the "rules of the method" by which one can come to the truth.
Originally thought by Descartes to be very numerous, in the "Reasoning about the Method", they are reduced by him to four main propositions that make up the" quintessence " of European rationalism:
1) to begin with the indubitable and self evident, i.e., with the opposite of which it is impossible to think;
2) divide any problem into as many parts as necessary for its effective solution;
3) start with the simple and gradually move towards the complex;
4) constantly double check the correctness of conclusions.
The self evident is grasped by reason in intellectual intuition, which cannot be confused with sensory observation and which gives us a "clear and distinct" comprehension of the truth.
The division of the problem into parts allows us to identify "absolute", i.e. self evident elements in it, from which we can start in subsequent deductions.
Rene Descartes calls deduction "the movement of thought", in which there is a concatenation of intuitive truths.
The weakness of human intelligence requires checking the correctness of the steps taken for the absence of gaps in the reasoning.
Descartes calls such a test " enumeration "or"induction".
The result of a consistent and extensive deduction should be the construction of a system of universal knowledge, a "universal science".
Descartes compares this science to a tree.
Its root is metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the fruitful branches are formed by concrete sciences, ethics, medicine and mechanics, which bring direct benefits.
From this scheme it can be seen that the key to the effectiveness of all these sciences is correct metaphysics.
What distinguishes Rene Descartes from the method of discovering truths is the method of presenting already developed material.
It can be stated "analytically" and "synthetically".
The analytical method is problematic, it is less systematic, but it contributes more to understanding.
Synthetic, as if "geometrizing" material, is more strict.
Descartes still prefers the analytical method.
Doubt and the indubitable
The initial problem of metaphysics as a science of the most general kinds of existence is, as in any other disciplines, the question of self evident grounds.
Metaphysics should begin with an indubitable statement of any existence.
Rene Descartes "tries" for self evidence theses about the existence of the world, God and our "I".
The world can be imagined as non existent if we imagine that our life is a long dream.
The existence of God can also be doubted.
But our" I", Descartes believes, cannot be questioned, since doubt itself in its being proves the existence of doubt, and therefore of a doubting Self.
"I doubt, therefore I exist" — this is how Descartes formulates this most important truth, which denotes the subjectivist turn of the European philosophy of the New Time.
In a more general form, this thesis sounds like this: "I think, therefore I exist" - cogito, ergo sum.
Doubt is only one of the "modes of thinking", along with desire, rational comprehension, imagination, memory, and even sensation.
The basis of thinking is consciousness.
Therefore, Descartes denies the existence of unconscious ideas.
Thinking is an inherent property of the soul.
The soul cannot help thinking, it is a" thinking thing", res cogitans.
The recognition of the thesis of one's own existence as unquestionable does not mean, however, that Descartes considers the non existence of the soul to be impossible at all: it cannot but exist, only while it thinks.
Otherwise, the soul is an accidental thing, i.e. it can either be or not be, because it is imperfect.
All random things draw their being from outside.
R. Descartes asserts that the soul is supported in its existence by God every second.
Nevertheless, it can be called a substance, since it can exist separately from the body.
However, in fact, the soul and the body interact closely.
However, the fundamental independence of the soul from the body is for Descartes the key to the probable immortality of the soul.
The Doctrine of God
Rene Descartes moves from philosophical psychology to the doctrine of God.
He gives several proofs of the existence of a higher being.
The most well known is the so called "ontological argument": God is an all perfect being, therefore, the predicate of external existence cannot be absent in the concept of him, which means that it is impossible to deny the existence of God without falling into contradiction.
Another proof offered by Descartes is more original (the first was well known in medieval philosophy): there is an idea of God in our mind, this idea must have a reason, but only God himself can be the cause, because otherwise the idea of a higher reality would be generated by the fact that it does not possess this reality, i.e. there would be more reality in the action than in the cause, which is absurd.
The third argument is based on the necessity of the existence of God in order to maintain human existence.
Descartes believed that God, not being bound by the laws of human truth in itself, is nevertheless the source of man's "innate knowledge", which includes the very idea of God, as well as logical and mathematical axioms.
According to Rene Descartes, our belief in the existence of an external material world also comes from God.
God cannot be a deceiver, and therefore this belief is true, and the material world really exists.
Philosophy of Nature
Convinced of the existence of the material world, Descartes begins to study its properties.
The main property of material things is extension, which can appear in various modifications.
Descartes denies the existence of empty space on the grounds that wherever there is an extension, there is also an "extended thing", res extensa.
Other qualities of matter are thought vaguely and, perhaps, Descartes believes, exist only in perception, and are absent in the objects themselves.
Matter consists of the elements of fire, air and earth, all the difference of which consists only in magnitude.
The elements are not indivisible and can turn into each other.
Trying to reconcile the concept of the discreteness of matter with the thesis about the absence of emptiness, Rene Descartes puts forward a very interesting thesis about the instability and the absence of a certain form in the smallest particles of matter.
Descartes recognizes collision as the only way to convey the interactions between elements and things consisting of their mixing.
It happens according to the laws of constancy, which follow from the unchangeable essence of God.
In the absence of external influences, things do not change their state and move in a straight line, which is a symbol of constancy.
In addition, Descartes talks about preserving the initial amount of movement in the world.
The movement itself, however, is not originally inherent in matter, but is introduced into it by God.
But one first step is enough to gradually assemble a correct and harmonious cosmos out of the chaos of matter on its own.
Body and soul
Rene Descartes spent a lot of time studying the laws of functioning of animal organisms.
He considered them to be thin machines capable of adapting independently to the environment and responding adequately to external influences.
The experienced effect is transmitted to the brain, which is a reservoir of "animal spirits", the smallest particles, the ingress of which into the muscles through the pores that open due to deviations of the cerebral" pineal gland " (which is the seat of the soul), leads to contractions of these muscles.
The movement of the body is made up by a sequence of such contractions.
Animals are devoid of souls and do not need them.
Descartes said that he was more surprised by the presence of a soul in man than by its absence in animals.
The presence of a soul in a person, however, is not useless, since the soul can correct the natural reactions of the body.
Descartes is a physiologist
Rene Descartes studied the structure of various organs in animals, studied the structure of embryos at various stages of development.
His teaching about "voluntary" and "involuntary" movements laid the foundations of the modern teaching about reflexes.
Descartes ' works present schemes of reflex reactions with the centripetal and centrifugal parts of the reflex arc.
The significance of Descartes ' works in mathematics and physics
The natural scientific achievements of Descartes were born as a "by product" of the unified method of unified science developed by him.
Descartes has the merit of creating modern notation systems: he introduced the signs of variables (x, y, z...), coefficients (a, b, c...), the designation of degrees (a2, x 1...).
Descartes is one of the authors of the theory of equations: he formulated the rule of signs for determining the number of positive and negative roots, raised the question of the boundaries of real roots and put forward the problem of reducibility, i.e. the representation of an entire rational function with rational coefficients as a product of two functions of this kind.
He pointed out that the equation of the 3rd degree is solvable in square radicals (and also indicated the solution using a compass and ruler, if this equation is reducible).
Rene Descartes is one of the creators of analytic geometry (which he developed simultaneously with Pierre Fermat), which allowed us to algebraize this science using the coordinate method.
The coordinate system proposed by him received his name.
In the work "Geometry" (1637), which opened the interpenetration of algebra and geometry, Descartes introduced for the first time the concepts of a variable and a function.
The variable is interpreted by him in two ways: as a segment of variable length and constant direction (the current coordinate of a point describing a curve with its movement) and as a continuous numeric variable running through a set of numbers expressing this segment.
In the field of studying geometry, Descartes included "geometric" lines (later called
Leibniz algebraic) — lines described when moving by articulated mechanisms.
He excluded transcendental curves (Rene Descartes himself calls them "mechanical") from his geometry.
In connection with the research of lenses (see below), the "Geometry" describes methods for constructing normals and tangents to plane curves.
"Geometry" had a huge impact on the development of mathematics.
In the Cartesian coordinate system, negative numbers have received a real interpretation.
Descartes actually interpreted the real numbers as the ratio of any segment to a single one (although he gave the very formulation later
I. Newton).
Descartes ' correspondence contains other discoveries of his.
In optics, he discovered the law of refraction of light rays at the boundary of two different media (set out in "Dioptrics", 1637).
R. Descartes made a serious contribution to physics, giving a clear formulation of the law of inertia.
The influence of Descartes
Descartes had a huge influence on subsequent science and philosophy.
European thinkers took from him calls for the creation of philosophy as an exact science (B. Spinoza), to the construction of metaphysics on the basis of the doctrine of the soul (J. Locke, D. Hume).
Descartes also intensified theological disputes on the question of the possibility of proof of the existence of God.
Descartes ' discussion of the question of the interaction of the soul and the body had a huge resonance, to which N. Malebranche, G. Leibniz, and others responded, as well as his cosmogonic constructions.
Many thinkers have made attempts to formalize Descartes ' methodology (A. Arnault, N. Nicole,
Blaise Pascal).
In the 20th century, the philosophy of Descartes is often addressed by participants in numerous discussions on the problems of the philosophy of consciousness and cognitive psychology. (V. V. Vasiliev)
More about Rene Descartes:
The Descartes family belonged to the low ranking official nobility.
His mother, having given birth to a child, died a few days later.
Rene remained alive, but until the age of twenty, a short, dry cough and a pale complexion inspired fears for his life.
Rene spent his childhood in Touraine, famous for its gardens, fertility and mild climate.
In 1612, Descartes graduated from school.
He spent eight and a half years in it.
The school achieved an almost miraculous effect: in a young man who was highly inquisitive, in a mind whose distinctive feature, the dominant passion was the passion for knowledge, it managed to cause an aversion to knowledge and to science.
Rene was in his seventeenth year when he returned to his family in Rennes.
He abandoned books and scientific studies and spent all his time in horse riding and fencing.
But it would be a mistake to think that his thought was asleep at that time.
In this creative mind, all sorts of impressions were immediately processed into laws and generalizations: the result of his fencing amusements was a "Treatise on Fencing".
In the spring of 1613, Rene Descartes went to Paris: a young nobleman had to take care of acquiring a secular gloss and tie up the necessary connections for everyday success in the capital.
In Paris, Rene met the scientist Franciscan monk Mersenne, the author of a very ambiguous commentary on the book of Genesis, when reading which pious people shook their heads, and the mathematician Midorge.
He got into the company of the "golden youth", led a distracted life and became interested in a card game.
Rene Descartes ' social friends, however, were sorely mistaken if they considered him one of them.
After a year and a half of scattered life, a turning point suddenly occurred in the young man.
Secretly from his friends and Parisian relatives, he moved to a secluded house in the Faubourg Saint — Germain, locked himself here with his servants and immersed himself in the study of mathematics mainly geometry and the analysis of the ancients.
Descartes spent about two years in this voluntary imprisonment.
When he was twenty one years old, Rene decided to leave France and see the light.
Descartes wanted to read "in the great book of the world, to see courts and armies, to come into contact with people of different mores and positions, to collect different experiences, to test himself in meetings that fate will present, and to reflect everywhere on the objects encountered."
The years of wandering began.
In 1617, Rene Descartes puts on the uniform of a volunteer of the Dutch army.
And now he lives in Delirium.
He refuses his salary in order to be free from any duties, does not even go to parades, stays at home and does mathematics.
Two years of reclusive life in the Faubourg Saint - Germain were not in vain Descartes became one of the greatest mathematicians of the era.
There is a note in the diary of Rene Descartes: "On November 10, 1619, I began to understand the grounds for a wonderful discovery."
There is no doubt that the wonderful discovery that Descartes is talking about here was the discovery of the foundations of analytic geometry.
The essence of analytic geometry consists in the application of algebra to geometry and vice versa geometry to algebra.
Any curve can be expressed by an equation between two variables, and vice versa any equation with two variables can be expressed by a curve.
This discovery was of great importance not only for mathematics, in the history of which it formed an epoch, but also for the natural sciences, and in general for the ever — expanding range of knowledge dealing with exact quantities number, measure and weight.
The inventor of the new method was clearly aware of all its enormous significance and generality, but soon Descartes apparently came to the conclusion that it was impossible to reform science with one idea, even if it was great and brilliant.
The wanderings continued — together with the army, Descartes visited first Prague, then Hungary and Brussels.
In 1623, Rene Descartes appears in Paris.
Then new trips to Europe.
In 1625, Descartes returned to France, but soon left it again and went to Holland.
Moving to Holland was caused not only by a desire to get away from numerous Parisian acquaintances and a love of solitude - there were other motives.
In Holland, free institutions successfully existed, the principle of religious tolerance was recognized in it.
In Holland, Descartes liked the very structure of life of an active people, "more caring about their own affairs than curious about others."
At first, Rene Descartes continues to work on the treatise "On the Deity", which he started in Paris, but, despite the change in climate, his work does not go well.
He abandons it and goes on to natural science classes.
A curious phenomenon observed in Rome in 1629, which consisted in the appearance of five false suns (pargelievs) around the Sun, as reported to Descartes by Mersenne, again revives his interest in optics and directs him to the study of the rainbow, since the scientist is quite correctly looking for the cause of pargelievs in the phenomena of refraction and reflection of light.
From optics, he moves on to astronomy and medicine — more precisely, to anatomy.
The highest goal of philosophy, in his opinion, is to bring benefits to humanity, he values medicine and chemistry in this regard especially and expects brilliant results from the application of the mathematical method to these sciences.
Descartes does not study anatomy from atlases and books, but he anatomizes animals himself.
In the middle of 1633, Rene Descartes informed Mersenne that he had a treatise "On the world" ready and that he had put it aside for a few months, then to finally revise and correct it.
In the autumn, Descartes began to revise and considered it necessary to first familiarize himself with Galileo's" Dialogues on the Systems of the World".
He turned to friends in Amsterdam with a request to send him this book, and, to his extreme amazement, received in response the news that in June of the same year the "Dialogues" were burned by the Inquisition, and their elderly author, despite the intercession of influential people, was first sentenced to imprisonment in an inquisition prison, and then arrested in a village house, where he was ordered to read penitential psalms once a week for three years.
Descartes was seriously frightened.
The scientist decided to burn his manuscripts even at the first minute.
This page from the life of Descartes will add nothing to his fame and is unlikely to increase the reader's respect for the French thinker.
In 1634, Rene Descartes made a sketch of his study "On man and the formation of the embryo".
By a somewhat strange coincidence, Descartes, as Mageffi notes, had at that time the opportunity to make "observations" on the question that interested him.
In 1635, his daughter, Francine, was born.
Information about the life of this little creature is characterized by extraordinary thoroughness on a point that in other cases even the most detailed biographies are silent about, and extreme scarcity in other respects.
On a blank page of one of Descartes 'books we find an entry:" Conceived on October 15, 1634."
But nothing is known about the child's mother, the connection, in any case, was fleeting.
Romantically, there were hardly any elements in Descartes ' nature, and Mageffi makes the assumption, perhaps too harsh towards Descartes, that the birth of Francine was the fruit of his curiosity.
In any case, Descartes was warmly attached to his little daughter.
Francine did not live long, and her death in 1640 from scarlet fever was a heavy blow for her father.
In June 1637, Rene Descartes published a book, highlighting the harmless sections from the "World" : "On light" (dioptrics) and "On meteors", having re written "Geometry" and prefixed to them the title "Reasoning about the method".
This was, if not the beginning of a new era, then, in any case, a major event in the history of human thought.
A new center has appeared for the crystallization of the already formed, but still scattered and unorganized elements of the new worldview.
The new worldview has resulted in one of its more or less stable forms; once again, the path along which the development of human thought will go has become clear.
Descartes deliberately wrote geometry in a confusing way, "in order to deprive envious people of the opportunity to say that they have known all this for a long time."
To do this, he released an analysis for the most difficult tasks, leaving only the construction.
Dioptrics and Meteors were incomparably more popular.
Descartes himself was very pleased with his Experiments.
He said that he did not think that he would ever have to release or change at least three lines in them.
In modern science, along with the inductive method, the method of deduction is also widely used.
Its essence consists in the fact that various particular consequences are derived from a small number of general principles.
Although this method originated in ancient Greece, it was in this book that Rene Descartes first thoroughly justified it in relation to natural science.
Descartes did not deny induction either, he perfectly understood the great importance of experience as a means of cognition and a criterion of truth: "From now on, I will advance in the knowledge of nature faster or slower, depending on how much I will be able to make experiments.
Experience gives me the necessary material for the initial assumptions, it also gives a check of the correctness of the conclusions drawn."
It was only in 1644 that Rene Descartes published a more extensive work entitled "The Beginnings of Philosophy".
It finally includes Descartes ' works on the world (cosmos), which he intended to publish back in 1633.
In this essay, he outlined a grandiose program for creating a theory of nature, guided by his methodological rule to take the simplest clear statements as a basis.
Even in the" Reasoning about the Method "Descartes analyzed all sorts of initial positions, doubting the validity of any of them, including the position "I exist".
However, in the act of thinking, doubt is impossible, because our doubt is already a thought.
Hence Descartes 'famous statement:" I think therefore I exist."
In order to protect his teaching from the attacks of the churchmen, R. Descartes speaks about the existence of God and the external world, Published by God.
But it is not possible to deceive the churchmen, they are they knew the materialistic essence of Descartes ' system.
True to his method, Descartes looks for the most basic and simple in the material substrate and finds it in extension.
Descartes ' matter is pure extension, a material space that fills the entire immeasurable length, width and depth of the universe.
The parts of matter are in continuous motion, interacting with each other upon contact.
The interaction of material particles obeys the basic laws or rules.
"The first rule is that each part of matter individually always continues to remain in the same state until an encounter with other particles causes a change in this state."
"The second rule, suggested by me, is as follows: when one body collides with another, it can give it only as much movement as it will simultaneously lose, and take away from it only as much as it will increase its own movement."
"As a third rule, I will add that although when a body moves, its path is most often represented as a curved line and that it is impossible to produce... not a single movement that was not circular in any form, nevertheless, each of the particles of the body separately tends to continue the body in a straight line."
These "rules" are usually seen as the formulation of the law of inertia and the law of conservation of the amount of motion.
Unlike Galileo, Descartes distracts from the action of gravity, which, by the way, he also reduces to the movement and interaction of particles, and mentions the direction of inertial motion in a straight line.
However, his formulation still differs from Newtonian, he does not speak about the state of uniform and rectilinear motion, but in general about the state, without explaining in detail the content of this term.
From the entire content of the "Principles" it is clear that the state of the parts of the mother is characterized by their size ("amount of matter"), shape, speed of movement and the ability to change this speed under the influence of external particles.
One can identify this ability with inertia, and then in one of the letters of Rene Descartes we find a very interesting statement: "It can be stated with certainty that a stone is not equally disposed to accept a new movement or to increase speed when it moves very quickly and when it moves very slowly."
In other words, Descartes states that the inertia of a body depends on its speed.
In Descartes ' letters, there is a formulation of the law of inertia that almost textually coincides with Newtonian: "I believe that the nature of motion is such that if a body has started moving, this is already enough for it to continue at the same speed and in the direction of the same straight line, until it is stopped or rejected by some other reason."
This principle of preserving velocity in magnitude and direction is all the more interesting for Descartes, because, according to him, there is no emptiness in the world and every movement is cyclical: one part of matter takes the place of another, this one takes the place of the previous one, etc.
As a result, the entire universe is permeated with vortex movements of matter.
The movement in the universe is eternal, just like matter itself, and all phenomena in the world are reduced to the movements of matter particles.
At first, these movements were chaotic and disorderly, as a result of these movements, the particles were crushed and sorted.
In the physics of Rene Descartes, there is no place for forces, especially forces acting at a distance through the void.
All the phenomena of the world are reduced to the movements and interaction of touching particles.
This physical view was called Cartesian in the history of science, from the Latin pronunciation of Descartes ' name — Cartesius.
The Cartesian view played a huge role in the evolution of physics and, although in a highly modified form, has survived to our time.
Descartes ' work during this period is characterized by special features.
Now he is the head of the school, and Descartes is particularly concerned about the issue of official recognition of his philosophy.
Rene believes that it would be beneficial for the Jesuits to introduce his philosophy into teaching in their schools, and tries to convince them that there is nothing contrary to religion in it.
In 1645, Descartes returned to the studies of anatomy and medicine, to which he promised in the "Discourse on Method" to devote his entire future life, and from which he was distracted by concerns about gaining the sympathy of theologians.
He settles in Egmond and works hard.
In 1648, Rene Descartes was summoned to Paris.
This is his third trip to France during his stay in Holland.
The first two, in 1644 and 1647, were associated with the troubles of inheritance.
On his second visit, influential friends procured Descartes a pension of three thousand livres from Cardinal Mazarin.
In May 1648, Descartes received a second royal rescript assigning him a new pension and an invitation to come to Paris, where he was waiting for an appointment to some important position.
However, on August 27, barricades appeared on the streets, and Descartes hurried back to Holland.
Descartes was simple and dry.
In communication, those who wanted to see him as an oracle, the personification of wisdom, were, according to Ballier, disappointed by the simplicity of his answers.
In a large society, Rene Descartes is silent and uninspiring, as is often the case with people accustomed to a secluded lifestyle.
But in the circle of close people, he became a lively and cheerful conversationalist.
Descartes ' attitude to these close people makes, in general, a heavy impression.
Descartes had a rare happiness - a circle of enthusiastic fans and devoted friends gathered around him, but apparently he did not know such happiness as loving others.
Haughty and arrogant with equals, who treated the greatest scientists of his time like boys, the scientist, approaching high persons, turned into a flattering and obsequious courtier.
Descartes utters this aphorism: "Persons of high birth do not need to reach adulthood in order to surpass other people in scholarship and virtue."
Perhaps this attitude to the crowned heads was the reason that Descartes, a rich and independent man who valued his health and was already elderly, went at the invitation of his admirer, Queen Christina of Sweden, to "the land of bears between rocks and ice," as he wrote himself.
In October 1649, the scientist arrived in Stockholm.
Soon after Descartes ' arrival, Christina began to tell him about the mercies awaiting him.
It was supposed to raise him to the rank of a nobleman of the Swedish kingdom; in addition, the queen promised to give him a vast estate in Pomerania.
At the same time, Christina forced the elderly and sickly philosopher to break his entire habitual way of life.
She found that it was necessary to start studying philosophy with a fresh head, and she chose five o'clock in the morning as the most suitable time for this.
Descartes, who even his Jesuit teachers allowed, due to his poor health, to stay in bed until late, was forced to go to the palace long before dawn in the harsh northern winter, and he had to pass through a long bridge open to the wind on all sides.
The winter was unusually severe.
On one of his trips, Rene Descartes caught a cold and fell ill on his return from the palace: he was diagnosed with pneumonia.
Rene Descartes died on February 11, 1650, on the ninth day of his illness.
(Samin D. K. 100 great scientists. - Moscow: Veche, 2000)
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Not to be picky - so as not to anger others and not to disgrace yourself.
Those who do not know how to do anything themselves and cannot do it, are the first to criticize and do it unceremoniously.
Well, a faulty site, sometimes sewn with white threads, in some places the links are dead - even so.
No one forbids you to say this... but where is the elementary delicacy?
And the more insignificant the critic, the more brazen he is (Baltasar Gracianov, virtual philosopher and cyber mannerist, knight of the Order of Binoculars)
