Descartes, René

Descartes, René (1596–1650) Together with Immanuel Kant and David Hume, the French philosopher René Descartes is one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. Descartes also made significant contributions to mathematics and the science of mechanics. He is best known for his Discourse on Method and Meditations, two texts in which he employed his method of systematic doubt so as to arrive at some indubitable foundation from which certain knowledge could be deduced. Famously, Descartes discovered he could doubt virtually everything, save that in doubting, and so thinking, he must at least exist. However, the existence thus asserted was not his bodily existence, but rather the existence of the self as a ‘thinking thing’. Descartes required proof of the existence of God, to restore his confidence in the existence of material bodies, defined by their spatial existence. This metaphysical view of the world as composed of extended material bodies, on the one hand, and souls or minds defined by thought, on the other, is known as dualism. Descartes himself, and successive dualist philosophers of mind, have experienced great difficulty in accounting coherently for the special connection between mind and body which constitutes the human person.

The influence of body–mind dualism is pervasive throughout the contemporary social sciences (for example, in Max Weber's distinction between behaviour and meaningful action). The increasingly problematic failure of sociology to deal adequately with either human embodiment or ecological issues is one legacy of this. Psychoanalysis and recent structuralist approaches in social science, which affect to ‘de-centre’ the human subject, often start out by explicitly rejecting Descartes's assumption of the ‘transparency’ of the self to reflection. Finally, Descartes is now frequently criticized as advocating a view of animals as non-conscious complex machines, thus allegedly excluding animals from direct moral concern, and sustaining an untenable gulf between human and animal nature. The adjective used to refer to Descartes is ‘Cartesian’. See also METAPHYSICS.