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René Descartes's Life And Accomplishments

829 Words4 Pages

Rodrigues 1
Izabella Rodrigues
Dr. Efron
Honors Physics
November 20, 2017

René Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, France on March 31, 1596. His mother passed away shortly after she gave birth to him. The death of Jeanne Brochard, the mother, left René’s father, Joachim Descartes, as the primary caretaker for his three children. Joachim worked full time, one might even say over time, as a Jurist in the Parliament of Brittany. This demanding job left little time to be a single parent, so he sent his three children off to his parents house (René’s grandparents). Joachim gave them strict instructions on how to raise the kids; he made sure they received the best education possible, René was sent to Jesuit college at the age of eight for seven years. At the college, he studied a variety of different subjects including; rhetoric, logic, mathematics, music, astronomy, metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics, and later in his education he added theology and medicine. Later, the extremely educated young man attended the University of Politer and earned a baccalaureate degree in law at the age of 22. A few years after graduating, Descartes joined the military, as what scholars believe, as an engineer, which required great mathematical skills. In the army, he meet and worked along side with Isaac Beeckman, though their relationship was more of a teacher student relationship, René being the student. Isaac reintroduced René to philosophy and he was …show more content…

He wrote “Rules for the Direction of the Mind” in 1628, “The World” and “The Man” in 1630-1633, “The Geometry” in 1637, “Meditations on First Philosophy” in 1641, and “The Passions of the Soul” in 1649. In his book, “The Geometry” he writes about his findings of a seamless way to connect algebra to geometry known as analytical geometry. Today his discovery is taught in schools around the world as Cartesian

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