Cartesianism

Cartesianism is the school of philosophy based on the fundamental philosophical principles of the great French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes lived from 1596 to 1650, and published his major philosophical works, Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy and Principles of Philosophy, in 1637, 1641 and 1644 (respectively). At the time, the dominant philosophical school was that of Scholastic (Aristotelian) philosophy. Descartes studied Scholastic philosophy, and become deeply dissatisfied with it, at a very young age. Believing that all human knowledge could be either reiforced or polluted by philosophical principles on which it rested, Descartes resolved to establish a new philosophical system from the ground up.

Though, contrary to Descartes' hopes, his philosophy was poorly received by the existing educational institutions, Descartes' work exercised an enormous influence throughout Western Europe. Even today, his Meditations is often taken as the starting point for modern philosophy. The great thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries (Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, etc.) can all be mapped on the basis of their reactions to Descartes' system. Because his thoughts inspired such dramatic resistance and development among those thinkers, however, the fact is often overlooked that in the decades following his major publications, a large number of philosophers devoted themselves to understanding and defending his philosophy.

This article describes the basic principles subscribed to by most Cartesians, and discusses some of the central debates. It does not discuss one of the major points of Cartesian concern: the development of Descartes' physics. While that physics was an extremely important step between Aristotelian and Newtonian physics (Newton himself made a close study of Descartes' physics, and much of his work is an explicit response to it), it is of limited philosophical interest.

The reconciliation project

While Descartes himself went to great lengths to distance his philosophical system from the then-dominant Scholastic philosophy, he nevertheless hoped that his views would be adopted by the educational and religious establishment (indeed, he advertised the Meditations as primarily a proof of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul). Though the works spread like wildfire among the intellectual community (in large part due to his acquaintance with Marin Mersenne, the central figures of the establishment unequivocally rejected them.

In light of this, one of the tasks many of Descartes' followers set themselves was finding ways to bring the Cartesian system closer to the Scholastic. Sometimes this happened simply on a presentational level. Scholastic philosophy was typically presented in a specific format, one based in the classic ordering of Aristotle's texts. Descartes' own works, even the carefully ordered Principles of Philosophy had little in common with this format. Because of this, many of his followers worked at producing textbooks of Cartesian philosophy that closely resembled existing Scholastic textbooks.

In other instances, Cartesians took on the more ambitious task of attempting to reconcile the philosophical content of the two systems. Johannes Clauberg, for instance, published treatises on logic and metaphysics that attempted to provide a Cartesian foundation for the Scholastic system. Later, Leibniz, in the development of his own philosophical system, continued in this vein, attempting to show that both Cartesianism and Scholasticism contained elements of truth that could be unproblematically integrated.

References and further reading

• Garber, Daniel (1998). Clauberg, Johannes. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge.
• Garber, Daniel (1998, 2003). Descartes, René. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge