Fellow philosophers,
Today, we’re taking a trip back in time.
It’s the early 17th century, and we meet a young French soldier on campaign.
One evening, he encounters a Dutchman discussing mathematics. The soldier pries the Dutchman to divulge his experiments and secrets in a mysterious discipline he calls physics.
The soldier, as it turns out, was the soon-to-be famous philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes.
Contemplating on the Dutchman’s lesson, Descartes was so inspired that he had a dream that night (so the legend goes). He awoke with a vision that changed history forever.
This experience would lead Descartes to develop what we would call analytical geometry today. Descartes had a gift, he could see the relationship between algebraic math and shapes in the physical world. (So if you hated your junior year of high school you now know who to blame!)
His work, however, would take years to be released into the larger public discourse because of the Catholic Church’s aggressive silencing of science. In seeing Galileo’s books burned, Descartes decided to hold back for years until it was safe for him to enter his research into the larger academic conversation.
What we’re most interested in today is Descartes’ concept of method—a gift not only for philosophers but every intellectual discipline which followed.
Descartes believed that our collective human knowledge and consciousness had plateaued because we were stuck in metaphysical thought experiments.
He perceived math and science as a vehicle to take our knowledge from mental perception and hypothesis, through discourse, and into verifiable experimentation and mathematical equations.
He saw the world ordered like a tree with roots, a trunk, and branches moving from metaphysical to observational.
He says it like, this1
"Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree; the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches that issue from the trunk are all other sciences.”
This view would drastically alter the overwhelming bulk of scientific and mathematical thought for years to come. You can already see a clear line right into the scientific method we now all learn in science class.
So we’ll conclude on this idea today: that because of his willingness to recognize his current limitations of perception, Descartes was able to reconcile the worlds of mathematics, philosophy, and sciences in a way that would fundamentally change all future thought.
His epistemology was not based in ideas, but rather rooted in hypothesis and dialogue, and ultimately lent itself to objective scientific proof.
This process is how we know what we know today—it is our epistemology.
So the next logical question is, what’s next?
Until tomorrow my friends, keep challenging what you know.
Matt
References:
The Great Conversation, Norman Melchert
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epistemology
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/07/never-die/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20117041