University of Kragujevac
Faculty of Natural Sciences
Seminar paper:
Topic: ,, Rene Descartes”
Mentor :
Student:
Radmila Paunovic – Stajn
Marija Jovanovic 12/2012
Kragujevac, 2012
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His life
René Descartes was born to Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard on March 31, 1596 in La
Haye, France near Tours. He was the youngest of the couple’s three surviving children. The
oldest child, Pierre, died soon after his birth on October 19, 1589. His sister, Jeanne, was
probably born sometime the following year, while his surviving older brother, also named
Pierre, was born on October 19, 1591. The Descartes clan was a bourgeois family composed
of mostly doctors and some lawyers. Joachim Descartes fell into this latter category and spent
most of his career as a member of the provincial parliament.
After the death of their mother, which occurred soon after René’s birth, the three Descartes
children were sent to their maternal grandmother, Jeanne Sain, to be raised in La Haye and
remained there even after their father remarried in 1600. Not much is known about his early
childhood, but René is thought to have been a sickly and fragile child, so much so that when
he was sent to board at the Jesuit college at La Fleche on Easter of 1607. There, René was not
obligated to rise at 5:00am with the other boys for morning prayers but was allowed to rest
until 10:00am mass. At La Fleche, Descartes completed the usual courses of study in
grammar and rhetoric and the philosophical curriculum with courses in the “verbal arts” of
grammar, rhetoric and dialectic (or logic) and the “mathematical arts” comprised of
arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. The course of study was capped off with courses
in metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics. Descartes is known to have disdained the
impractical subjects despite having an affinity for the mathematical curriculum. But, all things
considered, he did receive a very broad liberal arts education before leaving La Fleche in
1614.
Little is known of Descartes’ life from 1614-1618. But what is known is that during 1615-
1616 he received a degree and a license in civil and canon law at the University of Poiters.
However, some speculate that from 1614-1615 Descartes suffered a nervous breakdown in a
house outside of Paris and that he lived in Paris from 1616-1618. The story picks up in the
summer of 1618 when Descartes went to the Netherlands to become a volunteer for the army
of Maurice of Nassau. It was during this time that he met Isaac Beekman, who was, perhaps,
the most important influence on his early adulthood. It was Beekman who rekindled
Descartes’ interest in science and opened his eyes to the possibility of applying mathematical
techniques to other fields. As a New Year’s gift to Beekman, Descartes composed a treatise
on music, which was then considered a branch of mathematics, entitled Compendium
Musicae. In 1619 Descartes began serious work on mathematical and mechanical problems
under Beekman’s guidance and, finally, left the service of Maurice of Nassau, planning to
travel through Germany to join the army of Maximilian of Bavaria.
It is during this year (1619) that Descartes was stationed at Ulm and had three dreams that
inspired him to seek a new method for scientific inquiry and to envisage a unified science.
Soon afterwards, in 1620, he began looking for this new method, starting but never
completing several works on method, including drafts of the first eleven rules of Rules for the
Direction of the Mind. Descartes worked on and off on it for years until it was finally
abandoned for good in 1628. During this time, he also worked on other, more scientifically
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