Decartes

Bertrand Russell

1d  ·

Death of French philosopher René Descartes

11 February 1650 (aged 53)

Stockholm, Swedish Empire

Bertrand Russell comments —

”René Descartes (1596-1650) is usually considered the founder of modern philosophy, and, I think, rightly. He is the first man of high philosophic capacity whose outlook is profoundly affected by the new physics and astronomy. While it is true that he retains much of scholasticism, he does not accept foundations laid by predecessors, but endeavours to construct a complete philosophic edifice de novo. This had not happened since Aristotle, and is a sign of the new self-confidence that resulted from the progress of science. There is a freshness about his work that is not to be found in any eminent previous philosopher since Plato. All the intermediate philosophers were teachers, with the professional superiority belonging to that avocation. Descartes writes, not as a teacher, but as a discoverer and explorer, anxious to communicate what he has found. His style is easy and unpedantic, addressed to intelligent men of the world rather than to pupils. It is, moreover, an extraordinarily excellent style. It is very fortunate for modern philosophy that the pioneer had such admirable literary sense. His successors, both on the Continent and in England, until Kant, retain his unprofessional character, and several of them retain something of his stylistic merit.”

— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three. Modern Philosophy, Ch. IX: Descartes, p. 913

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Background: Death of René Descartes

In the summer of 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden invited Descartes to her court. He had by then become one of Europe's most famous philosophers and scientists. Descartes accepted and arrived on January 15 in an unusually severe winter. Challenging fellow French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, Descartes took the first set of barometric readings in Stockholm to see if atmospheric pressure could be used in forecasting the weather (these readings were recorded under blizzard conditions). The harsh Swedish winter, the daily 5 am lessons to the Queen, and the Queen herself (it soon became clear they did not care for each other) did not agree with him. Less than a month after arriving in Stockholm, Descartes contracted pneumonia and died on 11 February at Chanut. Descartes skull is on display in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, France.

”Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions.”

— American philosopher John Searle, Our Shared Consciousness, TED.com (May 2013)

Image: Detail of portrait of René Descartes after Frans Hals (1648).