René Descartes, the ‘father of modern philosophy’ wrote his essay Meditations (published 1641) not long after Shakespeare published the Sonnets (1609). The change from Shakespeare to Descartes represents the shift from the Renaissance to the era of Modernism. The humanism of the Renaissance gives way to rationalism and a faith in the emerging sciences.
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René Descartes, the ‘father of modern philosophy’ wrote his essay Meditations (published 1641) not long after Shakespeare published the Sonnets (1609). The change from Shakespeare to Descartes represents the shift from the Renaissance to the era of Modernism. The humanism of the Renaissance gives way to rationalism and a faith in the emerging sciences.
Descartes' dualism of mind and body is a lasting legacy. Nowadays many people still believe the body is less well-known than the mind and that there is a mystery about how the mental and the physical can interact. His correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia prompted him, late in life, to explore the union of mind and body in his last work, The Passions of the Soul. In retrospect, Descartes seems to have had two views of how mind and body might be related, one that the mind interacts with the body via a gland in the brain, the other that mind is spread all the way through body and intermingled with it. While neither view is satisfactory, it is still not clear nowadays how best to think about the relation of the mental to the physical.
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The Philosophy of Descartes
René Descartes, the ‘father of modern philosophy’ wrote his essay Meditations (published 1641) not long after Shakespeare published the Sonnets (1609). The change from Shakespeare to Descartes represents the shift from the Renaissance to the era of Modernism. The humanism of the Renaissance gives way to rationalism and a faith in the emerging sciences.
