笛卡儿(1596～1650年)

Descartes, René

法国数学家、科学家和哲学家，人称近代哲学之父。出生於图尔（Tours）附近，受教於耶稣会学院，1618年在军队中学习数学和军事建筑。1619～1628年笛卡儿在北欧和南欧旅行。1628年定居荷兰（Holland），一直停留到1649年。笛卡儿的理想目标是把数学的严密、条理清晰的特点运用到哲学当中。从《沈思录》（Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641）开始，他以方法论对基於权威、感官和推论的知识提出质疑，继而在直观中发现必然真理，这一点表达在他的一句名言「我思，故我在」（Cogito ergo sum）中。他的工作就是建立在这个基础上，从这里再推演出一系列其他的定理，每一种都有相同自明的证据，於是产生一套人们完全认同的哲学体系，就如人们相信欧几里德的几何一样。他还发展了一套二元论体系（参阅dualism），将精神和物质严格分开，认为精神的本质是思维，物质的本质是三维的广延。笛卡儿的形上学体系是理性主义的（参阅rationalism），而他的物理学和生理学则是以感官知识为基础，又是属於经验论（参阅empiricism）和机械论的（参阅mechanism）。在数学方面，他创立了解析几何（analytic geometry），并改进了代数的记数法。

English version：

1596～1650年

Descartes, René

French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, considered the father of modern philosophy. Born near Tours and educated at a Jesuit college, he joined the military in 1618 and traveled widely for the next 10 years. In 1628 he settled in Holland, where he would remain until 1649. Descartes's ambition was to introduce into philosophy the rigor and clarity of mathematics. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he began by methodically doubting knowledge based on authority, the senses, and reason, in the hope of arriving in the end at something indubitable. This he reached in his famous “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). His task was to build on this as a foundation, to deduce from it a series of other propositions, each following with the same self-evidence, and thus to produce a philosophical system on which people could agree as completely as they do on Euclid's geometry. He developed a dualistic system (see dualism) in which he distinguished radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions. His metaphysics is rationalistic (see rationalism), but his physics and physiology are empiricistic (see empiricism) and mechanistic (see mechanism). As a mathematician, he founded analytic geometry and reformed algebraic notation.