Get your daily dose!

On November 10th and 11th, 1619; after a series of dreams and meditations, Rene Descartes doubted all preconceived ideas in an attempt to understand the nature of reality. In his later work, The Meditations on First Philosophy. he said: “I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.” He said; “I will shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will eliminate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since this is hardly possible, I will regard all such images as vacuous, false and worthless. I will converse with myself and scrutinize myself more deeply; and in this way I will attempt to achieve, little by little, a more intimate knowledge of myself." "I am a thing that thinks." “Whatever is revealed to me by the natural light—for example that from the fact that I am doubting it follows that I exist, and so on—cannot in any way be open to doubt.” Descartes' maxims and science helped drive enlightenment era thought. Thanks to his thinking four hundred years ago, our world became a little brighter.