In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
RD–1596–2026  ·  Observatory

René
Descartes

1596  —  1650
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
René Descartes
René Descartes
La Haye en Touraine, France, 1596  ·  Stockholm, Sweden, 1650

The man who doubted everything until he found the one thing he couldn't doubt — and built the modern world on it.

Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Discourse on the Method (1637). He invented analytic geometry. He suppressed an entire book when Galileo was condemned. He died teaching Queen Christina of Sweden at 5 a.m. in a Swedish winter.

The mind-body problem he raised has not been solved. He knows it.

Consultation

I think,
therefore I am.

Descartes speaks from 382 chunks across two works — Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method.

His discourse holds Galileo's Two New Sciences and Newton's Principia — his contemporary and his greatest successor in the mathematical description of nature.

Ask him what the cogito actually proves. Ask him about the mind-body problem. Ask him why he suppressed an entire book. Ask him whether artificial intelligence thinks in his sense.

The CogitoSystematic DoubtMind-Body ProblemAnalytic GeometryRationalismThe MeditationsAI and Thought
I think, therefore I am.
Meditations on First Philosophy  ·  Meditation II  ·  1641

Drawn From the Corpus