Cartesianism

Cartesianism is the philosophical system associated with René Descartes, grounded in methodical doubt, rational inquiry, and a distinction between mind and body.

René Descartes: René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist whose work shaped modern philosophy. His arguments and method form the system’s central source.
Meditations on First Philosophy: Meditations on First Philosophy is Descartes’s work presenting arguments for certainty, God, and the distinction between mind and body. Its sequence of meditations lays out the system’s central reasoning.
Cartesian skepticism: Cartesian skepticism is the use of radical doubt to test whether beliefs can be justified with certainty. The system’s method made skeptical challenges a lasting starting point for epistemology.
Empiricism: Empiricism is the view that experience is the primary source or test of knowledge. It challenges Cartesian confidence in knowledge grounded independently of sensory experience.
Methodic doubt: Methodic doubt is the deliberate suspension of belief in claims that could be mistaken. Descartes uses doubt to seek a foundation that cannot be overturned.
Evil demon: The evil demon is Descartes’s hypothetical deceiver capable of making a person’s beliefs systematically false. The demon scenario pushes methodic doubt beyond ordinary skepticism.
Modern philosophy: Modern philosophy is the period of Western philosophy beginning in the seventeenth century and shaped by new accounts of knowledge and nature. Cartesianism helped set its agenda around certainty, subjectivity, and reason.
Baruch Spinoza: Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher who argued that there is only one substance, God or Nature. His monism rejects Descartes’s division between mental and physical substances.
Cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am” is Descartes’s claim that thinking guarantees the thinker’s existence. This is the first certainty reached through Cartesian doubt.
Trademark argument: The trademark argument claims that the idea of an infinite, perfect God must have a cause with at least as much reality. Descartes uses it to argue that the idea of God cannot originate from a finite self alone.

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