Descartes

Summary

The history of modern European philosophy is counted from the overthrow of scholasticism until the present time. Renatus Cartesius (René Descartes), born 1596, the initiator of modern philosophy, a revolutionary, in the spirit of his nation, began by breaking off all connection with earlier philosophy, by rubbing out, as if with a sponge, everything that had been achieved in this science before him, and by building it up again from the beginning, as if no one had ever philosophised before he did. The necessary consequence of such a total tearing away was, though, that philosophy regressed, as if into a second childhood, a kind of immaturity which Greek philosophy had already almost surpassed with its first steps. On the other hand, this regression to simplicity could be advantageous to the science itself; it withdrew thereby from the breadth and extension which it had already received in antiquity and in the middle ages, almost to a single problem, which now, by successive expansion, and after everything was prepared for it in detail, has grown into the great, all-inclusive task of modern philosophy. It is almost the first definition of philosophy to offer itself if one says philosophy is the science which begins absolutely at the beginning. It had, therefore, already to have a big effect, even if one only began at the beginning in the sense that one did not presuppose anything from previous philosophy and did not presuppose that it proved anything.