Descartes And Hobbes: Indubitable Truth

Descartes and Hobbes: Indubitable Truth In the early 17th century, a period known as the Scientific Revolution, French philosopher Rene Descartes developed an alternative approach to expanding knowledge and understanding of the world from the traditional Scholastic Aristotelianism. In 1640, English philosopher Thomas moved to France to escape the English Civil War. This around the time when Descartes wrote his famous works Discourse on the Method in 1637 and Meditations in 1641. Hobbes began writing his famous Leviathan in France, but he didn’t publish it until he returned to England after over a decade in 1651. Even though .more commonly known for his political theory in the Leviathan, he has written on a variety of subjects. Aristotle, being an empiricist, relied on our senses to attain knowledge, but a crucial problem for modern thinkers of the time was the doubtfulness of the knowledge provided by one’s
Descartes focuses more on God and elaborating that our soul is what separates us from animals, and that we are fortunate that the soul continues to live after we die (Discourse, 33). He does not want to explain in his first treatise about his opinions of sciences such as physics and geometry because of the fear of being punished like Galileo (Discourse, 36). Descartes acknowledges that he was unsuccessful in in explaining anything of the external matters of the world. He develops his knowledge by proposing everything in the world originates from God. According to Descartes, the reason we are able to speak and reason unlike animals is because it is God’s gift to human beings because our soul continues to live after death (Discourse, 31). He doesn’t acknowledge that we can speak because of our sense perception and interaction of material bodies because anything deriving from bodily interactions can be