Jenny Wright, age 17, of White Plains, N.Y., for her question:
WHO ORIGINATED MODERN PHILOSOPHY?
The originator of modern philosophy is a French scholar named Rene Descartes who lived from 1596 until 1650. He was also a scientist and a mathematician.
Descartes was the son of a nobleman and started his education at the age of 8. His eight years of training at a Jesuit school included the usual classical studies as well as mathematic and scholastic philosophy.
Although mathematics was his favorite subject, Descartes graduated in law from the University of Poitiers at the age of 20. he didn't practice law, however, and elected to travel and study for 13 years. When he was 33 he settled down and made his home in Holland.
Descartes spent most of the rest of his life in the Netherlands, living for different periods of time in Amsterdam, Deventer, Utrecht and Leiden.
Decartes came to be known as the father of modern philosophy. He tried to base his theories only on what he could actually prove to be true, as he would in solving a mathematical problem.
Starting his search to discover truth, Decartes at first doubted everything that he had been taught. Finally, however, he saw that there was at least one thing he could not doubt: the fact that he was thinking about many different things.
"Cogito ergo sum," Descartes said. "I think therefore I am."
Descartes also came to accept some other ideas as basic truths for which he felt no proof was needed. He found an example of this to be the concept of God.
Descartes then built on his basic truths by adding other self evident truths. The system of thought that he worked out is known as the Cartesian system.
"Discourse on Method," "Meditation on the First Philosophy" and "Principles of Philosophy" are some of Descartes' works.
One of Descartes' accomplishments as a mathematician is that he worked out a new system called analytic geometry.
Descartes was the first mathematician to attempt to classify curves according to the types of equations that produce them. He also made contributions to the theory of equations and succeeded in proving the impossibility of trisecting the angle and doubling the cube.
Descartes was the first to use the last letters of the alphabet to designate unknown quantities and the first letters to designate known ones.
He also invented the method of indices to express the powers of numbers. In addition, he formulated the rule, which is known as Descartes' rule of signs, for finding the number of positive and negative roots for any algebraic equation.