Birthday: 27 December

Cogito, ergo sum. Often regarded as the first thinker to emphasise the use of reason to develop the natural sciences(??). Cartesianism was later developed by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz and opposed by John Locke and David Hume.

Discours de la methode 1637

• The organism as a machine
  • Heart is a pump, no quintessential Platonic "heart thing"
    • Not "like" or "as if" a pump but exactly what you'd expect of a pump and nothing more
  • Hold up an ox eye to the window and see light diffracting thru the lens
• Animals no soul
  • You kick a dog and it barks, this is an automatic reflex as befits a machine. It does not feel pain because pain is in the realm of souls, and dogs don't have souls.
    • Descartes did not have any pets growing up.

Maybe afraid after what he heard happen to Galileo [imprisonment], so did not publish book, but small texts at a time. Living in the Netherlands for safety.

Died in Sweden after lung inflammation due to the cold.

Development of modern logic, contributions to foundations of mathematics. Created analytic philosophy.