Written by Nethra Singhi
The Philosophy of Education is a reflection on the nature, aims and problems of education. It is a branch of applied philosophy that borrows from epistemology, metaphysics, language etc. It looks at both the theoretical and practical aspects of education from a philosophical angle. Now, because educational practice is so vast and varied around the world, there are, of course, variations in the philosophy of education as well.
This series of articles aims at analysing the different theories on education famous philosophers across history had and their application in the modern education system. This particular article, though, will focus more on the philosophical and scientific thought of Rene Descartes rather than its direct impact on education. This is because while Descartes founded a new scientific method of study, he did not have many opinions on how people should be educated and the importance of his method in studying. However, his philosophical thought influenced many modern educational philosophers, and his scientific approach led to many changes in education and scientific research.
Rene Descartes was a mathematician, scientist and philosopher in the 16th and 17th centuries. He is best known for his contribution to the fields of geometry and algebra and the phrase “Cogito Ergo Sum” (originally in French, “Je pense, donc Je suis”) aka “I Think, Therefore I am”.
Rene Descartes’ Philosophy
Descartes is often regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, as he was one of the earliest philosophers to reject the Aristotelian Scholastic convention in his time. He proposed the modern take on mind-body dualism and propagated the use of a new kind of science grounded in observation and experiment, unlike the Scholastic reliance on senses.
In philosophical thought, Descartes was essentially a rationalist who believed that everything had a reason, and this reason could be found through continuous observation and experimentation.
Descartes believed reality to be made up of three substances: God, mind and matter, of which only God was capable of existing on its own and creating the other two.
He proposed that the mind and body were distinct, the mind a thinking substance that is not extended, compared to the body, a non-thinking extended substance that can be broken down into parts. In simpler terms, Descartes believed that mind and body (matter) were two distinct entities that fundamentally differed in nature. The material (physical) world could be doubted, but the mind could not deny its own existence as a thinking thing.
This belief has obviously been contested, one significant debate being how the mind and body can work together if they are as distinct as Descartes believed them to be. But in its existence, this belief was a radical thought that contested Aristotelian principles in a time where doing so was almost considered blasphemy.
A fundamental Aristotelian belief that Descartes contested was that any and all knowledge came through senses. While Descartes believed that our senses were capable enough to help us avoid pain and increase pleasure, he found them unreliable sources of knowledge. Instead, he proposed that human beings were born knowing some fundamental truths and the basic structures of reality and then grew up learning others. Descartes suggested that if we wanted to know true metaphysical facts, we must move away from our senses and “and turn toward our innate ideas of the essences of things, including the essences of mind, matter, and an infinite being (God).”
The other Scholastic belief Descartes renounced was the use of substantial forms. Aristotelians held that all things had a substantial form from which the physical form was derived. This did not explain how anything worked and why. Thus, Descartes proposed that one could draw more fruitful conclusions by looking into the configurations of a thing and its parts. This would help further the progress of physical science and provide mechanistic explanations of how things actually worked with no reason to look at their substantial forms.
This is where observation and experimentation came into play. If one would keep observing the inner workings of a thing and conduct experiments to draw verifiable conclusions, they would know what the thing was and the purpose of its existence. In simpler terms, everything material (non-thinking), including the human body, was a machine and thus was operated by mechanical principles. Figure out the mechanical principles, and you will figure out the machine. Then, these mechanistic explanations extended to nutrition, growth, reproduction, and even how the senses functioned.
Descartes’ mechanistic approach also led him to found theories on sensory perception and how the spatial properties of size, shape, distance, and position are perceived in vision specifically, contributing to modern optics theories. His mathematical (geometrical and algebraic) contributions too impacted the above.
While Rene Descartes may not have proposed any educational theories, his contributions to philosophy, science and mathematics have profoundly impacted modern-day education. Perhaps, the most significant impact is that his mechanistic science and rejection of Scholastic tradition opened up avenues for how human knowledge, its acquisition, and application were perceived. He influenced his contemporaries and successors to examine the knower (human) as a means to determine the scope and possibilities of human knowledge.
Philosophers influenced by Descartes include Henry More, Nicolas Malebranche, Benedict de Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz and more. Although later epistemologists like John Locke, George Burkley, David Hume, Immanuel Kant etc., rejected Descartes’ metaphysical beliefs, they did it through Descartes’ own approach: the investigation of the cognitive capacities of the knower. Thus, Descartes offered a systematic reformulation of natural philosophy and science that continues to influence contemporary thought.
References
Ariew, Roger. Descartes and the last scholastics. Cornell University Press, 2019.
Gibson, A.B. (1932). The Philosophy of Descartes (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315468099
Hatfield, Gary. “René Descartes.” (2008). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/descartes/>.
Skirry, Justin., 2022. Descartes, Rene. [online] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: <https://iep.utm.edu/rene-descartes/#SH2a> [Accessed 15 March 2022].
Smith, Kurt. “Descartes’ life and works.” (2001).
Watson, Richard A.. “René Descartes”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Feb. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Descartes. Accessed 15 March 2022.
