Compare And Contrast Descartes And Martin Luther

Throughout the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, there was a great deal of revolutionary movements that changed the way that people looked at the world, whether it be religiously, philosophically, or scientifically. Two important thinkers who were apart of these different movements were René Descartes and Martin Luther. These thinkers sought to change the way people thought because they thought old systems and ways of thinking were flawed . Descartes did this through the study of philosophy and the natural world, while Luther did this through faith and the practices of religion. Descartes and Luther wanted to disprove old habits and doctrines in order to establish a new way of spiritual and intellectual certainty and clarity. In doing so,

This was due to the fact that he moved away from old ideas of certainty, and he doubted everything. He was always wondering how we know what we know. Descartes was skeptical of authority, and he thought people who thought they knew everything would be lost in life. His skepticism of the foundations of knowledge started when he was a young boy in school. Although he did enjoy some subjects, like mathematics, he was overall dissatisfied because he felt he did not benefit from his education. He felt like he was “bogged down in so many doubts and errors”(Descartes, 7). Due to this, in his later life, when he was in Germany fighting in the war, he spent the day in a stove heated room by himself and pondered his thoughts. There is where he discovered that he needed to rethink everything, he says, “the realization that things made up of different elements and produced by the hands of several master craftsmen are often less perfect than those on which only one person has worked”(Descartes, 12). Descartes goes against old ideas of certainty and questions the foundations of knowledge that had already been built. He believes that the foundation of knowledge that has been built over time by many different thinkers is not as strong as one that is built by just one person. So, Descartes decided to forget everything he had ever learned, and start over on his own. His goal was to find