Descartes Scientific Method

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With his method of radical skepticism, Descartes escaped a chain of assumptions built on dogmatic “results” and laid a new foundation for science rooted in observation and experiment. Dissatisfied with the qualitative evidence of Aristotelian syllogisms, Descartes sought to avoid building on assumptions by promoting criticism and rigorous review of hypothesis, which could them be pieced together mathematically to develop scientific theory. While Descartes left a framework that continues to drive modern science, some of his most fervent beliefs presented in Discourse on the Method have been abandoned to make way for a pragmatic view of sciences role in explanation. Aside from his contributions to mathematics, physics, and optics, one of Descartes’ largest contributions to scientific thought was his formulation of a physical universe whose machinations could be found out through inquiry of fundamental laws. While he proposed such a world hypothetically, he demonstrates how the current universe might be explained if it had “develop[ed] gradually out of chaos” in accordance to some set of laws. While his mechanistic arguments for how the universe or human body might possibly work are rough, these claims call for the end of using immaterial entities or forces …show more content…

His ideas shape our thinking so strongly that many of his teachings, while radical at the time, can seem obvious from the perspective of the modern reader. Descartes proposed the possibility of a mind-independent universe that obeys fundamental laws, and encouraged the rigor and mechanistic explanations that science seeks today. While Descartes justified his work with an a priori backing, science continues to operate without foundationalist assumptions about being. This could be interpreted as relinquishing mind-independent truth, as all theory are only descriptions of a world we can only hope to

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