Influences & Meditations on First Philosophy
- As the Meditations on First Philosophy is ultimately an argument for the existence of God, Descartes's spiritual beliefs play an important role in his work. Descartes grew up as a Catholic in France during a time of great religious upheaval. The changes brought by the Protestant Reformation were still in living memory. Descartes's Meditations were an attempt to take what facts he knew and use them to deduce answers about the nature of existence and religion.
- The classical philosophers, particularly Aristotle, Pythagoras and other ancient writers who focused on logic and mathematics, providing Descartes with the grounding he needed to produce his work. Ultimately Meditations is an exercise in Aristotelian logic, and he uses the logical rules of the classical philosophers to establish his principles.
- Descartes's most personal influence was his relationship with his mentor, the mathematician Isaac Beeckman. Beeckman exposed Descartes to the rigor of mathematical thought, and Descartes would use this mathematical background heavily as he produced his conclusions in Meditations. While Meditations is a work of classical logic, it is classical logic as seen through the prism of mathematics. In many ways Meditiations, with its proofs, principles and deductions, could be seen as a mathematical work of philosophy.
- Descartes was a product of his time, and his work is steeped in the contemporary philosophical discussions taking place in Europe at the time. While previous generations of philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas or William Ockham, focused on religious issues within the context of a specific religious tradition, Descartes was at the vanguard of the Enlightenment movement. While he still wrote about metaphysical beliefs, he did so from outside the construct of traditional religious scholarship and instead from a new, secular tradition that combined the skepticism of the humanists with the logical rigor of the scholastics.
