With the Reformation on the continent, a renaissance movement centered on humanism was emerging in Europe. In the 16th century, Martin Luther founded Protestantism, Protestantism believes that the connection between human beings and God does not need the church as a medium, everyone can communicate directly with God by virtue of his own free will and conscience, God should exist in the heart of everyone, this principle has great consequences, one of which is that our study of nature does not offend God, in the Catholic view, nature is the embodiment of God's will, scientific study of nature is a blasphemy against God, Protestantism breaks this point. In such a context of the times, a large number of modern thinkers must have been born.
Reformation Martin Luther (black in the middle)
Descartes, born on 31 March 1596 in Leyre, Toulon, France, was a French philosopher, mathematician and physicist. He invented the planar Cartesian coordinate system commonly used in mathematics, making a very important contribution to the development of modern mathematics, and at the same time, he also founded the philosophy of "European Rationalism".
Descartes had a very famous saying, "I think, therefore I am", so what is the specific connotation of this sentence? We must always have this idea, that is, whether the world we live in is real, in a sense, yesterday's "you" and today's "you" are two "you", because at this time there is only an imagination of yesterday's you in your brain, just a feeling or an illusory scene in your brain.
Descartes
Descartes believed that anything he did not explicitly recognize could never be accepted as true. When you find that everything in the world can be used to question, you will wonder what is unchanging in the midst of so many uncertain things. This principle expresses Descartes' view of the starting point of knowledge, that human knowledge must originate from an unmistakable starting point. Mathematically we call the starting point of this kind of "indeterminate" "axiom." Descartes doubts everything, and if you think about it according to this logic, the world will inevitably become absurd and meaningless in people's subjective cognition, but Descartes thinks that one thing is certain. In this world, we can doubt anything, we can doubt the reality of this world, we can doubt the existence of God, and so on, but no matter what you are doubting, we cannot doubt that I am doubting the truth of this matter, because if I doubt the matter of "I am doubting", I am still doubting, and doubting that this act requires a subject to perform, so we can come to Descartes's famous saying "I think, therefore I am.".
Ideas like Descartes are still inseparable from the background of the times, Protestantism breaks through the church's participation in social structures, the end of the theocratic state, and drives God out of social activities, so in such an environment, human beings must restructure their worldview, and reason is the tool for human beings to re-understand the world. Each of us is a thinking subject, and therefore a rational subject, and we can rely on our reason to re-understand the world, which is not a problem of philosophical ontology, but also the opening of new social principles, and from then on, whether it is the science of the conceptual society or the morality of the humanistic society, it has become an object of argument.
I am nagging, an up master who tries to speak philosophy in plain language, looking forward to your attention, welcome everyone to chat and communicate together.