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Overview
René Descartes was a French philosopher who was born in 1596 and died in 1650. Descartes is generally considered the father of modern philosophy
. He was the first major figure in the philosophical movement known as rationalism, a method of understanding the world based on the use of reason as the means to attain knowledge.Descartes’s works include Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Rules for the Direction of the Mind, which are each concisely described in this SparkNotes guide.
SparkNotes also offers separate, comprehensive guides for Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, as well as for another of Descartes’s famous works, Principles of Philosophy.
