Cartesianism

The term Cartesianism (also Cartesianism, from Descartes, Latin for ( René ) Descartes) is used for both

• The philosophy of René Descartes ( Cartesianism in the narrower sense)
• The philosophy of his followers ( Cartesianism in the broad sense )
• The philosophy of Descartes as that of his followers.

In addition, one speaks of Cartesianism in relation to individual characteristic positions:

• The doctrine of the dualism of body / hand and body a soul / spirit on the other;
• The epistemological position that knowledge should only be based on unquestionable insights.

As principles of Cartesianism in the broadest sense are self-certainty of self-awareness (see Cogito ergo sum ), clarity and distinctness as the criterion of truth, matter as space filling, dualism, corpuscular theory, methodological doubt, rationalism and appreciation of mathematics.

The better-known Cartesians are: Henricus Renerius, Henricus Regius, Johannes de Raey, Adriaan armies board, Abraham Heidanus, Claude de Cleseleir, Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, François Fénelon, Balthasar Bekker, Christian Sturm, Antoine Legrand, Johannes Clauberg, Geraud de Cordemoy, many Oratorian and Jansenists, partially Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, Pierre Poiret, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus.

Opponents were particularly Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. More recently, Richard Rorty sat in his monograph " Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" from 1979 critically Descartes apart. Rorty rejects the epistemological project with his fundamentalist orientation in the context of the represented his own pragmatism deweyscher embossing.