Descartes: Father of modern philosophy

Scholasticism was already drawing to a close after centuries of church-dominated Aristotelianism. The challenge of the Copernican revolution, compounded by the Protestant Reformation begun by Martin Luther, had set the stage for the revival of Skepticism fueled still further by the republication, between 1562 and 1569, of all of Empiricist's writings. By the close of the sixteenth century the Catholic "Counter-reformation" was in full swing, and Catholic theologians began using the newly rediscovered Skepticism against Protestants, Calvinists, and Lutheran opponents, arguing that they could not use reason to come to know what they professed to know. Indeed, as we saw, the work of Copernicus and even Galileo was, at least initially, part of their method of demonstration. Thus, ironically, during Descartes's school years Skepticism had aligned itself with religion in the exact way it once had opposed it, creating a climate in which it was generally believed that no certainty could be found in the teachings of science and philosophy and that even the methods of mathematics were not infallible. Such ideas are often attributed to Descartes, but they were already "in the air" during his upbringing and hs own teachers taught Skepticism.

经院哲学在经历了几个世纪由教会主导的亚里士多德哲学之后，已经接近尾声。哥白尼革命带来的挑战，再加上马丁·路德发起的新教改革，为怀疑论的复兴奠定了基础，而1562年至1569年间，所有经验主义著作的再版又进一步加剧了怀疑论的复兴。在十六世纪末期，天主教的"反宗教改革"已经全面展开，天主教神学家们开始使用最近重新发现的怀疑论反对新教，加尔文主义者，和路德教的反对者，他们认为他们不能使用理性来了解他们所声称的知识。事实上，正如我们所看到的，哥白尼，甚至伽利略的作品，至少在一开始，是他们论证方法的一部分。因此，具有讽刺意味的是，在笛卡尔的学生时代，怀疑论以其曾经反对的方式与宗教结盟，创造了一种氛围，人们普遍认为在科学和哲学的教学中找不到确定性，甚至数学方法也不是绝对正确的。这些观点通常被认为是笛卡尔的观点，但在他成长的过程中，这些观点就已经“悬在空中”了，他自己的老师也曾教授过怀疑论。