Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes was born March 31, 1596 in La Haye, Touraine. Descartes was the son of a minor nobleman and belonged to a family that had produced a number of learned men. At the age of eight, he was enrolled in the Jesuit school of La Fleche in Anjou, where he remained for eight years. Besides the usual classical studies, he received instruction in math and in Scholastic philosophy. Roman Catholicism exerted a strong influence on Descartes …

…single sure fact from which his investigations began was expressed by him in the famous words Cogito, ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am." In saying that a clear consciousness of his thinking proved his own existence, he argued the existence of God. God, according to Descartes' philosophy, created two classes of substance that make up the whole of reality. One class was thinking substances or minds, and the other was extended substances or bodies.