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René Descartes

René Descartes

0

Near balanceFormula-derived score

Philosopher and mathematician (1596–1650). Documented harms: Dutch exile, animal-machine, 1633 withholding, 1663 Index as later church. Offsets: Discourse 1637, Geometry appendix, Meditations 1641, Elisabeth letters, Harvey circulation.

Dutch exile as a dated publishing geographyDiscourse and Meditations as public methodanimal-machine as a documented cost not a unique pineal coefficient

Impact

Not rated yet: the verified records linked to this person, without a numeric impact.

Editorial assessment (context, not the score)

The record is not a marble cogito and not a unique author of a pineal number. The heaviest documented costs are animal-machine, the 1633 withholding, Utrecht polarisation, and a court death in 1650. The 1663 Index is later church, not 1637. The offsets are the Discourse with Geometry, the Meditations with objections, and the Elisabeth letters. Harvey remains the circulation neighbour. Confidence is high on 1637/1641/1644/1649 imprints, medium on pension sums and medical cause of death.

Indicators affected

Indicators this person’s verified facts reach. No score contribution is assigned; the observed state is the indicator’s own reading.

Accountability & contradictions

Claims against the record, the type of responsibility, and what is disputed.

Claimed

What happened

Responsibility

What could change this assessment

  • 17 linked facts have no assessed welfare direction yet.
  • Lifetime coverage has not been assessed: the record reflects stored facts only (1607–1663).

Causal path

Person → Fact → Driver → Indicator. Select a path to inspect its factors; the full network opens on demand.

  1. PersonRené Descartes
  2. FactThe 1663 Index listing of Descartes's works is later church action, not a 1637 act of the Discourse and not his autograph ban
  3. DriverJudicial Independence
  1. PersonRené Descartes
  2. FactDescartes dies in Stockholm in 1650 after the court winter; the death is health-harm in patronage weather, not a later poisoning novel as established Fact
  3. DriverHealth system capacity stress
  1. PersonRené Descartes
  2. FactDescartes goes to Queen Christina's Stockholm court in 1649; the court winter is patronage-and-health weather, not a unique philosophy coefficient
  3. DriverInstitutional Corruption

Timeline

The most relevant dated facts, newest first.

  1. 1 January 1663 · Judicial Independence

    The 1663 Index listing of Descartes's works is later church action, not a 1637 act of the Discourse and not his autograph ban

  2. 11 February 1650 · Health system capacity stress

    Descartes dies in Stockholm in 1650 after the court winter; the death is health-harm in patronage weather, not a later poisoning novel as established Fact

  3. 1 October 1649 · Institutional Corruption

    Descartes goes to Queen Christina's Stockholm court in 1649; the court winter is patronage-and-health weather, not a unique philosophy coefficient

  4. 1 June 1649 · Protection of Minority Rights

    Animal-machine teaching weakens claims of animal standing; stored as a rights-harm twin of the humanitarian animal-machine row, not a second treatise

  5. 15 January 1649 · Social Cohesion

    Passions of the Soul (1649) is a public treatise written with Princess Elisabeth's correspondence in view, one book not a unique pineal number

  6. 1 January 1649 · Personal-Data Protection

    This catalog refuses to store a unique pineal coefficient; the pineal mention in Passions is a speculative seat, not a measured constant

Evidence & methodology

How the record is sourced and how the score is derived.

32 of 32 linked facts verified, drawing on 9 distinct sources (1607–1663).

Sources include Encyclopaedia Britannica, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Sources (showing 8 of 9)

  1. 1.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Descartes, Dutch yearsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. 2.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Descartes's works, Le Monde neighbourhoodStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  3. 3.Britannica — René Descartes, residence in the NetherlandsEncyclopaedia Britannica
  4. 4.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Descartes's epistemology / mind-body neighbourhoodStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  5. 5.Britannica — Christina of Sweden, Descartes neighbourhoodEncyclopaedia Britannica
  6. 6.Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Descartes, life neighbourhoodInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  7. 7.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Descartes and the pineal glandStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  8. 8.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Elisabeth of Bohemia as correspondent neighbourhoodStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The score is formula-derived (Factrail formula v1, version 1.0.0), not an editorial verdict. Read the methodology.

By the Factrail desk · Method: how we source and score · Last reviewed · Sources: 9

Expert analysis

An excerpt; the full analysis opens on request.

The offices he actually held

Descartes is a French-born philosopher who published from the Dutch Republic and died at a Swedish court. Britannica at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Descartes (opens in a new tab), SEP at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/ (opens in a new tab), works at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-works/ (opens in a new tab), IEP at https://iep.utm.edu/descarte/ (opens in a new tab), Gutenberg Discourse at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59 (opens in a new tab), Meditations at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23306 (opens in a new tab), and Elisabeth at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/elisabeth-bohemia/ (opens in a new tab) are independent public files.

The first fact about his power is a 1637 book with appendices. The second is a 1641 Latin book with objections. The third is that 1663 is not 1637.

What went wrong

Animal-machine is a documented cost. Le Monde was withheld after Galileo's 1633 condemnation — Galileo's trial, Descartes's silence. Voetius attacked at Utrecht. Christina's court is patronage weather ending in 1650 death. The Index is later church.

What improved

Discourse, Geometry, Dioptrics, Meteors, Meditations with objections, Principles, Passions, Elisabeth letters, acceptance of circulation beside Harvey.

Related people: Elisabeth, Mersenne, Galileo as 1633 neighbour, Christina, Beeckman, Gassendi, Arnauld, Harvey, Pascal as younger neighbour, Spinoza as later reader.

Later Loeb, UNESCO, and encyclopedia pages are evidence, not additional acts. Related 2024–2025 news about COP, NATO, or a chancellorship is not a relation. Shared work remains named. What would change the reading is a contradictory original with a different date or signatory. Shared work remains named. Shared work remains named. Shared work remains named. Shared work remains named. Shared work remains named. Shared work remains named.

The 1637 Discourse made a new method public after years of withholding larger work

René Descartes was born in 1596, studied at the Jesuit college of La Flèche and spent part of his early adulthood travelling and serving with military forces before settling for long periods in the Dutch Republic. His decisive publication date was 1637, when the Discourse on the Method appeared in French as an introduction to three scientific essays. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab) notes that Descartes had earlier prepared a larger work, The World, but withheld it after learning of Galileo’s 1633 condemnation. The published Discourse instead offered rules for directing reason and presented the famous first-person route from radical doubt toward the certainty of thinking. Meditations on First Philosophy followed in 1641, deliberately circulated with objections and replies from other scholars. That sequence shows a philosopher managing both intellectual risk and publicity: he did not simply announce a completed system, but staged its publication across scientific demonstrations, metaphysical arguments and organised controversy.

The final decade joined metaphysics, physiology and court patronage before the 1650 death in Stockholm

Descartes continued expanding the system in Principles of Philosophy in 1644 and The Passions of the Soul in 1649. His account of mind and body defended a real distinction between thinking substance and extended substance while also trying to explain ordinary interaction between mental states, bodily motions and passions; the Stanford Encyclopedia’s survey of Descartes’s works (opens in a new tab) places those texts in the order of their composition and publication. In 1649 Queen Christina invited him to Sweden. The arrangement required Descartes, accustomed to a different routine, to provide philosophical instruction at the royal court in Stockholm. He became ill during the winter and died on 11 February 1650. His death did not end the disputes his work had generated: Cartesian physics, mechanism, dualism and the method of doubt became targets for both followers and critics. The concrete record is therefore broader than “I think, therefore I am”: publication choices, censorship fears, correspondence networks and a final move under royal patronage shaped how the philosophy entered seventeenth-century European institutions.

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