Philosophers to Know, Part II

René Descartes (1596–1650) is traditionally considered the father of modern philosophy for rejecting completely the worldview of Aristotelian Scholasticism and developing in its place a new science based on mechanistic principles, a new metaphysics based on an original form of mind-body (or mind-matter) dualism, a new epistemology based on methodical doubt (the systematic rejection of any belief that could conceivably be false), and the theory of innate ideas. Descartes was also a great mathematician, having invented the field of analytic geometry, a method of representing and solving algebraic problems geometrically and geometric problems algebraically. He is perhaps best known as the author of the famous phrase Cogito, ergo sum (Latin: “I think, therefore I am”), a version of which he used in his Meditations (1641) as a foundation of absolute certainty on which to reestablish human knowledge of the self (or mind), God, and the external (physical) world. Descartes’s metaphysical dualism, which recognized mind and matter as distinct and irreducible basic substances, gave rise to the modern mind-body problem, the challenge of explaining how mental phenomena can causally interact with physical states and events. His methodical doubt gave rise to the modern problem of other minds, the challenge of justifying one’s belief that others have mental lives similar to one’s own, among many other epistemological conundrums. And his conception of the mind as a repository of innate ideas gave rise to the philosophical school of rationalism and in the 20th century inspired scientific investigations of innate mental faculties and structures in cognitive science and theoretical linguistics.

* During the last year of his life, Descartes served as tutor to the young Queen Christina of Sweden, who made him rise before 5 o’clock in the morning to give her lessons in philosophy. On his way to attend the queen on the morning of February 1, 1650, he caught a chill, and 10 days later he died of pneumonia.

* Although Descartes never married, he fathered a child, Francine, by his housekeeper, Helena Jans, in 1635. The girl’s death of scarlet fever at the age of five was the greatest sorrow of Descartes’s life.

* To avoid persecution by French religious authorities for his philosophical and scientific views, Descartes spent much of his adult life in the Netherlands. While there he lived alone, concealed his whereabouts, and moved frequently, living in 18 different places in 22 years.

* Despite his status as a great thinker, Kant is generally regarded as one of the worst writers in the history of Western philosophy. The bad writing of his first major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), resulted in what he considered a serious misinterpretation by critics and caused him to issue a second edition (1787), whose inconsistency with the first edition has resulted in a centuries-long debate about his original intentions.

* Kant’s quiet life and regular habits eventually became an object of curiosity and derision. He was born and died in the same small Prussian town, Königsberg, and it was plausibly said of him that one could set one’s watch by the time he took his regular afternoon walk.

* Kant credited the birth of his critical philosophy to the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose radical empiricism, he said, awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, classicist, and cultural critic whose highly original and penetrating attacks on conventional Western philosophy, religion, and morality profoundly affected the development of European philosophy in the 20th century and influenced important figures in many other intellectual and artistic fields, including theology, psychology, history, literature, and music. His aphoristic, romantic, and often poetic style of writing and the undeniable artistic merit of his German prose contributed to the eventual popularity and influence of his thought. But his characteristically unsystematic and fragmentary philosophical reflections were easily misunderstood or oversimplified. After his death, aspects of his philosophy, especially his notion of the “will to power,” were misrepresented in grossly bowdlerized texts published by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who for her own purposes attempted to cast her brother as a prophet of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, a caricature that was enthusiastically adopted by cultural officials of the Nazi regime in the 1930s. In reality, Nietzsche abhorred both nationalism and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche is remembered for many other provocative but frequently misunderstood doctrines, including “slave morality,” the death of God, and the “superman” or Übermensch.

* In his early academic career Nietzsche was recognized as a brilliant classical philologist. He was granted a doctorate by the University of Leipzig without dissertation or examination and was appointed to a chair at the University of Basel when he was only 24 years old.

* In 1870, while serving as a medical orderly during the Franco-German War, Nietzsche contracted diphtheria and dysentery. He was thereafter in continual ill health, suffering migraine headaches, vomiting, and vision problems that forced his permanent retirement from teaching in 1879.

* After collapsing in the street in Turin, Italy, in 1889, Nietzsche became completely and permanently insane. He spent the last 10 years of his life in mental darkness, first in an asylum and then in the care of his mother and sister. Various causes of his breakdown have been proposed, including tertiary syphilis and retro-orbital meningioma, a tumor on the surface of his brain behind his right eye.

* Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide.

* When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, he submitted the Tractatus as a dissertation in fulfillment of the doctoral degree. His oral examination was conducted by Russell and Moore, a ritual that both older philosophers regarded as absurd. Wittgenstein ended the discussion by telling his examiners, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.” He was passed anyway.

* Wittgenstein’s obsessive, neurotic, and domineering personality was well known and caused even some of his admirers, including Russell, to openly question his sanity. At a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge in 1946, Wittgenstein flew into a rage at a guest speaker, the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper, and allegedly threatened him with a poker that he had pulled from a fireplace. According to one version of the story, violence was averted only after Russell ordered Wittgenstein to put the poker down.

* Several of Heidegger’s students became important thinkers in their own right. One of them, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, had an affair with the married Heidegger in the 1920s. Because of her Jewish heritage, she fled Germany after the Nazi takeover in 1933.

* In 2014 the first three volumes of Heidegger’s so-called “black notebooks,” containing his private philosophical and political reflections, were published in Germany. They contained several overtly anti-Semitic passages woven into philosophical discussions, apparently lending support to the view that aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy were inherently fascistic.

* Heidegger’s complete works, when finally published, will run to more than 100 volumes, making him one of the most prolific writers in the history of Western philosophy.