The soldier savant

Descartes is most generally known these days for being the guy who was sure he existed because he was thinking. But before he devoted himself to metaphysical meditations, he had spent a decade as a soldier-scholar travelling the hotspots of Europe. How might a greater understanding of this period affect our view of the great man? This is a fascinating if dry kind of pre-intellectual biography, which hopes to hint at how the philosophy grew out of the action.

René Descartes was born to a family of minor nobility in 1596, and educated by Jesuits. He studied some mathematics in Paris and then acquired a degree in law, after which he ‘set out to study the art of war’. Over the next decade, he popped up in areas of conflict all over Europe as a ‘gentleman volunteer’, inveigling himself into useful aristocratic networks. At length, he also began to acquire a reputation as a natural philosopher with his mathematics and optics.