RENE DESCARTES

Philosopher and mathematician René Descartes is regarded as the father of modern philosophy for defining a starting point for existence, “I think; therefore I am.”
Synopsis

René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, France. He was extensively educated, first at a Jesuit college at age 8, then earning a law degree at 22, but an influential teacher set him on a course to apply mathematics and logic to understanding the natural world. This approach incorporated the contemplation of the nature of existence and of knowledge itself, hence his most famous observation, “I think; therefore I am.”

Early Life

Philosopher René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, a small town in central France, which has since been renamed after him to honor its most famous son. He was the youngest of three children, and his mother, Jeanne Brochard, died within his first year of life. His father, Joachim, a council member in the provincial parliament, sent the children to live with their maternal grandmother, where they remained even after he remarried a few years later. But he was very concerned with good education and sent René, at age 8, to boarding school at the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche, several miles to the north, for seven years.

Later Life, Death and Legacy

Descartes never married, but he did have a daughter, Francine, born in the Netherlands in 1635. He had moved to that country in 1628 because life in France was too bustling for him to concentrate on his work, and Francine’s mother was a maid in the home where he was staying. He had planned to have the little girl educated in France, having arranged for her to live with relatives, but she died of a fever at age 5.

Descartes lived in the Netherlands for more than 20 years but died in Stockholm, Sweden, on February 11, 1650. He had moved there less than a year before, at the request of Queen Christina, to be her philosophy tutor. The fragile health indicated in his early life persisted. He habitually spent mornings in bed, where he continued to honor his dream life, incorporating it into his waking methodologies in conscious meditation, but the queen’s insistence on 5 am lessons led to a bout of pneumonia from which he could not recover. He was 53.

I'm On Top of the World - SPEECH

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”- We people are like mountaineers. We crave to reach the top of the mountain. We crave to step our feet higher. We crave to see all things.

We seek the fastest and easiest way for us to be satisfied. We are only human. We all have fears; fears of what if’s. What if I get tired? What if I can’t? What if I don’t finish the steps? What if I fall?

We sometimes doubt ourselves. We feel lost. We feel wrong. But believe it or not, WE can conquer the world. No mountain is too high if we believe that we can. The meaning of life is not simply to exist or to survive. We live for a reason. We have goals in life. We strive for success. Remember that we are only stepping on just a piece of this world. Every piece contains a lot of mountains to climb. The mountain is an excellent schoolmaster. It can teach us more than we can ever learn from books. We should have faith in our abilities. We should never let anyone bring us down. We got to keep going. We should not let our fear stop us from trying new things.

If you want to conquer the world, then you must believe in yourself. You must overcome first yourself to build your strength. You never climb a mountain accidentally, you climb for a purpose. You have to let go of your fear. Everything will become possible if you believe in yourself. Our mind is powerful, if you think you can, then it will. Yourself is bigger than the world.