THE RELATIONSHIP OF PHILOSOPHY WITH MATHEMATICS IN MODERN ERA -THE CASE OF DESCARTES-
The modern era witnessed a remarkable development of many sciences, the first of which was mathematics, a fact that directly affected the development of philosophy at that time. This was evident with the rationalist doctrine of Descartes and his followers who made mathematics science their highest scientific ideal that philosophy should emulate by adopting its method and its method of inference as well as some of its concepts. In fact, the impact of mathematics was not limited to philosophy alone, but extended to all branches of knowledge, such as physics, psychology, sociology, economics, ethics, Yet, its impact on philosophy was very strong and distinctive. The reason for this is that the great philosophers of the modern era like Descartes and Leibniz were also great mathematicians. Thus, the present paper is devoted to Descartes, considering that he was one of the philosophers most influenced by mathematics and geometry in particular. He was greatly upset by the decline of philosophy in his time, its immerson in ambiguity and turmoil, and its fall into endless sterile, debates, in contrast to the development of mathematics, and its clarity, objectivity and accuracy. Accordingly, he aspired for philosophy to become a clear, objective, accurate and certain science like mathematics itself through the application of the mathematical method. The clarification of this idea is the objective of this research paper.
Keywords: Mathematics, Method, Certainty, Rationalism, İntuition, Deduction.