René Descartes

📍Musée Descartes, 29 Rue Descartes, 37160 Descartes, France

“I was born in this house in the little town of La Haye in Touraine, on the River Creuse, in March 1596. It belonged to my grandmother, Jeanne Sain, and my mother had come here to give birth. My father, Joachim, was a counsellor in the parliament of Brittany at Rennes and was often away. My mother died when I was barely a year old, and my father remarried, so I was raised here by my grandmother, with my brother and sister, and cared for by a devoted nurse. I was a sickly child, pale and with a dry cough, and the doctors did not expect me to live long. So I was allowed to stay in bed in the mornings, a habit I kept all my life, lying quietly and thinking. La Haye was a small market town with a bridge, a church and the fields of the Loire valley around it, and I grew up curious about everything, asking so many questions that my father called me his little philosopher. Around the age of ten I left for the new Jesuit college at La Flèche, where I studied mathematics, logic and philosophy, and where my teachers still let me lie in bed in the mornings to think. I went on to study law, served as a soldier, and settled in the Netherlands to write the works that made me known as a founder of modern philosophy, including the line I think, therefore I am. In 1967 my birthplace changed its name to Descartes in my honour, and this house is now the Musée Descartes.”

Sources: Wikipedia: René Descartes Wikipedia: Descartes,_Indre-et-Loire mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk plato.stanford.edu thegreatthinkers.org