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was born March 31, 1596 in La Haye, Touraine. Descartes was the son of a minor nobleman and belonged to a family that had produced a number of learned men. At the age of eight, he was enrolled in the Jesuit school of La Fleche in Anjou, where he remained for ei ....

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.... to the study of philosophy and also experimented in optics. In 1628, having sold his properties in France, he moved to the Netherlands, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He lived for varying periods in a number of different cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Deventer, Utrecht, and Leiden. It was probably during the first years of his residence in the Netherlands that Descartes wrote his first major work, Essais philosophiques, published in 1637. The work contained four parts: an essay on geometry, another on optics, a third on meteors, and Discours de la methode (Discourse on Method), which described his philosophica ....