Question

Who wrote the book, 'Discourse on Method'?
A) Rene Descartes
B) Voltaire
C) Karl Marx
D) Michel Foucault

Answer 1

Hint: In 1637, he authored Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, a philosophical and autobiographical work. It is most famous for being the source of the famous quote ("I think, therefore I am", or "I am thinking, therefore I exist"),

Complete answer:
In 1637, Rene Descartes published a discourse titled "Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences." The goal of the text is to examine several approaches to epistemology or knowledge theory.

Discourse on the Method is regarded as one of the most influential works in modern philosophy, as well as a significant contribution to the advancement of natural sciences. Descartes confronts the problem of scepticism in this work, which has been examined by numerous philosophers previously.

Descartes adopted his predecessors' and contemporaries' approaches to account for a reality he found unassailable; he began his path of reasoning by doubting everything, so that he could analyse the universe from a fresh perspective, free of any preconceived beliefs.

Let us look at the given options:
A) Rene Descartes: This is the correct answer. René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who invented analytical geometry, which brought the hitherto disparate areas of geometry and algebra together. In 1637, Rene Descartes published a discourse titled "Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences."
B)Voltaire: This option is incorrect because Voltaire did not write Discourse on Method. He wrote Elements of the Philosophy of Newton.
C) Karl Marx: This option is incorrect because Karl Marx did not write Discourse on Method. He wrote ‘The Communist Manifesto’.
D) Michel Foucault: This option is incorrect because Michel Foucault did not write Discourse on Method. He wrote the book Discipline and Punish in 1975.

Thus, the correct answer is Option A) Rene Descartes.

Note: Descartes attempts to illustrate his way of reasoning through even the most complex of difficulties in Discourse on the Method. Brief autobiographical anecdotes are mixed with philosophical arguments to show how this method evolved. Because he meant to convey complex scientific issues to individuals who had never studied them before, he published the book in French rather than Latin, the accepted language of scholarship at the time.