French philosophy for René Descartes' oeuvre. Modern philosophy began in France with the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). His "Meditations on First Philosophy" changed the primary object of philosophical thought from ontology to epistemology and overcame the Aristotelian dogmatism inherited in philosophy from Scholasticism, the dominant form of thought in preceding centuries, while simultaneously raising some of the most fundamental problems for future generations of philosophers. René Descartes was concerned with the uncertainty in the sciences and the radical scepticism which spread across Europe when publications of Sextus Empiricus became available. Descartes desired to find indubitable ground on which all the sciences
20th-century French philosophy highly influenced by biology, particularly Darwin's "Origin of Species", which was released the year of Bergson's birth. This led Bergson to discuss the 'Body' and 'Self' in detail, arguably prompting the fundamental ontological and epistemological questions to be raised later in the 20th century. Bergson's work was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze, who wrote a monograph on him ("Bergsonism") and whose philosophical analyses of cinema ("" and "") develop his ideas. Following debates concerning the foundation of mathematics around the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), who opposed Bertrand Russell and Frege, various French philosophers started working on philosophy