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
French philosophy sociology and the doctrine of positivism, and may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Strongly influenced by the Utopian socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French revolution, calling for a new social paradigm based on the sciences. Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. Comte's stages were (1) the "theological", (2) the "metaphysical", and (3) the "positive". Comte