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
Warren Goldfarb Warren Goldfarb Warren David Goldfarb (born 1949) is a philosopher and mathematician with a specialization in the history of analytic philosophy and in logic, most notably his work on the classical decision problem (see his book on the subject, "The decision problem: Solvable classes of quantificational formulas", with Burton Dreben). He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he is now Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic in the Department of Philosophy. He has been on the Harvard faculty since 1975, and was tenured in 1982, the only philosopher to be promoted to tenure at Harvard