Descartes, Father of Modern Philosophy

            My pervious paper tells of a man in search of himself. It can be said that Descartes is the same as the unnamed man in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both men are always searching for answers and looking around. He was a man in search of himself, a man not willing to follow the human race as it moved drearily on, a man who would not cease in his journey until he knew what truth and equality were. His expedition across America answered his inquiries, he provided his own answers, solution that would provide for the most important of all states: peace of mind. .
             Deep-seated and often implicit beliefs about what should go through for knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, the good life, are generally acknowledged to be fundamental to the way we think and act in life. An important intellectual challenge in this regard is finding one's way among the increasing variety of theoretical perspectives, ideologies and truth claims that abound in scholarly fields. In this view, science is regarded as part of, created by and, hence, embedded in human culture. A still unresolved question and debate arising from this state of affairs is: should we continue in our knowledge endeavors to follow the old, analytic tradition of Western science, or does it serve mankind (and especially intellectuals as creators of new ideas and understandings) better to become "contextualizers", "story-tellers", "faith healers" or "conversationists"? Perhaps more pointedly, should one have to choose at all? .
             Many of the philosophers we have been reading about in class seem to me to be hopelessly dated. Although some of them express useful ideas and or make good points. Of course, it is easy to become trapped in writing only for the period in which a person is living, and a philosophy is necessarily dependant on the historical situation and the extent of man's knowledge. And many of the philosophers who have existed over the course of centuries have necessarily had to worry about governmental, church or societal disapproval, censorship, or punishment.