Thus, Descartes’s views on the subjectivity of reason inspired a wide range of thinkers. But they were also taken quite differently by philosophers who continue to hold Descartes’ views of man as a thing that can be known. One of them, the philosopher Abraham Kuyper, argued that «the sensible existence of a person is just a case of his awareness, conceived in his own consciousness, that he exists existentially». In other words, my being has a certain meaning, and I am happy to know that.
In fact, Kuyper believed that knowing that I existentially exist was critical to my freedom – and to all other people – because knowing my existence prompts me to act. According to his version of Descartes, the world is fixed and given; I do not just exist, but I can think and act freely. I do not just exist, but I know my existence and free will.
Thus, the description of the world as a fixed and given subjectivity is at the heart of Kuyper’s philosophy. He himself would call his philosophy «idealistic realism» (also called «subjectivism»).
But although Descartes has always been unpopular in philosophy, he enjoyed some support from other thinkers, in particular Immanuel Kant, who actually wrote a commentary on Descartes’s thinking. Kant’s commentary, however, does not address the philosophical problems posed by Descartes’ philosophy. Rather, he argues that what Descartes saw as" cogito ergo sum" was not something that the philosopher had to convince himself of as much as he had to convince the world of the validity of his ideas. Thus, according to Descartes ' axiom, the philosopher «does not rule the world and does not question it. For the world rules him.»
The philosophy of Descartes is a philosophy that is sometimes called Cartesianism, Cartesian dualism, or Cartesian philosophy. As Rene Descartes put it, the main direction of Cartesian philosophy is the understanding and use of reason as a source of knowledge, understanding of natural law and the practice of the scientific method, which, showing the power of the mind, seeks to gain true knowledge. He considered himself the first true philosopher and the first «true scientist.» His famous physics is rooted in medieval Arab philosophies of the corpuscular method and their distinction between mathematics (which is limited to understanding the natural order) and physics (which is unsystematic and therefore capable of predicting the behavior of the world around us), and the theory of conservation of energy. His analysis of the mind and the nature of the mind, as well as the direct analysis of the mind by the mind, are central to Descartes’ philosophy. Descartes developed a theory of ideas, which he called the commotive of ideas. His philosophy is thus often considered a corpuscular version of the Irish philosopher John Buridan of the tradition of atomism and Plato’s philosophy of mind.