The discourse of the method.

René Descartes made a decisive contribution to creating the modern image of the world and of humankind. He shifted thought from investigating the essence of things to the way thought itself works. From mathematics, he developed his method for analyzing human knowledge of the world. During his time, the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages predominated, proclaiming more doctrines of faith than objectively comprehensible scientific knowledge. After all, it was precisely during this time that Galileo had to answer to the Roman Inquisition and was sentenced to life imprisonment. So Descartes was warned and therefore wrote his Discourse on Method anonymously. However, what he wrote, in the first person and in French instead of Latin, was sufficiently heretical despite some "proofs from God" in the text. Descartes made the individual an absolute example of truth and challenged him to raise doubts about the methodological principle. In this way, he replaced critical reason with apparent religious knowledge handed down over centuries. With the writing of the Discourse on Method, he brought about a paradigm shift in modern philosophy: from then on, questions about the possibilities and limits of human consciousness and about the thinking being came to the forefront.