Apparently, it was the Cambridge Platonist Henry More who introduced the term Cartesianism—from the Latin Cartesius—into the English language. The term itself now denotes either the views of René Descartes or the various defenses and developments of these views in the writings of les cartésiens, an eclectic group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European intellectuals.

Science and Theology

Descartes is perhaps best known in the early twenty-first century both for his epistemological "method of doubt" and for his metaphysical doctrine of mind-body dualism. However, he was known in the early modern period primarily for his attempt to systematically displace explanations of natural phenomena, deriving from the work of Aristotle, that were then predominant in both Catholic and Protestant schools on the Continent. In Principles of Philosophy (1644) Descartes proposed as an alternative for Aristotelian explanations in terms of prime matter, substantial forms, and final causality...