Johannes de Raey

Johannes de Raey (1622 to 1702) was a Dutch philosopher and an early Cartesian, born in Wageningen and died in Amsterdam. He studied at Utrecht with Henricus Regius, then at Leiden under Adriaan Heereboord, and took a medical doctorate in 1647. He was professor of philosophy at Leiden from 1653 to 1668 and then moved to the Athenaeum Illustre in Amsterdam, where he was the best paid professor of his day and lectured on physics. A dedicated follower of Descartes, whom he knew personally, he regarded Descartes as completing the ideas of Aristotle, moderated Descartes's more radical claims, and held that philosophy rests wholly on reason, with doubt as its foundation. His Clavis philosophiae naturalis of 1654 was his most influential work.