ABSTRACT
René Descartes is one of the most important figures in the history of both mathematics and philosophy. He was also a prominent supporter of the idea of innatism. Descartes was convinced that everyone has a natural light allowing for discerning truth and falsehood. Descartes knew Plato's Meno and he mentioned that Socrates interrogated a boy in the subject of geometry to show that there were, in the boy's mind, truths that the boy did not know about and which he could recollect. Socrates used his maieutic, or midwifing, method of bringing the truth from the inside of an interlocutor in two phases: first, he used the elenctic method of demolishing the interlocutor's convictions and then proceeded to coaxing the truth from him. Descartes was convinced that there is an unbridgeable gap between humans on the one hand and animals and humanlike robots on the other.
