Comparing Zera Yacob to Descartes: Independent Rationalism

René Descartes published his Discourse on the Method in 1637 and his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641, working out a systematic method of doubt intended to strip away every belief that could conceivably be false — including the evidence of the senses and even the existence of the external world — in order to arrive at a single indubitable foundation, the cogito, from which the rest of certain knowledge could be reconstructed. Zera Yacob dictated the Hatata in 1667, some twenty-six years after the Meditations and roughly a decade before Descartes's own posthumous reputation had become established across much of learned Europe, in the Ethiopian highlands, in Ge'ez, addressed to an entirely different set of concerns and, by every available historical indication, composed in complete independence from any knowledge of Descartes's work.