Descartes: An Intellectual Biography - Tapa blanda

Any future biographer of Descartes will have to contend with this study for the richness of its scientific analysis and the tremendous wealth of references presented in the notes. It is a well-printed, handsome volume ... Altoghether the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Descarte's birth was well served by the publication of this study. (Desmond J. Fitzgerald, The Thomist)

'Stephen Gaukroger is an experienced and erudite writer on Descartes. He has a complete mastery of the recent literature, and is at home equally in metaphysics, epistemology and natural philosophy. He offers reasoned argument against many conventional criticisms of Descartes.Nature

'Gaukroger writes well and his important book will certainly excite all students of 17th-century thought.'The Times

'will remain indispensable for all those interested in the history of Cartesian thought and its continuing impact on our philosophical culture.'Times Literary Supplement

'Gaukroger's book fills the philosophical and historical vacuum which has grown around Descartes, and is a good source to consult for those who wish to better understand why his methodology became so influential.'The American Rationalist

René Descartes (1596-1650) is the father of modern philosophy, and one of the greatest of all thinkers. This is the first intellectual biography of Descartes in English; it offers a fundamental reassessment of all aspects of his life and work. Stephen Gaukroger, a leading authority on Descartes, traces his intellectual development from childhood, showing the connections between his intellectual and personal life and placing these in the cultural context of seventeenth century Europe.

Descartes' early work in mathematics and science produced ground breaking theories, methods, and tools still in use today. This book gives the first full account of how this work informed and influenced the later philosophical studies for which, above all, Descartes is renowned. Not only were philosophy and science intertwined in Descartes' life; so were philosophy and religion. The Church of Rome found Galileo guilty of heresy in 1633; two decades earlier, Copernicus' theories about the universe had been denounced as blasphemous. To avoid such accusations, Descartes clothed his views about the relation between God and humanity, and about the nature of the universe, in a philosophical garb acceptable to the Church. His most famous project was the exploration of the foundations of human knowledge, starting from the proof of one's own existence offered in the formula Cogito ergo sum, `I am thinking therefore I exist'. Stephen Gaukroger argues that this was not intended as an exercise in philosophical scepticism, but rather to provide Descartes' scientific theories, influenced as they were by Copernicus and Galileo, with metaphysical legitimation.

This book offers for the first time a full understanding of how Descartes developed his revolutionary ideas. It will be welcomed by all readers interested in the origins of modern thought.